You know, you're smart, funny friends who always seem to have the best celebrity gossip. I'm talking about the ones who always know what you should be watching or reading or listening to. But what if you could pick their brains every week? Pop Chat is a brand new podcast that does exactly that and feels like spending time with your best friends. So join me Elamin Abdelmahmoud, and a panel of the smartest cultural critics that I know as we dissect the discourse, but also have a great time doing it. This is a CBC podcast.
I'm Nahlah Ayed. Welcome to Ideas. With each day, more of us become entrenched in our own camps.
“This is not a damn democracy.”
We live inside our own social bubbles. Yet, with the pandemic, climate change the financial markets, we're more connected to each other than ever.
We are all connected.
So whatever happened to the idea of the common good?
Just imagine what we could do together.
The common good is an idea with deep roots, some of the earliest thinkers on record, Plato and Aristotle 2500 years ago wrestled with the question of what it means for me to be good as an individual, and what it means for us to share things in common as we must do to live in society. The ancient questions about the common good are with us still, and with a new urgency in a world rocked by despotism and inequality. In every corner of our lives, the question of how we might live together in a more equitable way is relevant. And the British writer, George Monbiot, has a lot to say about everything from advertising to farming, from globalization to hunting, always with an eye to the fairness of at all, what I owe my neighbor, and how we can be better citizens.
You know, as soon as you say to people, right, you're in charge. This now rests on your shoulders, if you want your community to be a good place, you've got to decide how that community is going to evolve. And you've got to work with that person across the road, who might have a totally different background to you. You've got to work with that person to find the common interest, to find the common good, and to make decisions that reflect that. And suddenly, it's like watching people wake up. It's this extraordinary moment, and you see that sort of flash recognition in their eyes.
“I am an intelligent, powerful human being, who can do good things by working with other people.”
Today on Ideas, and to wrap up our week on the subject of the common good. A conversation I had with George Monbiot, former documentary journalist and foreign correspondent, these days, a prolific author and columnist for The Guardian newspaper. We're calling this program The Politics of Belonging.
I wanted to begin this discussion with your book Out of the Wreckage, and the actual subtitle, which is A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. So the “age of crisis.” Of course, we all acknowledge were in an age of crisis. I think most people would agree with that. It's clear enough. But can you explain the “new politics” part? Why do we need a new politics?
Well, without a new political narrative, that tells us where we are, who we are, how we got here, and where we're trying to go, it is impossible to move on. We remain stuck within the old narratives, which shaped the way that we perceive politics and the way that politics is executed. And what you see, in the case of all successful political and religious transformations, is that they're accompanied by a new story. And interestingly, the story just isn't any old story. It always seems to conform to a particular narrative structure that I call the restoration story. So it goes like this disorder afflicts the land caused by powerful and nefarious forces, working against the interests of humanity. But the hero or heroes, revolt against that disorder, against the odds overthrow those powerful and nefarious forces and restore harmony to the land. This is a very old and very familiar narrative structure. It's the Bible story. It's the Harry Potter story. It's the Lord of the Rings story. And it also happens to be the story of all successful political transformations, good or bad.
