George Monbiot On The Invisible Doctrine
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Hi, good evening and welcome here to 5x15 and I'm absolutely thrilled tonight to have George Monbiot as our guest. George has been promoting this extraordinary book,

It's quite small and it packs a quite extraordinary punch. It's called The Invisible Doctrine, The Secret History of Neoliberalism. And on the back, there's many, many good quotes, but one I particularly like says, the secret history of neoliberalism is really the ultimate crime novel, one in which we all play a part. Now, the fact that all of you are here means you don't need much introduction to George. So suffice it to say, he's one of our best columnists ever.

He's been a consistent voice fighting from the left for justice, for transparency and for openness. And he's an all round splendid human being. And when we were talking before yesterday,

I said, can I kick off by asking you what neoliberalism means? And he said, no, actually, let's jump one stage back and let's start talking about capitalism, because you can sure as hell bet that no one on the BBC would ever ask a straightforward question like, what is capitalism?

So, George, over to you. Thank you for being joining us from down there near Totnes. Rather envious of you being here on this hot night. But over to you. And thank you so much for writing this. This is a very important book and it's extremely readable and understandable if anyone is fazed by the idea of economics.

Thanks so much, Rosie, and thanks everyone for coming along. Yeah, so the question of capitalism, I mean, it is amazing. You almost never hear a critique of capitalism in the mainstream media. And if anybody says anything which suggests that there might be some issues with capitalism, it's like, do you want to go and live in China? Well, actually, China's pretty capitalistic as well now. But one of the extraordinary features of this debate is that if ever the issue is raised,

You hear people discussing it

and come to the clear conclusion that they don't know what capitalism is. You have fierce defenders of capitalism and fierce opponents of capitalism, but actually no clear definition of what they're talking about. And a lot of people confuse it with commerce, with buying and selling things. Commerce has been happening for thousands of years, and commerce and capitalism are absolutely not the same thing. In fact, in some respects, commerce and capitalism are opposites.

Now, with my wonderful co-author, Peter Hutchison, we trace the origins of capitalism following the great geographer Jason Moore to the island of Madeira in about 1450. And we say this is really when the thing we call capitalism kicks off.

Now, one of the best definitions of capitalism or partial definitions of capitalism was provided by the great social anthropologist Karl Polanyi, who said that these three conditions need to be met for capitalism to occur. The commodification of land, and we can see that as meaning natural wealth in general,

of labour and of money. And all those three things need to happen simultaneously for us to be able to say this is a capitalist system. And there's pretty strong evidence that the first place where they happened, where they came together, was Madeira in 1450 or thereabouts.

The Portuguese had come across the island in 1420. It was a genuinely uninhabited island. There weren't many, but this was one. And they named it after the resource which they rather fancied, which covered the island, madeira, or wood, timber. They were very short of timber. They could

build the battleships they wanted because they didn't have enough of it. So they were delighted to find this. And so to begin with, they just did what they'd been doing on the mainland. They cleared some forests. They ran a few pigs and cattle in it. They shipped out the timber. And then someone realized that this was a great place for growing sugar, perfect climate, perfect soil, et cetera. And sugar did very well there.

And then they realised, well, we're in an unusual position here because there's no constraints on how we use the land. There's no church here. There's no landowners. There's no custom. There's no culture. There's no society. We can just do exactly what we want on this land. So they could fully commoditise the land, just turn it into an object for making money.

And then I thought, well, where are we going to find the labour? Oh, we can just bring people in to work. And who are the cheapest people to bring in? Slaves. So they started importing slaves first from the Canary Islands, then from Africa. And of course, slaves are fully commoditised labour.

You've stripped away everything that gives them their humanity. You've stripped away their social context, their cultural context, their religious context, a whole lot of it. And it's purely 100% commoditized labor is what slavery is.

Then they needed money to finance the operation. Previously, on the mainland, you would have gone to the landowner or someone and been charged extortion at rates of interest. But no, they could shop around and they could just say, we just want money. We don't want any attachments to that money. We'll just pay the lowest rates of interest we can get. And so they went to Flanders and Genoa to get their money. So they'd commoditize the money as well. And what happened was a very rapid recovery.

rise in sugar production. I mean, if you're trying to make a lot of money, this system works very well. But alongside it was a remarkably rapid rise in ecological destruction. And the reason for that was that this great sugar industry, which had created so quickly, absolutely devoured Madeira. You need 60 kilograms of wood to refine a kilogram of sugar.

And what that meant was that as the slaves used up the timber in the surrounding areas, they had to go further and further to get it. And suddenly productivity fell off a cliff. By about 1470, Madeira was the top producer of sugar on earth.

by this tiny island, by 1500, it had collapsed by 80%. It was a very sudden boom and a very sudden bust. And then, and this is an absolutely crucial component of it, they did what capital has gone on to do all over the world, they left. Boom, bust, quit. Those are the three components of capital. That is what capitalism does.

