The new political story that could change everything George Monbiot
Do you feel trapped
in a broken economic model?
A model that’s trashing the living world
and threatens the lives
of our descendants?
A model that excludes billions of people
while making a handful unimaginably rich?
That sorts us into winners and losers,
and then blames the losers
for their misfortune?
Welcome to neoliberalism,
the zombie doctrine
that never seems to die,
however comprehensively it is discredited.
Now you might have imagined
that the financial crisis of 2008
would have led to the collapse
of neoliberalism.
After all, it exposed
its central features,
which were deregulating
business and finance,
tearing down public protections,
throwing us into extreme
competition with each other,
as, well, just a little bit flawed.
And intellectually, it did collapse.
But still, it dominates our lives.
Why?
Well, I believe the answer
is that we have not yet produced
a new story with which to replace it.
Stories are the means
by which we navigate the world.
They allow us to interpret
its complex and contradictory signals.
When we want to make sense of something,
the sense we seek is not scientific sense
but narrative fidelity.
Does what we are hearing reflect the way
that we expect humans
and the world to behave?
Does it hang together?
Does it progress
as a story should progress?
Now, we are creatures of narrative,
and a string of facts and figures,
however important facts and figures are –
and, you know, I’m an empiricist,
I believe in facts and figures –
but those facts and figures have no power
to displace a persuasive story.
The only thing that can replace a story
is a story.
You cannot take away someone’s story
without giving them a new one.
And it’s not just stories in general
that we are attuned to,
but particular narrative structures.
There are a number of basic plots
that we use again and again,
and in politics there is one basic plot
which turns out to be
tremendously powerful,
and I call this “the restoration story.”
It goes as follows.
Disorder afflicts the land,
caused by powerful and nefarious forces
working against the interests of humanity.
But the hero will revolt
against this disorder,
fight those powerful forces,
against the odds overthrow them
and restore harmony to the land.
You’ve heard this story before.
It’s the Bible story.
It’s the “Harry Potter” story.
It’s the “Lord of the Rings” story.
It’s the “Narnia” story.
But it’s also the story
that has accompanied almost every
political and religious transformation
going back millennia.
In fact, we could go as far as to say
that without a powerful
new restoration story,
a political and religious transformation
might not be able to happen.
It’s that important.
After laissez-faire economics
triggered the Great Depression,
John Maynard Keynes
sat down to write a new economics,
and what he did was to tell
a restoration story,
and it went something like this.
Disorder afflicts the land!
(Laughter)
Caused by the powerful and nefarious
forces of the economic elite,
which have captured the world’s wealth.
But the hero of the story,
the enabling state, supported
by working class and middle class people,
will contest that disorder,
will fight those powerful forces
by redistributing wealth,
and through spending
public money on public goods
will generate income and jobs,
restoring harmony to the land.
Now like all good restoration stories,
this one resonated
across the political spectrum.
Democrats and Republicans,
labor and conservatives,
left and right all became,
broadly, Keynesian.
Then, when Keynesianism ran into trouble
in the 1970s,
the neoliberals, people like
Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman,
came forward with
their new restoration story,
and it went something like this.
You’ll never guess what’s coming.
(Laughter)
Disorder afflicts the land!
Caused by the powerful
and nefarious forces
of the overmighty state,
whose collectivizing tendencies
crush freedom and individualism
and opportunity.
But the hero of the story,
the entrepreneur,
will fight those powerful forces,
roll back the state,
and through creating
wealth and opportunity,
restore harmony to the land.
And that story also resonated
across the political spectrum.
Republicans and Democrats,
conservatives and labor,
they all became, broadly, neoliberal.
Opposite stories
with an identical narrative structure.
Then, in 2008,
the neoliberal story fell apart,
and its opponents came forward with …
nothing.
No new restoration story!
The best they had to offer
was a watered-down neoliberalism
or a microwaved Keynesianism.
And that is why we’re stuck.
Without that new story,
we are stuck with the old failed story
that keeps on failing.
Despair is the state we fall into
when our imagination fails.
When we have no story
that explains the present
and describes the future,
hope evaporates.
Political failure is at heart
a failure of imagination.
Without a restoration story
that can tell us where we need to go,
nothing is going to change,
but with such a restoration story,
almost everything can change.
The story we need to tell
is a story which will appeal
to as wide a range of people as possible,
crossing political fault lines.