And there are different ways in which you could tell that story but I feel it could be Told more or less as follows. The land has been thrown into disorder by the powerful and nefarious forces of neoliberalism. People who tell us that there is no such thing as society, that we should be governed instead by this thing called the market, which is really just a euphemism for the power of money, democracy should take second place, to the power of money, that we are individuals rather than societies, and that we should see ourselves as a solution for all our problems rather than recognizing that there are such things as structural problems. And that has thrown us into serious disorder. But we the ordinary people of the land, the working class people, the middle class people will revolt against that disorder, and come together to form coherent bonding communities where we reach across traditional dividing lines. But in a place based or local based way, we actually start to create communities of of mutual concern of mutual aid, where we support each other as indeed many people have been doing during the coronavirus pandemic. And we create a sense of belonging, whoever you might be, wherever you might have come from, however, briefly, you might stay in this area while you are there you belong. And out of that, we start to rebuild political society, we start to rebuild political action based very strongly in local initiatives to improve the lives of all and we do so on a principle that I call private sufficiency, public luxury. Now, the reason I come to this is that it's become clear to me that the only reason that some people can pursue private luxury is that everybody doesn't, is it not everybody has private luxury. If everybody tried to have a private jet, and a yacht and a super home and a supercar, not only would we run out of ecological resources, there wouldn't even be the physical space for us to do it. If everyone in London wanted their own tennis court and their swimming pool, and their own art collection in their own playground, London would cover half of England, England would cover most of Europe, where would everybody else live, it just can't be done. But there is enough ecological and physical space for everyone to enjoy public luxury, magnificent parks, wonderful museums, wonderful libraries, great public transport, great public swimming pools, and public tennis courts and art collections and playgrounds. And in creating that public luxury, you don't take space away from other people, as you do in creating private luxury, you In fact, create more space for everybody. And if that can be controlled to the greatest extent possible by the local community, through building a commons building a commonly controlled resources in a self organized way, then you have the potential for a real political transformation, spontaneous dynamic change, not controlled from the center, not top down, but a new politics built from the bottom up. And by this means we can restore harmony to the land.
Right, I think we can end right there. Okay, fine. Fine. A second, you know, I want to I do want to break that down, obviously, a little bit. But going back to the idea of the, as you say this the restoration, you know, disorder, as you say, and then restoration, if that's the normal pattern. Why has that pattern been broken? And how much responsibility for that breaking of that pattern? Would you place squarely on the on the shoulders of neoliberalism itself?
Well, neoliberalism is the 20th century variant of capitalism. It's a kind of hyper capitalism, which says, capitalist relations will be extended to the point at which we are all part of this thing called the market that our lives are reduced to transactions to buying and selling. And that's the only really legitimate human relation. And anything which interferes with that transactional approach, such as democracy, such as trade unions, such as regulation, such as taxation, is illegitimate because it prevents the discovery of a natural order of human beings. It prevents you from seeing who should be at the top and who should be at the bottom. And everyone has their place in this natural order that the neoliberals conceive. And unsurprisingly, those who are phenomenally rich today and have funded the neoliberal thing tanks and academic bodies and newspapers should be at the top. And those who are very poor today should be at the bottom, that's where they deserve to be and nothing should disrupt that order. And alongside it must be this system of surveillance and monitoring and auditing and quantification, to decide in any one organization who should be at the top and who should be at the bottom. And so while neoliberalism promised to relieve us from bureaucracy, it actually creates this stultifying bureaucracy where we're under constant assessment, constant monitoring constant auditing is anyone who works in a large organization, public or private now will be able to testify. And so it's, it's introduced into almost every aspect of our lives a kind of hyper capitalism, in which the only values which counter financial values, and the power that arises from those financial values, and all the things that I think human beings really value, community, family belonging, kindness, mutual aid, empathy, decency, those things become completely irrelevant to the model, and indeed, are seen as threats to the model. And somehow this profoundly anti social, destructive model of politics and economics is has bled into almost every aspect of our lives. And even when it became clear that this model was basically destroying our life chances, and the 2008 financial crisis was a very good example. But the ongoing environmental crisis is another very good example, where it's destroying our life support systems. Somehow it has been allowed to persist, and it has been allowed to persist, because we have not produced a coherent alternative that people can immediately comprehend and latch on to.
You've repeatedly said that that you think capitalism played a role specifically in the epidemic of loneliness and alienation and effectively weakening the idea of the common good. Can you sort of develop that idea a little bit? How did that happen?
