Ryan North: "The government of tomorrow is responsive and responsible"

Who is Ryan North?

Ryan North (Canada) is a New York Times bestselling author, and he has one of the best jobs in the world: he creates villains for comics. Currently one of the scenarists of the Marvel's Fantastic Four, he has worked with the world's biggest studios helping them create credible plans for heroes and villains.

Ryan has also previously written for the comic series of Adventure Time and Marvel Comics' The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. His works have won multiple Eisner Awards and Harvey Awards.

An original thinker on the questions of society as a whole outside of the comic world, Ryan is the author of the world-famous Dinosaur Comic and the best-selling books How To Take Over the World and How To Reinvent Everything.

Government Tomorrow Forum is proud to have such an original thinker among its participants.

GTF: Are governments rather villains or heroes?

RN: I think if we're going to talk big ideas around government, we should nail down what government actually is. And big picture: it's civilization, right? We've all decided things go better for everyone when we're working together than when we're working apart, and we call that working together "civilization" and it's given us great things like penicillin and computers. And governments are how we build and manage civilizations.

So, as the instrument we've invented that lets us have civilization, that lets us cut child mortality by the huge amounts we have in the past 200 years to the point where the countries with the worst life expectancy today still have longer life expectancies than anywhere on the planet at the start of the 1800s — then yeah, government's great. Government's what's brought us food surplus, what's brought us from 1 billion to 8 billion people over those 2 centuries I've been talking about. Heroic! Nothin' better!

And if all of those 8 billion people had food and clean water and education and access to resources and opportunity, then I wouldn't feel like I need to slip an asterisk in here somewhere, just to hedge my bets on the very simple question of "are governments good".

GTF: How to ensure people who get to power have the 'right' mentality?

RN: If I had a perfect solution to this I'd be shouting it from the rooftops, but I think a lot of it is consequences. When you're untethered from dealing with the results of your actions, you can make them a lot quicker, without having to think things true, because it's never going to come back to you. We live in a world in which the wealthiest people tend to become the most powerful, and wealth is a terrific insulator from consequences. Power too. So in a real sense, simply having power works to shy you away from being best able to exercise it - but that's as it stands now, and I don't think that's how it always has to be. (In the past we've relied on shame to be one of those consequences — do badly, and you'll be shunned. But the past little while has shown us how toothless that is if you simply decide not to be ashamed.)

GTF: What are governments globally lacking - in both their structure and approach?

RN: Long term planning is a perpetual problem I see: it's hard - and expensive - to plan for things 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 years down the road when you know a) you won't be in power then so it's not gonna be your problem, and b) all the expense for that problem is up front. It leads to a lot of short-term thinking. And that's not just limited to governments! Corporations have tied executive compensation to performance, and that leads to short-term thinking too: let's get gains in the next 3 months so everyone gets their bonuses, and not worry where that leaves us 10 years from now. You can't always be harvesting — there's times where you need to plant too.

Sometimes, grabbing that short-term win is aligned with long-term planning, but oftentimes it's not, and it's so hard to sell a plan to the public that hurts them now, but could have a great payoff for their children, or children's children. And yep, here would be a great time to talk about climate change!

GTF: Is there something wrong in the way governments and the governed are connected? Can the globally observed rise of the far-right be explained by wrong, or broken, narratives?

RN: I think the answer to this question is a self-evident "yes", because governments are ultimately the representation of their people and what they want, and I don't think there's a ton of people who are looking around right now and saying "yep, this is fine, no notes, A+ all around." And I never underestimate the power of stories - they're so fundamental to how we see the world. Canadian writer Thomas King wrote that "The truth about stories is they're all we are" - and I don't think he's wrong. If we tell ourselves stories about how we're wronged, how we're aggrieved, how the world would be perfect if only people would do exactly what we say then yeah, that's gonna get you a lot of fascism. If we tell ourselves stories about how the world can be better if we listen and collaborate and refuse to accept things as they are, refuse to walk away from problems because they're too big and instead find some small way to make improvements — then that gives you a different view of the world.