It should resonate
with deep needs and desires.
It should be simple and intelligible,
and it should be grounded in reality.
Now, I admit that all of this sounds
like a bit of a tall order.
But I believe that in Western nations,
there is actually a story like this
waiting to be told.
Over the past few years,
there’s been a fascinating
convergence of findings
in several different sciences,
in psychology and anthropology
and neuroscience and evolutionary biology,
and they all tell us
something pretty amazing:
that human beings have got
this massive capacity for altruism.
Sure, we all have a bit of selfishness
and greed inside us,
but in most people,
those are not our dominant values.
And we also turn out to be
the supreme cooperators.
We survived the African savannas,
despite being weaker and slower
than our predators and most of our prey,
by an amazing ability
to engage in mutual aid,
and that urge to cooperate
has been hardwired into our minds
through natural selection.
These are the central,
crucial facts about humankind:
our amazing altruism and cooperation.
But something has gone horribly wrong.
Disorder afflicts the land.
(Laughter)
Our good nature has been thwarted
by several forces,
but I think the most powerful of them
is the dominant political narrative
of our times,
which tells us that we should live
in extreme individualism
and competition with each other.
It pushes us to fight each other,
to fear and mistrust each other.
It atomizes society.
It weakens the social bonds
that make our lives worth living.
And into that vacuum
grow these violent, intolerant forces.
We are a society of altruists,
but we are governed by psychopaths.
(Applause)
But it doesn’t have to be like this.
It really doesn’t,
because we have this incredible capacity
for togetherness and belonging,
and by invoking that capacity,
we can recover those amazing
components of our humanity:
our altruism and cooperation.
Where there is atomization,
we can build a thriving civic life
with a rich participatory culture.
Where we find ourselves crushed
between market and state,
we can build an economics
that respects both people and planet.
And we can create this economics
around that great neglected sphere,
the commons.
The commons is neither market nor state,
capitalism nor communism,
but it consists of three main elements:
a particular resource;
a particular community
that manages that resource;
and the rules and negotiations
the community develops to manage it.
Think of community broadband
or community energy cooperatives
or the shared land
for growing fruit and vegetables
that in Britain we call allotments.
A common can’t be sold,
it can’t be given away,
and its benefits are shared equally
among the members of the community.
Where we have been ignored and exploited,
we can revive our politics.
We can recover democracy
from the people who have captured it.
We can use new rules
and methods of elections
to ensure that financial power
never trumps democratic power again.
(Applause)
Representative democracy should
be tempered by participatory democracy
so that we can refine
our political choices,
and that choice should be exercised
as much as possible at the local level.
If something can be decided locally,
it shouldn’t be determined nationally.
And I call all this
the politics of belonging.
Now, I think this has got
the potential to appeal
across quite a wide range of people,
and the reason for this
is that among the very few values
that both left and right share
are belonging and community.
And we might mean
slightly different things by them,
but at least we start
with some language in common.
In fact, you can see a lot of politics
as being a search for belonging.
Even fascists seek community,
albeit a frighteningly
homogenous community
where everyone looks the same
and wears the same uniform
and chants the same slogans.
What we need to create
is a community based on bridging networks,
not bonding networks.
Now a bonding network brings together
people from a homogenous group,
whereas a bridging network brings together
people from different groups.
And my belief is that if we create
sufficiently rich and vibrant
bridging communities,
we can thwart the urge
for people to burrow into the security
of a homogenous bonding community
defending themselves against the other.
So in summary,
our new story could go
something like this.
Disorder afflicts the land!
(Laughter)
Caused by the powerful
and nefarious forces
of people who say
there’s no such thing as society,
who tell us that
our highest purpose in life
is to fight like stray dogs
over a dustbin.
But the heroes of the story, us,
we’ll revolt against this disorder.
We will fight those nefarious forces
by building rich, engaging,
inclusive and generous communities,
and, in doing so,
we will restore harmony to the land.
(Applause)
Now whether or not
you feel this is the right story,
I hope you’ll agree that we need one.
We need a new restoration story,
which is going to guide us
out of the mess we’re in,
which tells us why we’re in the mess
and tells us how to get out of that mess.
And that story, if we tell it right,
will infect the minds of people
across the political spectrum.
Our task is to tell the story
that lights the path to a better world.
Thank you.
(Applause)