Well, let's begin by asking what capitalism is. Because what capitalism is, is not at all what it purports to be. You know, if you ask most people, if you stopped someone in the street, “So, what's capitalism?” Most people would quickly talk about trade. They would say, “Well, it's about buying and selling, and the person who makes money by selling something, then invests that money, so they can sell more stuff, and then they can make more money, and on it goes. That's capitalism.” But that's not at all how this thing we call capitalism has really worked. Quite the opposite. Really, it's not been about trade, it's really been about theft on a grand scale. Look at how the United Kingdom became rich, or England and then Britain as it was, at the time. It was through bleeding India dry, we bled $45 trillion out of India. We taxed the subcontinent until there was virtually nothing left, then used a small amount of that tax money to buy its goods. So we were buying goods with their own money. And then we used the phenomenal profits—100% profits—from that enterprise to finance the capture of other nations, and the colonization of those nations and the citizens, the railways and the other things we built in order to drain wealth out of them. And there are similar processes continuing today, if you are sticking with the UK. If we look at a major source of our wealth, which is the City of London, much of that is based on laundering the money stolen from nations around the world. This is a global entrepôt for processing corruption, and this thing we call capitalism is actually looting. It's theft on a global scale. And it simply doesn't operate as the textbooks say. So, if the question is, Why would that system be harmful to human beings? You can only answer it by saying the system begins with gross harm to human beings. That's how it operates.
Took so obviously, capitalism is a large part of the picture in neoliberalism, but also the way we are governed. Why have we ended up here like why is it that all systems seem to have failed to give us what we want?
It is amazing, isn't it? To get things which almost everyone would agree with, like functioning community, a lovely local place to live a global environmental system. Which can be sustained. You have to fight just about everyone who's in power. How can this be? How can this be that common goods have to be fought for, against supposedly democratic governments. And the fundamental reason the underlying reason is that we are societies of altruists, governed by psychopaths, that those who claim to represent us those who get into positions of power are very often wildly different in their psychology, to those whom they claim to represent. And there's been a huge amount of work now, showing pretty clearly that while we all have some selfishness and greediness, our overriding values are the opposite. They are empathy and altruism and community spirit and family, belonging, they're all about being with other people working alongside other people doing good stuff with other people. And yet, we're constantly told we overwhelmingly selfish ingredient, we are a bit, but that's not the dominant values. But among those who governance, those tend to be the dominant values. And in fact, what we see increasingly in many nations around the world is that those who governors appear to have serious psychological issues and narcissism, psychopathy. And in fact, there's been several studies showing that people in positions of power are highly likely of great power, highly likely to be psychopathic. And so somehow, we, as broadly altruistic people, have allowed, profoundly selfish and grasping, psychopathic, narcissistic people, to govern us and to tell us how our life should be run. And I think we've sort of been just led into that incremental step by step until we can't stand back far enough to see the mess we got ourselves into.
Where did things go wrong? I mean, be beyond the fact that it's the psychopaths in charge, as you say, but where did the original sin happen?
Well, there's no one Original Sin. But there's a whole series of misconceptions, mistakes, bad faith on the part of those who claim to be establishing democracy, but really wanted to maintain control. And I think a big part of the problem is that politics tries to reduce the phenomenal complexity of human society into a simple and linear model that can be controlled from the center. Human society is this incredibly complex, self organized system with emergent and adaptive characteristics as any complex system has. And yet politics tries to tell us, you are either Democrat or Republican labour or conservative. And it treats us as if we are a highly simple system. And in doing so, it does simplify us politically. So, for example, instead of allowing the sort of self organized nature of society to emerge, it'll say, right, here's the political platform, which we have decided on as a political party, you either say yes or no to it, you've got one choice once every four or five years where you can say we either accept the whole of this, or we reject the whole of this. And if enough people accept it, and the political party achieves a majority and gets into power, everyone in the nation is a deemed to have consented to everything that that platform contains. And so something buried on page 191, which no one even ever looked at, is deemed to be the will of the people, or indeed, anything that that government chooses to do in the next four or five years, even if it wasn't in the platform is deemed to be the will of the people. Now, we don't accept the idea of presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics? So So instead of allowing democracy to emerge from the will of the people from the bottom up, instead, you have the system where you're told right you can vote once every four or five years and in doing so, you're voting for everything and then we are in complete control until someone either manages to overthrow us or until the next election. And that is this phenomenally simplified and forceful means of trying to control a highly complex society with conflicting and complex demands. which ensures politics is almost destined to fail.
You also contend that that community is the place from which a new politics begins to grow or should begin to grow. What does that say about the current state of community?