And then they moved the operation to San Tomé, another island they'd recently stumbled across. Did

did exactly the same, even quicker, destroyed it, used it up with extraordinary speed, boom, bust, quit. Moved across the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil, moved up the coast of Brazil, bang, bang, bang, just taking out ecosystems one after another, moved into the Caribbean, by which time they've been joined by the Spanish and English, and the model started to proliferate all over the world. Very profitable, but fantastically destructive. And what capitalism is...

is a system of colonial looting, which creates and destroys its own frontiers. It creates these highly lucrative frontiers, it burns through them literally or metaphorically with extraordinary speed, and then it has to move on to find the next one. And that's a product of bringing together these three commodities at one and the same time.

And it's moved on to destroy frontier after frontier after frontier, ecologically, socially, culturally. It's a planet trashing machine.

Gosh, there's so many questions that come off the back of that. But how do we get, I mean, I can see how this system took off because it made a few people very rich and allowed a few people to be very powerful. How do we get to this, to the philosophical position of neoliberalism? Was that the kind of umbrella that made it all right? I mean, why?

At what point did... yeah. Yeah, so the first thing to say is that most of the places where capitalism operated were not uninhabited like Madeira and so in order to commoditise your land and your labour you had to dispossess people and you had to enslave them. You had to take away what people had before. You had to destroy their social relations, you had to destroy ecological relations.

And capitalists could do that quite successfully because they had violence behind them and there were very few people who were able to resist because, of course, capital develops its own momentum. It produces the money which gives you your military-industrial complex, which you can then use to conquer the lands, seize them, commoditise them and commoditise labour at the same time.

And then, of course, you've created a commoditized money supply through your capitalist enterprise too. So it's a sort of self-perpetuating machine until the point at which it crashes and burns. And so for several hundred years, they had pretty well a clear run, but then it ran into a problem, a problem called democracy.

Because when adults began to have the vote, they started to use that vote in ways that capitalists don't like very much, like saying, well, perhaps we should have a bigger share of the money which is being produced through our labour. In fact, perhaps our labour should not be commoditised to the extent that it is, and we should reclaim some of our humanity. Perhaps

Perhaps we shouldn't allow machinery to rip our arms off. Perhaps we shouldn't live in places which are so choked with pollution that we die by the time we're 40. Perhaps we want a better world for everyone, not just for capitalists. Perhaps we want outrageous things like weekends.

And this was a huge problem because it greatly limited the ability of capitalists to make money, to extract from this system. And it is an extractive system. That's what it is. And suddenly you have this limitation put in front of your extraction.

And neoliberalism is one of the two most effective means of solving capitalism's biggest problem, which is democracy. The other one, incidentally, is fascism, which is always backed by big money wherever it arises. But we're talking about neoliberalism today.

So neoliberalism took off really in America in the last century, century before last. So can you explain how it came about and how it was used as a philosophical justification for this change?

Dehumanizing of people. I mean, I was very interested in that since reading the books like The Nutmeg's Curse about how the whole way that, say, the West was able to take over America depended on having made and turned the Native Americans into somebody who was subhuman.

and that you were morally entitled to both take and plunder and destroy. And the question then becomes the philosophy of it, which is saying some people are better than other people, begins to be the narrative, it seems. Exactly. So neoliberalism is a full-on assault on political choice. That's its fundamental characteristic. And what it says is we should not seek to resolve problems

our problems and our questions in the political sphere. In other words, through democracy. We should seek to resolve them in the economic sphere. We should seek to resolve them through this thing it calls the market, which, like almost all the terms involved in neoliberalism, is the opposite of what it says it is. You know, you think about a market, what are you thinking about? You think about little stalls with stripy awnings and more or less an egalitarian sphere. Of course, capitalism is the exact opposite of that.

in arguably the very opposite of markets. It's a sphere in which some people exploit and other people are exploited.

And so these confusions are baked in from the very beginning. And, you know, one of the primary purposes of our book is to try to resolve these confusions and explain what the terms really mean. So, but the market in the hands of neoliberals means the power of money. And so we move this away from the sphere where we don't have control, where capital does not have control, into the sphere where capital does have control, which is the economic sphere. And of course,

some people have far more power in the economic sphere than other people have. It's not one person, one vote. It can be one person, millions of votes and millions of dollars and other person far fewer. And so if you can shift decision-making into that sphere, you've got us where you want us. So the term neoliberalism,

was developed in 1938 at a colloquium meeting in Paris. But it didn't really take off and it wasn't really formalized until the publication of two books in 1944, which was Friedrich Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom, and Ludwig von Mises' book, Bureaucracy. And they had an almost identical theme. They claimed that

Any attempt to interfere in the workings of this thing they call the market, to interfere with the power of money, in other words, would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. It might look like something benign, the incipient welfare state and economic safety net, publicly funded services, but that would inevitably lead to Hitler or to Stalin. It was a classic slippery slope fallacy.

And it was put forward with some force by them. They're quite readable books. I mean, they're absolutely shot full of holes. But, you know, you can sort of see there's a thread that you can follow and an argument that is more or less coherent, but very easy to tear apart.