I think a lot about the middle ages, where there really wasn't this idea of "the future" in Western civilizations. The world was not going to get better tomorrow, because tomorrow was going to be the same as today. The church was eternal and the crown was eternal, and they were living in a twilight after the fall of these great Greek and Roman civilizations, too late to join those but too soon for the coming end of the world. Things were always the same, which meant they couldn't get better. And if that's the story you believe, then you're not surprised when nothing changes, when your children suffer just as you have.

And we're coming off of the 20th century, a period of unprecedented growth, where — in many places — your kid could have a better life than you. Hard work could be rewarded with riches and peace. That's an historical aberration, and it's not at all clear that children born today will have a life better than their parents did. That disenchantment can lead to two things: changing the world as it stands now so that things do improve again — or, conversely, retreat into that now-imagined past and try to resurrect it. And it's a short walk from that second story to the beginnings of the far-right.

GTF: If you were appointed head of government services of a developed country, what new services would you think about and why? And if it were a developing country?

RN: I look at the greatest technologies we have, and they've all been made by human brains. Best technology we have right there, and we didn't even have to invent it. So if I'm in charge of my civilization, I want to have the best and healthiest human brains going. We deify these geniuses we've encountered, the Hawkings and Einsteins and what have you — but all these brains had the advantage of being able to be trained and challenged and kept in healthy bodies. The people that could've done what Hawking or Einstein did but didn't because they were child labourers or had kids at 14 or anything else - that's a loss you don't recover from. So to me, if you scrape away everything else that a government does and should do, I think you're left with giving people what they need to be their best. it shouldn't just keeping you alive — it should be letting you reach your full potential.

So to answer your question, in a developed country, I'm going to look at food scarcity, education, and health — especially mental health. In a developing country I'd look at the same — but if there aren't the resources for that, I'm going to prioritize food. You can't do anything else well when you're hungry, and can't think about the world if you're worried where your next meal is coming from.

GTF: And with the existing services in your actual country, what would you improve or modify?

RN: Here in Canada we've benefit a lot from not being the US, but being so close to it, and a lot of the comparisons are favourable. We've got socialized medicine — they don't! We have federally-mandated parental leave: not so in the US! They have a real problem with fetishizing their "founding fathers" - and nobody in Canada cares what John A. MacDonald thinks about current events, because he's a drunk racist who died 130 years ago. But Canada is far from a paradise, and we've also suffered from cuts to services that saved money in the short term, but which hurt everyone over the long term. Especially now, when we're still in a pandemic, I'd restore and improve funding to healthcare — and I'd fold dental into it. Yes, this costs money! But it's what keeps those human brains I want that I mentioned earlier alive and happy, and after a generation, it becomes a point of pride. When Canada introduced socialized medicine, doctors went on strike, trying all these techniques to protest this "un-Canadian" activity the government was mandating. Now it's the first thing people mention when talking about Canada. We can choose the people we want to be, and we can build governments to reflect that. Nothing is permanent and everything we build will one day be dust in a dead and silent universe — which, while terrifying, should also be inspiring. That means there's nothing that says the bad stuff we see around us has to be this way forever.

GTF: How do you imagine, in general, the government of tomorrow compared to the one of today?

RN: I wish I had a specific answer for this question, because I'd love to implement it. I think it's responsive and responsible, and one in which there are consequences to choices. There has to be, in order to keep people engaged in it. There's tangible goals, and some of those last a generation or more: we're starting tasks our children will benefit from, decades down the line.

In contrast to a lot of people, I don't have a lot of stock in technology changing things: we're not voting on computers or our phones (please, no, this is such a bad idea and sets the stage for so much corruption) and I don't think it's possible to abstract away the humanity from it. We're big messy complicated animals, and I don't believe we can build a system to govern us that isn't big messy and complicated too — at least, if we want it to be fair. So in that sense, I think it'll still be recognizable to the systems we have today.