Well, this too has been suppressed because part of the nature of this top down simplified system is to centralize is to say power resides in one place. Of course, as we've discussed, it doesn't really reside in that place at all. But the fiction is, that power resides in the government tos legitimacy and sovereignty resides in Parliament. And, you know, we know the reality is that actually, power has bled out of those institutions and gone somewhere else. But that's the fiction and it from this central place, we will decide how everyone lives. Now, even if someone had a brain the size of a planet, they could not fulfill that they couldn't do that society is too complex, it's too big. There are too many people with too many needs and too many different directions that they want to take. And why should such a paternalistic model be accepted? anyway? Why should we accept that somebody else knows what's good for us what has a better idea, or where our shoe rubs than we do? And so the far better approach, I believe, is what I call rewilding of politics to catalyze mass participation, and then to the greatest extent possible to step back and allow that to evolve. And there are some great examples from around the world. So for instance, the participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, where in the Brazilian town of Southern Brazilian town, where for 15 years, and still to a lesser extent today, but for 15 years between 1989 and 2004, people determined how the money was spent, rather than allowing a group of politicians and their friends and brother in laws to decide where the money should go where upon inevitably went to all the wrong places. Instead, people could determine themselves, these are our needs. This is how we want the money spent. And there was this extraordinary transformation in the fortunes of that city, it rose from being in a very bad state, to number one on the Human Development Index in Brazil, where it had massively improved primary health care, sanitation, water quality, primary education, massively reduced maternal mortality, infant mortality, improved public transport, because the money was being spent in the right way because it was the people themselves who determined how that money was spent through a very clever and subtle and yes, complex means, but one in which there was massive participation, 50,000 people a year, coming together to set the budget and putting a lot of their time in. Because they realized their time was well spent on doing this, they could transform their social circumstances by participating. And something extraordinary happened in Porto Alegre, which every political scientist would tell you was quite impossible. People marching in the street, demonstrating for their taxes to be raised.
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What we share in common and how best to make sure we share it equitably is in the turtle puzzle. But that doesn't mean we should stop trying George Monbiot tries harder than many to keep that discussion alive in his many books, and in his regular columns in the British newspaper, The Guardian. This is what he says on his website. Here are some of the things I try to fight environmental destruction, undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public injustice, inequality and the MIS allocation of resources. Waste denial, the libertarianism, which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the power, less undisclosed, interests, complacency on ideas today, the politics of belonging, my conversation with George Monbiot. I had a chance to interview public philosopher Roman Bismarck for our series on the common good. And he seemed to say that our times are somewhat similar to those in the 18th century, when political economists including Adam Smith seemed to not realize despite the signs that there was actually, you know, there was an industrial revolution going on at the time. He says that there are signs now, you know, of an obeah, fragmented movement to reinvent democracy. Is that too optimistic?
No, I don't think it's too optimistic at all, I think it's actually, it's not just a movement to reinvent it is a movement, reinventing it. Democracy is a lived practice, that there's there's a limit to how much people like me can sit in their office and say, This is how it should be. Because actually, how it should be is is how it evolves. What we need to set up is, is a system that allows democracy to evolve rather than being constantly suppressed and controlled, and reduced to this simplified model from the center. What we need is, is this to create the circumstances in which democracy can grow and flourish in ways that local people want it to do? You've said it can be rescued. How would that what would that look like? Well, it's a question of tempering representative politics with participatory and deliberative politics. Now, I wouldn't argue against all representative politics, I think we need them I think often they need massively to be reformed, we need to end the ridiculous political funding, which enables millionaires to buy political parties, we need to ensure that we use the most up to date and intelligent forms of representation, the best kinds, but we do need representative democracy because we need a body of people a permanent body, who are accountable to the people who are going to make certain decisions which can't be made only at the local level. So that that is necessary. But as shouldn't be the end of the system, we should have a sort of institutional participatory democracy, accompanying that system where people can get together and decide for themselves to the greatest extent possible, how their community, their Bara, their city, should evolve and should change. And this is what we're seeing in places like Madrid with the deceided Madrid system and Reykjavik in Iceland, with the better Reykjavik program where the people now run the city. And it's an extraordinary thing. So Reykjavik, for example, two thirds of the the city's population have have taken part in the deliberative negotiations as to what that city should be. And they've massively improved it. It works very simply, every month, people put forward proposals for change in the city, the proposals which received the most votes from other people, because everybody else can vote on the proposals, then go to the council. And the council must either accept them or reduce a very good, well reasoned argument for why it doesn't accept them. And that turns out to be crucial to the legitimacy of the system. If you feel that people are just brushing you off, and saying no, without really having listened to what you're saying, then you lose trust in it. But if what you get back is well, I can see your ideas and real virtues, which are the following. But there are some downsides, which are the following. And we've weighed these up and we think on balance, the downsides outweigh the virtues so much as we'd like it in some ways, sorry, we're not going to accept it. Then you think, Oh, these guys have listened. They've actually heard me I exist. I'm a real person. I count for something because I'm being listened to. And this is absolutely crucial for civic society. If we're to have functioning civic life. We have to be heard. And you know, since the final crisis we've pretty well wiped the city out. The place has been transformed through citizen control through the rewilding of politics.