And they were saying that such impediments to capital as high taxes, as regulation, as trade unions, as protest should be stripped away in order to enable people

a kind of natural order to be discovered of winners and losers. There are those who have the grace of money and those who do not have the grace of money, and you can see from who has money who is deserving and who is not deserving. And if you try to alter that natural order of the righteous and the unrighteous, it's a very Calvinist approach, if you try to interfere with that,

then you will sap humanity of its vitality. You will strip away the spirit of enterprise and make everyone poorer. Because if you allow the rich to get richer, they will, through the invisible hand, generate the money that will shower down upon the rest of us. And you say, well, hang on a moment. I thought the rest of us weren't meant to get richer. I thought we were meant to stay poor because we're unworthy. So, you know, you straight away start to see these enormous contradictions in it.

And many people reacted with absolute horror and disgust towards these ideas. At the time, the dominant form of political economic thought was Keynesianism, Keynesian social democracy, which was very much distributive within the rich nations. It was still highly exploitative between rich and poor countries.

Obviously, it was a form of capitalism, but it was far more distributive within the rich nations than we'd ever seen before or since, and was about building up public services, was about ensuring that everybody had a decent standard of life so they could spend into the economy, and that generates economic growth. And so this neoliberalism was at the time very much out of tune with the times. But there was one group of people who thought it was just fantastic.

And these were the richest people on earth. And it was literally the richest people on earth who got behind Hayek and von Mises and later Milton Friedman and the other great advocates of neoliberalism and built what has been described as a neoliberal international, a global network of academic institutes, of journalists, of bureaucrats, of sympathetic politicians, but above all,

of these things they called think tanks, lobby groups, groups who characteristically don't reveal who's funding them,

which poses independent institutes, so academic groups just thinking about things, but are actually straightforward lobby groups on behalf of capital. And they became the sort of shock troops of neoliberalism, whose role, whose mission was

was to translate these sort of slightly pointy-headed and abstruse ideas of Hayek and Friedman, and Friedman was pretty good at translating his own, but of von Mises and people like this, was to translate them into what appeared to be political common sense until they reached the point where they could say, it's the only way to do things. There is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher, one of the first neoliberal prime ministers, pointed out.

And so it was in the rich world, it wasn't until Keynesianism began to fall apart in the late 1970s that they were able to implement this. In Milton Friedman's words, because they'd spent 30, 40 years developing the doctrine by then, he said, we were ready and we could step straight in. But they'd had some practice elsewhere, particularly in Pinochet's Chile,

because after Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende in this bloody military coup, the first thing, the very first thing he did was to put these economists who had been trained at Chicago, where the economics department had been completely taken over by neoliberal money, to put them in charge of the economy.

And the result was almost like word for word transcription of what Hayek and others had demanded. In fact, when Pinochet wrote the new constitution for Chile, he called it the Constitution of Liberty, which was the title of one of Hayek's books written in 1960.

And Hayek, later touring Chile, said, yeah, I'd much rather have this than the democracy at home, which isn't fully neoliberal. Democracy is nothing to these people. It's all about economic power. And of course, if anyone resisted the neoliberal program in Chile, they got killed.

Yes, well, we weren't. I mean, I spent my young adulthood in the 70s when there was a feeling that the world we lived in was fairly equal. And, you know, we didn't pay for universities. I mean, all sorts of good things happened. You could afford houses, you could afford children.

It worked. And then you saw this process that you're talking about, which was obviously hugely accelerated by what happened at the end of the 1980s with the fall of Russia and the feeling that someone like Francis Fukuyama could say this is the end of history. Capitalism has won. But one of the things on which this whole philosophy depends is that you, again, going back to thinking about being in the 70s, we did things in groups.

We felt the power of the group of togetherness and that this society we're in now is about the individual and that it's your fault if you eat the wrong food and get fat, if you're poor, if you can't afford a house. How did we how did that mentality get tweaked? Because the human is a naturally cooperative person. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, a very good question. And just as Richard Nixon was alleged to have said, we're all Keynesians now in the 1960s, today we can reasonably say we are all neoliberals now. And the reason is that it seeps into the very fabric of your being, you know.

rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, most people most of the time align with the status quo without even being fully aware that there is a status quo that they're aligning with, without even really thinking through what is it that we're siding with. And it affects you, not just in your political decision-making or your economic decision-making, but it affects your very conception of yourself. It affects your social position, your cultural position,

it seeps right in. And individuation has been an absolutely crucial aspect of the neoliberal revolution. In fact, perhaps the greatest propaganda coup in modern history has been to persuade us that we are not so much citizens as consumers. And this word consumer, consumer, consumer, and this identification as that thing

And it seeps into every aspect, into our language. We can hardly complete a sentence without saying personal.

Personally speaking, to distinguish myself from a ventriloquist dummy, I rather like to have personal belongings. Well, how could they be belongings if they're not personal? And I prefer close personal friends to the impersonal variety. But that's just my personal opinion, otherwise known as my opinion. We use these redundant terms all the time. We don't talk about people anymore. We say individuals. Right.

An individual was apprehended. Two individuals were walking down the street. These things seep into our minds in ways which we're scarcely aware. We absorb these dominant themes, these dominant cultures. It's a cultural hegemony that Antonia Gransky was talking about.

And so it's very successfully, through mass persuasion right across most of the media, across politics, told us we are a different kind of person and we have become that different kind of person. And it's had devastating impacts on our mental health.

Without a doubt, that's true. But let's move on to looking at what's happening in the politics of today, because I realise we're racing through the time. And I also want to say to people, please put questions in for George. I mean, I find that the individuation extraordinary. And as someone who, you know,

in a way, over my career as a journalist, has sort of studied the way the Daily Mail operate, that they always have a story about one person who has managed to get from the very, very...

toughest, lowest place. You know, their mother was not there, et cetera, et cetera. And somehow they're running a hedge fund by the time they're 35. And the absolute message of I could, if I could, they can do it. So can you, it's your fault. And I think that that's epitomized by the book that JD Vance wrote in 2016, the hillbilly energy, which I remember reading and thinking, golly, this is kind of an amazing book. This is someone who's,

told this story of what it was like to grow up as forgotten working class whites in a left behind city in America, town in America. And now suddenly you see how

There's nothing compassionate in it. It's completely egocentric. It was a wool pulled over the eyes. And I personally find it very scary. But how do you fit him into the neoliberal argument, given that he may be very powerful in our lives in the coming year? No, well, I mean, he's obviously a blatant opportunist. He'll switch sides according to what he thinks is going to work for him.

And there were some real virtues in that book, but it was this Horatio Alger story, you know, if only you try hard enough, if you get yourself together, pull your act together, you'll be fine. So it's a sort of denial of the structural causes of poverty, denial of structural unemployment.

Denial of the enormous forces levied against people trying to pull themselves out of the holes created by corporate power, including, for instance, by Purdue with the opioid crisis.

And I think a far more compassionate and reasoned account is the one you find in Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful novel, Demon Come Ahead, which is also very, very empathetic, but doesn't try to convince you that there's a simple individuated solution to a structural systemic problem, which is what neoliberalism tries to do throughout.

I see Vance as a very scary person, not least because he is a creature of Peter Thiel, who is perhaps the scariest person on earth. Thiel says the quiet bit out loud. At one point he says, capitalism and democracy are incompatible. And I know which side I'm on, which is capitalism. And he's quite right. They are incompatible.

This is why capitalism backs neoliberalism, backs fascism, as means of solving that problem of democracy. I mean, Thiel's not wrong about this, but he's just prepared to state it and to act on that belief, and hence his huge backing for Vance and for Trump.

But, you know, the extraordinary feature of this is because of that hegemonic aspect, neoliberalism, just as Keynesianism once did, has captured both sides of the customary political divide.

When Richard Nixon says we're all Keynesians now, yeah, it was true. Whether you were Democrat or Republican, Labour or Conservative, you were broadly Keynesian in your approach. Today, whether you're Democrat, Republican, Labour or Conservative, you're broadly neoliberal in your approach, almost the opposite of Keynesianism. But it's become this

the new dominant story of our times. I mean, it's not so new anymore, but it keeps refusing to die. However, often it collapses. And of course, the 2008 financial crash was a spectacular refutation of neoliberalism. It keeps rising from the grave and staggering forwards.

And unfortunately, you know, in the current government, you know, and I'm sure many in the audience will share my sense of relief that after 14 years we've escaped from the shadow of the Tories. But this new government seems determined to maintain this ultra neoliberal policy of austerity.

It's completely unnecessary. It has loads of opportunities to escape from austerity. There are lots of ways of taxing the rich. There are lots of other ways of raising money.

modern monetary theory, people would say, well, you know, you can just make money. I mean, I'm kind of neutral on that question. But, you know, there are loads of options which the government has flatly refused to take. And as a result, austerity will continue unless it changes its policy. And austerity is...

absolutely fundamental to neoliberalism. Every neoliberal government from Pinochet onwards has introduced austerity because that rolls back the constraints on capital. Austerity means less public spending, so more the economy moves into the hands of the private sector. It means that the private sector can take over government functions.

It means, of course, that you're not taxing the wealthy so much. So their wealth increases. With that, their economic power increases and democracy is replaced by oligarchy, which is the default state of politics and just what capital was striving for all this time. And so they win. And, you know, my...

relieved as I am, delighted we got rid of the Tories, we still have a neoliberal government and capital is still going to win unless it is confronted.

Yes, you come on to the question of now the sort of new world oligarchs, which is a kind of where your book goes before you get into how do we rewrite the story and the role now of the oligarch. I mean, you make the point of that shocking statistics that over the time of the pandemic, whatever it is, the 10 richest men died.

in the world got however much richer again. There is no restriction on the pay of CEOs. These regulations have been completely hollowed out. And yet, as you say, we are all complicit. We are all part of a strange neoliberal elite that somehow plays with the hands and runs with the hands.

As we go through this. So how how do we take on the corporations and the oligarchs? Because, I mean, I do food politics and you do food politics. And I guess that's for me, that's the place where you see the power of the corporations, possibly more than anything, because it affects every single person's meal.

and what they choose to eat. And again, you're told it's your fault if you're fat or whatever. Exactly. No, that's a classic individuation of blame. So you've got the junk food manufacturers apologising

I mean, they pour money into think tanks who will say, yeah, it's nothing to do with the junk food manufacturers. It's all because people have lost their willpower. Two thirds of the population has simultaneously lost its willpower. That's an extraordinary psychological shift that's taken place. It'd be interesting to see how that could be explained.