You mentioned society, in your book in 2017. How did we get into this mess? There's a section that's titled, there is such a thing as society, which of course, this is, is a reference to Margaret Thatcher's statement who famously once said that there is no such thing as society. Why was she wrong? And what's your argument in favor of the idea of society.
So what Mrs. Thatcher said, she said, There is no such thing as society, only men and women and their families. And it was seen as a description of how things were. But actually, it was a manifesto. That's how she wanted things to be because the approach of politicians have that tendency has always been to atomize. And rule is when people get together, and organize and try to change things that they've become a severe threat to established politics. And we've seen this with people's movements across history. But when people believe themselves to be alone, believe themselves to be isolated, accept these myths about the self made man and the self made woman, and think that isolation is a splendid thing, we become totally controllable. Because the only way you can exercise effective political power is by combining with other people. And, of course, she was wrong from the anthropological point of view, in that we are the supremely social mammal, with the possible exception of the naked mole rat, we might just put the naked mole rat to one side. But with that exception, we are the most social of all mammals. And this is how we came to dominate the natural world. And if you think of what we were in the East African savannas, you know, we were the weakest and slowest of all the large animals. But the one thing we had on our side was this incredible capacity for cooperation. We were really, really good at it. And we had extremely good communication far better than any other species where we could plan staff where we could work out what we were going to do. And this week, slow, pathetic looking creature, wiped everything else out and came out on top. And we did so through our extraordinary ability to cooperate. But to suggest that this supremely social animal doesn't have any society, that preposterous misunderstanding of biology, or psychology or anthropology
was sort of following on from that you say that the predicament that we're in now, in the predicament that we're in now, there are two entities, there's the state, the larger political structure that we exist in, but there's also the community, something which is a lot more informal. Can you spell out the difference? And you know, the tension between those two parts of our lives and how we determine how we live?
Well, one thing to recognize is that the nation state in most parts of the world is a really recent invention. If you walked across Europe in the mid 19th century, and stopped everyone you met, and said, What nation do you belong to? Most people wouldn't have the faintest idea what you were talking about. Because they didn't belong to a nation. their allegiance was to the Canton or to the city or to the city state, or to the Empire. But, but this idea of belonging to a nation was alien to most of the people, even in Europe, let alone in much of the rest of the world. And this business of nation building is a really recent thing. But now we are told the only legitimate and sensible political unit is a nation, state and nation service should pursue their interests and they're interested in boded in the state. And if you work against the state, you're a subversive and you're anti patriotic, you're anti national, you're against the interests of the nation. Whereas the reality is that in many states, and I include my own in this, the real people, undermining the interests of the nation, the interests of the people they claim to govern, are those in power, the real threat to the well being of the people of that nation comes from the state. It comes from the state working alongside very powerful economic and political actors, the oligarchs to reshape society to suit their interests, rather than the interests of the rest of people in society. So the subversion comes from above, it's a sort of super version of the national interest. And yet, of course, the state creates the ledger It creates a context, which tells us that if we challenge it, we are the enemies, we are the enemies of the people. And it's unthinking that unlearning that unseeing that, which is one of the key democratic tasks
and the tension with with community, I suppose you could even look at it through the lens of what's happening now, the pandemic in awareness, the responsibility of the state ends where the community begins, we do need both.