Oh, or could it perhaps have something to do with the mass advertising of junk food and the obesogenic environment in which we live? That's the thing you can't talk about. That's what neoliberalism says is not the subject. But who's saying it? The subject is the individual. Who's saying it? When you say we're not allowed to say it, who's stopping us saying it?

Well, you and I can say it. You know, fortunately, we still so far touch wood have freedom of speech. But but, you know, you will not get a platform to say it almost anywhere. I get a platform in The Guardian. I'm extremely fortunate to have that. I could not work for any other mainstream media outlet. None. I started my career in the BBC. It would be completely impossible for me to work in the BBC today.

What other newspaper would have me? None other would have me. I'm not complaining. I'm perfectly happy in my own life. But, you know, you can just see this almost hegemonic situation and you can see how it originated as well. There's an extraordinary book published by the founder of the Adam Smith Institute, which is one of these neoliberal junk tanks which refuses to say who funds it. And it's his autobiography. It's called Madsen Piri. And the book's called Think Tank.

Yeah, and about six people read this book. But unfortunately for him, I was one of them because it gives away an extraordinary amount of things which were previously secret. And one of these is his description of the meetings they had in the late 1970s after Margaret Thatcher had become leader of the Conservative opposition.

every Saturday morning in a wine bar called the Cork and Bottle in West London, where representatives from the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Telegraph, the Mail and the Times would come together to map out the agenda for the week. And they would say, right, we at the Institute of Economic Affairs, another Tufton Street neoliberal junk tank, are going to be producing this report about

calling for the privatisation of the water industry, and that's going to be a wonderful thing for this country. And so the person from the Mail or the Telegraph saying, right, we'll do a leading article on that, right, we'll have a feature page on it, they would map it out. In the same meeting, you had Conservative Party officials saying,

who would then look at how they could turn that into workable policy. They're all working together. It's a remarkable thing. I mean, it's literally a conspiracy. It's just he tells you about... Who were they wanting to make rich at that point? Themselves? So one of the things we've got to realise is, yeah, absolutely it's about enrichment, but it's also about power.

And, you know, one of the weaknesses of the analysis on the left, you know, and I include myself in this because I've often fallen into this trap, is to imagine that the only thing they're after is money. It is by no means the only thing they're after. You know, what very rich people want is not just more money. They want to be seen as the heroes. They want to be the people around whom society is shaped. They want...

to be the dominant force and they don't want anyone getting in their way.

And they will buy politics in the same way that they might buy a yacht or a private jet or an island or something. You know, the politics is part of their self amplification. It's part of the expression of the ego. And they will spend on politics. They might earn money from various places, but they will spend it on politics because that means that, you know, they are in that dominant position that they've always wanted to be in.

And what an oligarch is, is someone who turns their inordinate economic power into inordinate political power. And one of the things that we've seen, and it's been very clear in this country, has been a kind of civil war within capitalism. You can see it most clearly within Brexit, where you had what could be described as a house-trained capitalist on one side, represented, for instance, by the Confederation of British Industries.

And these were the sort of supposedly respectable side of capitalism. The blue chip companies with their five-year plans, their 10-year plans, and they want a stable environment for investment. They don't want too many shocks. They don't want, you know, if there's a change of government, they don't want much to happen. And what they want is boring technocratic middle managers in charge.

who are not going to allow too much democracy, but are just going to keep everything very smooth and calm so that they can plan for the future. And then you have the warlord capitalists,

People are the sort of people who funded Brexit, people like Jeremy Hosking, people like Ian Hargreaves, people like Robert Mercer, for instance, in the United States. Many, many other people. Peter Thiel is a classic example of a warlord capitalist who want to rip everything up, tear it all down, and then build their economy out of the wreckage of this destroyed society. Society as we know it being destroyed.

In Steve Bannon's words, and Steve Bannon could be seen as the hitman, he want the deconstruction of the administrative state. I think he meant the destruction, because I don't think he's actually a French structuralist philosopher. But the deconstruction, the destruction of the administrative state is what they want. And Brexit was a civil war between those two arms of capital.

And what we see, though, they don't map onto this precisely, but by and large, corporate power is

is on the house-trained side, and warlord power is on the oligarch side. And out of corporate power, the oligarchs have arisen, because corporate power enabled the creation of oligarchic power, as the owners and the CEOs were able to scoop more and more profit and ensure that more of the total production of that company went into their pockets rather than the pockets of their workers, as a result of neoliberalism, that

that government would give them more and more contracts. You create this new class of oligarchs who then want a very different economy to what the old corporations wanted. As a result of that, they then start sponsoring. Instead of your boring, grey, technocratic middle managers, they want killer clowns.

They want people who will rip things up and at the same time distract and scapegoat. Yeah, hence the rise of Johnson, of Bolsonaro, of Trump, of Moody, of Duterte, of Orban, of Erdogan, everywhere around the world. We see warlord capitalism sponsoring killer clowns and it's very rapid change in the nature of politics. Well, yeah.

We've got lots of questions coming in, so I'm going to come to them in a minute. But we have to stop our part of the conversation by talking about this is such an embedded story. I mean, we are so embedded in the stuff that we get sold every time you turn on your phone, the targeting of advertising, the feeling that more stuff will make you happier, all the stuff that we kind of know. How do we change this incredibly embedded story? Sure. So...