So we need the state to fund a good strong public health service and a good strong public education system, and to be in charge of national infrastructure and other crucial aspects of our lives. But actually, if we rely on that, and that alone, we lose our moorings, we lose our grounding in society, and we come potentially passive, and uninvolved in the issues that govern the quality of our lives. So I feel that alongside an effective state, which we do need, we also need an effective community, which is going to provide people with true Social Security, we have a funny thing in I don't know about in Canada, but in this country, we call the the money that people received from the state, if they don't have work, or if they have particular needs, we call it Social Security. That's, that's what we call it to, yeah, it's actually economic security. And we need that, and that's a great thing, we should have economic security, but that's not Social Security, what's the distinction? Because socialism is is other people. It's your society. It's, it's the security you get of belonging to a community, a community, which is going to support you, which is going to hold you positively in its mind, which is going to encourage you to be yourself. And there's a great paradox here. Because, you know, we're constantly told that if we're isolated from each other, that's how we establish our individualism, but actually, we need a strong community to be strong individuals, and we sort of find our feet, really within our communities. And that's where our social security comes from. And, and it's interesting, you know, when we misuse words, it often suggests that we're not actually thinking about crucial concepts and and social is such an important term. And we misuse it. For me, these these words are indicative, you know, when we miss use words, it suggests that, that we aren't thinking things through.
So back to the word society, you make the point that we make decisions on who we are, rather than what we think. In other words, we're not rational beings. Can you talk a little bit about this and how it frames the discussion about a good society?
Yes. So these are really the very depressing findings of the work of the professor's Christopher Archon. And Larry bertelsen, who wrote a book called democracy for realists, which is very depressing, because it says basically, the folk theory of democracy, that we decide what's in our best interests, we listen to what the politicians are saying, we judge whether they are aligning with our best interests, we also judge them on their records. That just doesn't happen. That's just not how it works. We don't make those rational choices in democracy. So you can say, Oh, no, well, that's terrible. We're completely stuck, then democracy is a dead letter, there's nothing we can do. Or you can say, right? Well, given that that is a fundamental weakness of humankind. How do we find ways of making decisions that are in our interests. And to me, the participatory and deliberative nature of the grassroots democracy that I'm talking about, really seems to overcome that problem. And I've witnessed this myself that, you know, as soon as you say to people, right, you're in charge, this now rests on your shoulders, if you want your community to be a good place, you've got to decide how that community is going to evolve. And you've got to work with that person across the road who might have a totally different background to you might have been here only three months, whereas you've been here 40 years, might have a different culture to you, whatever it is, you're going to work with that person to find the common interest to find the common good, and to make decisions that reflect that. And suddenly, it's like watching people wake up. It's it's this extraordinary moment, and you see that sort of flash recognition in their eyes. I am an intelligent, powerful human being, who can do good things by working with other people and and that moment of realization is the moment at which that democratic constraint All of us basically making stupid decisions is overcome. Because we suddenly realize that we have responsibility, but we also have the power to exercise that responsibility. And this ties in closely with a concept that was developed by the people who worked on the first Bernie Sanders campaign. Well, the the, what was it the 2016, Bernie Sanders attempt to secure the Democratic nomination and who developed this new political model or new organizational model that they called radical trust, where you, you give people far more responsibility than political parties are used to giving them because and they came out of necessity, because they couldn't afford a big staff team. So they said, Well, what do we got in huge numbers, we got volunteers, we don't have any money. We don't have any staffers. But we've got this massive network of people who want Bernie Sanders to be president. So let's use them, let's give them responsibility for the things that staffers would usually do. So rather than just inviting them to stuff envelopes, or to knock on some doors, we're going to say, You're in charge of this district. And you're going to work with other people in this district to devise a strategy and reach people. And it was extremely effective. He didn't win the nomination, but he came from a position of 2% name recognition, they're getting 40 46% of the nominations. And it was quite an extraordinary transformation. And it came about through that big organizing radical trust model. And it was another vindication of this notion that if you give people real control, if you place your trust in them, and so you are deciding, it's down to you now it's on your shoulders, people will rise to that challenge. But if you treat people like morons, people will behave like morons,
you've said that the loss of common purpose actually leads in turn to a loss of belief in ourselves and as a force for change to change things. How much do you think of that dynamic is playing in the background right now?
I think that when we accept the story, that there is no such thing as society, when we come to believe in ourselves as being individuals, when we cease to believe in the structural nature of problems and the structural nature of solutions and say, well, it's just down to me if I'm rich, that's because I'm so brilliant. And if I'm poor, that's because I'm so rubbish. And so it's entirely down to me what happens, then we basically accept our role as political cannon fodder. And this has been one of the achievements of neoliberalism, which is to tell us that it's just down to us. Nevermind, structural unemployment, if you don't have a job, it's because you're not hard working. And you're not enterprising. Nevermind, junk food, manufacturing, and marketing and advertising, if you're overweight, is because you've got no self control. So you take these structural issues, which are afflicting vast numbers of people. And you say it's down to you, and you alone as an individual to address that structural issue. And if you don't address it successfully, well, that's your fault, you're entirely to blame. And we internalize that we absorb that. And then we reproduce it. And this, I think, is partly responsible for the crisis in mental health, that is afflicting so many nations now. Because we've internalized this belief system, that it's all our fault, or it's all our success, which determines where we are in society. And instead of combining with other people, to address our common problems, we just loaded onto ourselves. And from a position of extreme weakness, which is where we always are if we're by ourselves, we struggle on and fail and keep failing, and then blame ourselves for that failure. How would that not cause a mental health crisis? So what this tells to me is, there are three rules for effective politics, and three rules for effective community and three rules for an effective society. And they're the same three rules in every case, and the first one is organize. And the second one is organized, and the third one is organized. That's how we become effective.
Going back to the idea of needing a new story, because that you say is an integral part of renewal and new politics in what different ways Do we need to be changing the way we're thinking in order to get to a new story then
other people might disagree with this prescription. But I believe that this recognition of our role as the supremely social mammal, of our amazing capacity to cooperate, which we've been induced to forget, is the starting point for political and social transformation. It's knowing who we are. Yeah. And that's a big part of the new story, which I and others are trying to tell is because the effective story says, you know, who are we How did we get here? Where do we now stand? And where are we going? And who are we bit is very important. So we've basically been induced to accept this Hobbesian view of society that we're all in a war of all against all. And the state of nature among human human beings is nasty, brutish, and short. Whereas all the research, I mean, there's a huge body of research now across psychology across anthropology, cross evolutionary biology, showing that that's absolutely not how it is, the state of nature is cooperation, is working together to achieve common aims, sometimes against another group. But one thing we've seen over the past few decades is that actually, the the scope of people's interests seem to expand with globalization and global connection, so that we no longer see ourselves, well, I'm English, so therefore, I'm against the French, the French are my enemies, they're our traditional enemies, or the Germans are my enemies. And they're my traditional enemies. We don't see it that way so much anymore, despite Brexit. But but so there is, there is a sort of widening sphere of social interest and a widening recognition amongst a very large number of people, that we have to address our common problems together. And of course, the overwhelming issue we have to address is the destruction of our life support systems. This is a thing which has to we have to come together over this otherwise, we are well and truly knackered, the planet, the planet, the we have to face ecological breakdown, and climate breakdown. Because if we don't, nothing else, that we valued nothing else that we stand for counts for anything.
You write, if your purpose is to create a kinder world, we should embed within the political story, we tell the intrinsic values that promote this aim empathy, understanding connectedness with other people self acceptance, independent thought and action. What makes these things so important? I mean, they seem pretty, they seem pretty obvious things that you know, anyone would sign on to. So what what are you saying that we haven't heard before? On this particular question?