It's easy to despair, right? And loads of people are throwing up their hands in despair. Probably quite a few in the audience right now say, well, you know, these huge forces, what can you do? But despair is actually irrational.

And the reason despair is irrational is that society, in common with everything else important in our lives, is a complex system. I mean, everything that's important to us, the human brain, the human body, the economy, the financial system, every ecosystem, the oceans, the atmosphere, the ice caps, they're all complex systems. And yet very few of us have ever taught the principles of complex systems at any point in our education. It's the biggest educational failure of all.

And one of the properties of complex systems is that they have their own self-created dynamics, which can damp down trends at certain points when those systems are resilient. When they lose that resilience, they can very rapidly push towards a tipping point, a change from one equilibrium state to another.

And society is a complex system with two equilibrium states. One is called impossible and the other is called inevitable.

From the point of view of anything we want to see happen, it's always impossible. Votes for women, you've got to be joking. They would never let that happen. Decolonisation, you must be off your rocker. Civil rights, end to apartheid, gay marriage, sexual liberation, end to smoking in public places, seatbelts. Any of these things are impossible. There's just a massive brick wall and you think that will never happen.

And then it happens and everyone says, well, that was inevitable, wasn't it? And what has happened? What is the thing that's taken place between those two states? How did that social tipping happen?

Did someone go around and persuade everyone in the country that this new thing needs to happen? Absolutely not. That has never happened in the history of humanity. That's not how change happens. We've got this Oxford Union belief in how change happens, that you use the power of your argument to persuade the person in the opposite corner that you're right and they're wrong. That is just not how social change ever, ever happens. What you do is

is a thing I've been told throughout my career not to do, which is to preach to the choir, what I'm doing right now. And who else is going to listen to you, right? You preach to the choir, but you try to make it a little bit bigger every time. You're pushing out those concentric circles. And the science is quite rudimentary so far. The results, there's just a few of them, but they point towards the tipping point being at about 25%.

that once that concentric circle has reached about 25%, suddenly something happens. It's not a definable something. It's not that everyone wakes up and says, oh, yeah, now I totally believe in equal marriage now, having thought it was going to be the end of civilization as we know it. That's absolutely not what happens. It's that people sense deep down, not in the conscious mind, that the status quo has changed.

Something has happened and we don't want to be left behind because reinforcing the tipping point, reinforcing the inherent properties of a complex system is the fact that we are, with the possible exception of the naked mole rat, the uber social mammal. We are absolutely connected much more strongly than any other mammals to our wider society.

And so when we sense that something is shifting, we don't want to be on the wrong side of that.

And even if, you know, you'd spent the last few years saying, yeah, equal marriage will be the ruin of us all, you'll start saying, well, yes, of course, I've always believed in equal marriage. I mean, I literally know people who do this. And don't contradict them. Let them believe that. That's fine. That's great, because that's how change actually happens. I mean, after the war, everyone became a member of the resistance. You go around any town in France, there's always a place de la résistance. There's never a place de la collaborateur.

People switch around to that side without ever actually consciously making that switch. That is how change happens. But we've got to understand that mechanism. The neoliberals understood it. There's a lot to learn from them. They worked out how change happens, and they went at it consciously. In fact, it could be the first movement in history which really worked it out

and consciously set out to apply those techniques that arose from the calculation of how society changes. We can do that too. So as I understand it, because I did this around an obesity project, when gay marriage was being contemplated in America, a bunch of rich gay people funded a five-year campaign

So that the message was not about equal rights or human rights or something that might jerk someone. It was about everyone has a right to a family life. And they pushed that through on that. And when it got to it, everyone went, yeah, that's okay. So I think about that quite a lot because I think, you know, all our environmental messages are healthy food. They all have values.

They actually have the equivalent of that simplicity. But do we need to be having our equivalent of those think tanks? Why do we have such a hard time floating that up into the atmosphere? High enough, 25% of the time.

I mean, that's exactly the sort of thing that the think tanks have been doing for neoliberalism. They've been thinking, how do we sell this? How do we make these outrageous, obscene ideas sound like political common sense? How do we make it sound like we would be missing out if we don't have this? How do we make it sound like this is normal and natural and acceptable and everything else is abnormal and unnatural? How do we do that? And they've been really, really clever at doing it because they've

There's so much money you could hire the brightest people. You know, the billionaires, the corporations, they poured extraordinary amounts of money into this neoliberal international and hired some really clever and devious people to work out how to do it. Now, we don't have that money, but we do have a lot of clever people.

And we have to mobilize those minds, but we have to be very clear what we're mobilizing around. And so what Peter and I have done, and I know we don't have time to go into this now, is to map out what a different society would look like. What would a society which actually works for everyone and meets our psychological needs as well as our physical needs might look like?

Okay, one last thing for me, and it's just an expression that you have in the book. You talk about we all need public luxury, and I thought –

such a nice, proper idea. Okay, so Brooke Kingsland says, what's the name of the counter-ideology political movement way of being to neoliberalism, since it seems that democracy in its current form isn't really, but she says suffice. I would wholly agree with that. Yes, well, democracy is a lovely idea, but we've never seen it yet. I mean, this thing we call democracy is the weakest and thinnest possible version

I'm very drawn to forms of participatory deliberative democracy, classic examples, for instance, in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, in Rojava, northeastern Syria. We've seen some really interesting innovation in Taiwan through the VTaiwan program, among many others.

In South Korea, in Barcelona, in Madrid, in Portugal, in Iceland, there's some really great examples. But that's just part of the story because there also has to be an economic democracy as well. And what we've formulated is something we call the politics of belonging. And it's all about building our democratic sphere and our economic sphere from the community, from the neighbourhood.

to create bridging communities rather than bonding communities. Because the great danger is, you know, everyone needs a sense of belonging. I mean, belonging is the universal human value. There's no one who doesn't need a sense of belonging. But if you can't find a positive sense of belonging, you can find some very dark ways of belonging instead. And the bonding community, which is creating a community amongst people who are as much as possible the same, you

You know, that creation is what drives fascism. It's what leads to some very nasty politics indeed. But the way to stop that from happening is not to stop the development of belonging. It's to create a far more positive belonging.

based on an open and inclusive belonging where everyone in a particular neighbourhood, in a particular community can feel they belong. And that means developing community resources, the commons,

It means developing a politics which allows everyone to belong, hence the deliberative participatory politics of which there's these fantastic examples. And it always works much better in practice than it does in theory because it transforms people. It turns us into democratic citizens. And it means paying attention to the extraordinary facets of

of our human nature, our good nature. We are primarily altruistic, empathetic, with a strong sense of wanting a better world, not just for ourselves, but for other people. There's a small number of people who aren't like that. We call them psychopaths. And our tragedy, the tragedy of humankind, is that we are a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. That's what we need to overthrow.

That's a good line. Jim says, have you any advice for opting out of neoliberalism? How? I think you've partly answered this, but I'd add a question to it as well, which is,

You talk as though this is dependent on locality, on feet on the ground and neighbours around the corner. Can you do this online? I'm adding to Jim's question. Both of those are good questions. I mean, you can certainly use online tools, but online is never enough.

You have to build it with feet on the ground, with face-to-face interaction. This remains the most powerful of all our media. And that human contact, that human aspect of

of connecting with your neighbours, of connecting, you know, maybe first of all with like-minded people in your community, but then pushing outwards, bringing more and more people into your concentric circle through community projects. So to give one example, right here, we've got this little WhatsApp group which was set up during the pandemic.

And it's where you sort of say, has anyone got a cup of sugar or does anyone want this old deck chair of mine or stuff like this? And it is just amazing how from there you start to build all sorts of other connections and relationships.

And what we need to do is to build those consciously. It's not just to say, well, let's see what happens, but to say, right, starting from this very simple, very easy point of a WhatsApp group where everyone's invited,

And there's certain rules. You've got to behave nicely to each other, you know, kindness at all times. If you've got a dispute, here's how we should resolve it, etc. And then what other social institutions can we build out of this? And the thing is about this, you don't need anyone's permission. You know, you don't need to wait for the centre to give you what you want. The centre will never give you what you want. Society is like an amoeba. It moves from the margins, not from the centre.

So you build it yourself and you can do it very, very rapidly because you're dealing with relatively small numbers of people.

But if we do it as a coherent programme with lots of people in their communities building that politics of belonging, say, what can we see here as a community resource that we can manage together? What can we build on here? How can we improve our decision making? How can we feed that decision making to local government and get them to respond to our needs, which we have identified here? You start to do that in a coherent way.

And suddenly you turn what is a very nice and lovely thing to have into a very powerful political force.

That's a very good answer. It sort of reminds me about how weirdly optimistic people were at the beginning of COVID. That it would be the breakthrough that would enable communities to rebound and to flourish. And somehow that got knocked down. It got stifled. I mean, it was quite extraordinary. I've never seen polls like it.

It was absolutely consistent across opinion polls. It was 89, 90, 91% of people did not want things to be the same after the pandemic. But you had a government which was absolutely determined to return to business as usual. We did not want business as usual. We discovered certain things in the pandemic. There were some really horrible aspects of it, certain things which were absolutely hideous for us. But we also discovered some things that we wanted.

and we weren't allowed to have them. I think that that's an extremely interesting thing that various people are saying, what are you going to write your next book on? And I'm going to chip in that you should write about that and how they destroyed that sense of community and optimism. And was it sort of deliberate? Rowan Lund asked, you've spoken methodologically about change, methodologically about change, but what should we be aiming for? I mean, again, is this about, I was with, yeah,

John Gummer, who used to chair the Climate Change Committee the other day, and he said something really interesting, which he's constantly in his role as the chair of the CCC. He was always going around the country giving talks and he'd go into halls in places with 200 or 300 people and he'd always say to them, how many of you have actually written to your MP to say you care about what happens to the climate? And he said invariably it would be three hands, maybe four hands.

And that we ourselves don't engage. And that I mean, I know from MPs that in fact, if they get 10 letters on the subject, there's quite a big red flag. And so is this because we think they're not going to do anything or because this whole neoliberal project has made people feel as though they can't?