Yeah, well, so a great mistake that many politicians across the political spectrum have made, is to say, Well, you know, people aren't going to accept the case for a kind of world unless we show it's in their economic interests. So you save the planet and save money. And that's, that's the reason you should save the planet, because you'll be using less fuel, and then you'll have more money to spend on flying abroad for your holiday. And actually, it's a classic Win Win argument. Exactly. And actually, what we find interesting is it just does not work. There's been a lot of research on this, there was a classic study at filling stations, where they had they please inflate your tires to the right pressure, is if you do so you'll burn less fuel, and you'll save money, completely useless. didn't touch people at all, but in other filling stations, so please inflate your tires to the right pressure, because you'll save fuel, and then you will be helping to protect the living world. And that had a big impact on people's because what you were doing was triggering an intrinsic value, a value about something inherently good about wanting to help other people. Whereas if you're appealing to people, selfish instincts, you'll save money. What you trigger is a selfish thought process or a selfish reflex like Well, I don't care. Yeah. And and it's just triggering all the wrong impulses and reinforcing the wrong values. So if you try to drive people towards something that's intrinsically good, by stimulating extrinsic value, selfishness and greed, you you actually push people in the opposite direction to the one you want them to go in. It sounds like a very obvious point, you would think people would recognize this an obvious point, but again, in the game, you see people making the same mistakes, appealing to the wrong values in order to try to get something good done.
Bringing in Finally, a free that you use in the last chapter of your book out of the wreckage, which is called the politics of belonging. How does that fit in? What do you mean by that?
Well, belonging is a really powerful human value, we all very badly feel the need to belong, belong to something belong to somewhere, have the sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. That's a really strong human instinct, and one which is often neglected. And an important component of that is geographical belonging. There's a lot of placeless politics around this assumption that there's one size fits all, and we're at the center can just tell you what you all want. And and if you're rational beings, you will want it whereas Actually, we need often rather different solutions to what the community next door might need. Because we've got different needs, we've got different things missing. And actually, the process of developing those different solutions is not just an outcome of politics, it is politics, it is itself a common good, it's the coming together to develop those solutions, which is a good in its own right. And so the idea is to try to stimulate a politics, which means something to people, because it's rooted in that community, not in an exclusive community where you say, just people who look like me, or who've got the same background as me that I want to work with, we stimulate what are called bridging communities, which was reach across social divides, rather than just bonding communities where you get together with people like you against other people. And other you know, there's almost a science of how you can do that now of how you create a rich participatory culture, which is as inclusive as possible in your community. But what that gives people if it works, is a sense of being valued. That's what belonging is all about. It's a sense that you're in a place where your personhood is recognized, you are recognized as a valued person. And you are seen and you are known, and people call you by your name, these things are really, really important to all of us. We want to know that we are held positively in the minds of others that is absolutely fundamental to our well being. And, and it's that urge that very powerful human instinct, which I believe we can build on politically to say, right, if we want what's good for our community, we're going to have to get together, band together, organize and fight for what is good for our community. And so you build on that urge, that powerful instinct to create a community in which you feel you have a role, you have a part, you are known and named, and held positively in other people's minds. And you say we build on that outwards, to start to create a region, a nation, a continent, a world, which is based on those same principles. That's the politics of belonging. But you
say none of those aims can be done. They all involve confrontation. Why is that necessary,
because of the psychopaths who exercise inordinate power. Because there's a small number of people who want to exercise power over us. Power is something we should all have. But the only power over we should have is power over ourselves. The rest of the power we exercise should be the power to do things, the power to do things together to do good things to the power to improve our lives to improve the lives of our communities. But we shouldn't seek power over other people, but certain people seek power over us. And those people unfortunately, have continually to be pushed back pushed back into their boxes so that they can no longer dominate our lives. We have constantly to confront such people and organize against them.
Thank you so much for your time. What a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you. Thank you. So it's been a real pleasure. George mom Bo writes, we should defend the poor against the rich, the powerless against the powerful, the defenseless against the armed, we should defend the biosphere that gives us life.
We must treat other people as we would wish to be treated ourselves. None of these aims can be possibly achieved, all involve confrontation. You've been listening to the Politics of belonging, a conversation with prolific British author George Monbiot. The program was produced by Philip Coulter. Our web producer is Lisa use. And our technical producer is Danielle Duvall. The senior producer is Nicola luxury. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala ion. For more CBC podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.