The system itself is remote from us, and with no disrespect to any parliamentarian, particularly yourself, Parliament really does not belong to the people. I mean, look at the symbol of Parliament. You've got a crown at the top, unaccountable power.

Below it, a portcullis exclusion. On either side, chains, captivity. When a system tells you what it is, believe it. And I know there are wonderful people like yourself within Parliament trying to create a better country. And you do so wonderfully. I totally take my hat off to you, Rosie. You're fantastic. It was set up in such a way.

as to prevent a much deeper and richer democracy from happening. I mean, at every stage it's been the absolute minimum you can give away to prevent the system from breaking. If you bend a little bit, we'll avoid revolution. And so we have what is fundamentally an 18th century parliament, even in the era of the universal franchise.

We can't even get Labour to commit to proportional representation, for God's sake, let alone to some 21st century ideas. Proportional representation, they were lobbying for it in the 1860s. We haven't even got there yet because power didn't need to make that concession. And so there are so many fantastic democratic innovations today.

We could be applying right now, which gives people much more of a sense that they're being heard and they're being seen because actually they're being heard and being seen by their peers.

You know, there's a reason why take back control was such a powerful slogan. We really, really want to take back control. We want a much greater say in our own affairs. But we also, very large numbers of people, want to do that in a fair way. We want to do that in an egalitarian, a distributive way. And there are ways of doing that. You know, the participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre,

this city in southern Brazil, which was absolutely at the bottom of the Human Development Index, a total basket case run by the mafia, effectively. Partido dos Revalidores, the PT, the Workers' Party, comes into power in 1989 in Porto Alegre,

says we're going to do things completely differently. You, the people, are going to set the budget. And everyone says you're completely mad. I mean, what expertise do the people have? What do the people know? They're idiots. Most of them are illiterate. How on earth are they going to set a budget? And every year,

tens of thousands of people, and especially the poorest people in the city, and there was much higher representation amongst the poor than there was amongst the rich, came together to determine how the money was going to be spent. The mafia was wiped out almost overnight. Clientelism was wiped out overnight. Corruption wiped out overnight. And what you got instead was this very rapid ascent to number one on the Human Development Index within Brazil,

Massive decline in infant mortality and maternal mortality, massive increase in sanitation and clean water, public transport, primary health care, everything. I mean, it just utter transformation because the people were in charge. So they didn't need to appeal to anyone.

They didn't need to be listened to anymore. They were listening to each other. They were building it themselves. That's our power. That's what we can do. But our power is constantly removed from us. We are not allowed to exercise that extraordinary power to build a better society ourselves. So we must build it without permission.

Well, I like that very much. And I'm afraid we're nearly up to time. So I'm going to have to skip quite a lot of these wonderful questions. But I am going to go to Mary Fair's question, which I think is good for all of us. What is the one thing I can do tomorrow morning to make a difference? I mean, you've given us lots of ideas, but give us a few more before we have to say goodnight.

Sure. So first of all, recognise that you are a very powerful person, but only when you get together with other people. Buying a different brand of biscuits does nothing. You have no power as a consumer. The absolutely first thing you have to do is to recognise that you're a citizen. A citizen first. And it's only by combining with other people that you are able to create political power.

But you can combine locally. Obviously, keep the national in mind, keep the global in mind. It's absolutely essential. Because at the same time, and we've scarcely discussed it, we're heading towards the Earth system's horizon here. This horrifying point. The biggest question that we've ever been faced with is whether we can hit the social tipping points before we can hit the environmental tipping points.

But in a way, it doesn't matter what your particular issue is, you know, because we need loads of different people with their different issues. The important thing is to recognize you are part of something much bigger than yourselves and to recognize that effective change is an ecosystem. It needs lots of different people applying their different skills. You absolutely need some people to sit in the robe of placards. That's an essential part of it.

You need your radical flank, but you need your moderate flank as well. You need your engaged accountants and your engaged lawyers and your engaged administrators and all the other skills that society has can be bent to this task. And you, I mean, I don't know what skills the questioner has, but she might say, actually, I'm really good at this, but I've been using it entirely for this purpose.

Think of how you can use it for the purpose of building a politics of belonging within your own community. Thank you for that. It makes me think of, you know, starting Spare Rib all those years ago. And that was absolutely about the politics of belonging.

It was done because we had sisterhood. We didn't argue. We were in the same river. I always think of it as a metaphor. We were rowing the same boat. You never had arguments because you knew where you were going. And it couldn't have happened without sisterhood. It just would not have happened.

the same is true of where we are now in terms of both the environment, which I simply can't believe we've been talking for an hour and we haven't discussed the environment. But I think probably all the people who are on this call know the kind of levels of the crisis we have. And personally, I'm very pleased to see Kamala Harris leaping forward at the moment. It gives me some, I've seen her environmental records are really great.

Let us hope. George, thank you so much. Listen, this is a fantastic book. It's 162 absolutely packed pages and short chapters. Each one is a gem of thought and ideas. And I've still got another nine pages of notes of things to ask you. But for the meantime, enjoy the evening in Totnes. Thank you all very, very much for coming. And we'll see you very soon. Take care. Bye bye. Thanks so much, Rosie. Thanks, everyone.