Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #5 "Progress is inevitable" with George Monbiot

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Bad Idea #5 "Progress is inevitable" with George Monbiot · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

0:00
There's this paradox of politics where the right talks constantly
0:03
about individualism, but it moves as a herd, its value of
0:07
belonging. It is universal right across the
0:10
political spectrum. I came to the conclusion that
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what we've got to do is to develop a politics of belonging,
0:17
a positive, inclusive, progressive politics of
0:20
belonging. I really don't care whose ideas
0:23
come out on top, as long as we have this positive propositional
0:26
narrative of the different world we want to see which is better
0:30
than the current one. If we fail to produce a vision
0:34
while our opponents are producing a vision, we will
0:38
lose. Welcome to saving the world from
0:42
bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus and I've had a
0:45
few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
0:48
time to destroy GMO crops and I also posed nuclear power.
0:51
But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
0:54
Oops. I've learned the hard way that
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none of us are right all the time.
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So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
1:00
often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
1:03
it right. Hello, George, welcome to the
1:07
podcast. It's fantastic to have you.
1:09
Obviously, I should probably tell our listeners and viewers
1:11
that we've all met do we've known each other for a long time
1:14
already. I think it's probably going on
1:16
20-30 years or something. But in fact, I saw you
1:20
introduced recently that maybe introduce yourself and you said
1:23
that you'd been an environmental activist and journalist for 39
1:27
years already. So how's, how's it going?
1:30
Are you changing the world successfully?
1:32
It's going to be 40 years in September and I think it's fair
1:36
to say that I have achieved the sum total of fuck all.
1:42
Are we going to have to put a little E next to this podcast
1:44
episode now? Everything I've sought to
1:49
achieve, and you'd probably say the same, same for yourself, has
1:53
just all turned to shit as particularly in the last last
1:57
couple of months with with Trump take taking power again.
2:02
But it's like it's a tragic scene, you know, as we see all
2:06
the things we might have hoped for, all the things we fought
2:08
for, being torn to pieces. We had Hannah Ritchie on a
2:13
couple of episodes ago and her main message was that the world
2:17
is not as bad as people often tend to think if you look at the
2:19
long term data. So are you talking about long
2:22
term trends and the world turning to shit or you just is
2:25
this something which is, you know, really, really urgent
2:27
issues which just have gone really downhill in the last few
2:31
months? Well, it's a bit of everything.
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And I think there is a kind of professional optimism we need to
2:35
be wary of. I mean, you can project long
2:41
term data forward, but that assumes a stable and benign and
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broadly liberal progressive political settlement.
2:49
What we now see is that political systems can change
2:54
with lightning speed towards something completely different.
2:58
And if there's one consistent feature of Trumpism, it's a war
3:03
against the natural world and against anyone outside a gilded
3:09
circle, which is basically people who are prepared to fawn
3:12
and flatter Trump. And I feel that we're in a very
3:20
dangerous place indeed, that all those supposedly assured trends
3:27
of increasing peace, increasing prosperity, better green
3:31
technologies and things, all those are now at dire risk if
3:35
they haven't been nixed already. So the format of this podcast is
3:40
saving the world from bad ideas. And I think we have you down to
3:43
save the world from the bad idea that we can, you know, not talk
3:48
about power when we're fighting our environmental campaigns.
3:51
So give us give us a quick, a quick summary of what, why this
3:55
is your your main issue. Well, it's not my main issue,
3:58
but it's an interesting one to talk about the sorry, I don't
4:03
mean to diss the program, but it is definitely worth discussing.
4:09
It's very important because there is a sort of technological
4:12
determinism among some people, including some people who may be
4:18
slightly adjacent to yourself, who not, not you, but I've had
4:24
some of your associates who who tend to believe that all we need
4:28
to do is fix the technologies and everything else will follow
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and be fine. And absolutely, technological
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change is a crucial, crucial component to change.
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And, you know, there are plenty of people on the other side who
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deride any technological change as a techno fix.
4:46
And a lot of the time you say, well, what are the kind of fix
4:49
are you proposing? You know, so that's a techno fix
4:52
for nuclear waste, you say, right.
4:54
So have you got a non-technical solution for nuclear waste?
4:58
However, you know, there is a techno fixed mentality which
5:02
says that all we need to do is to roll out renewables or some
5:07
other green technology and everything is sorted, which is
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just as fallacious. You know, the, the, the, there's
5:14
a sort of mirror effect going on where there's one side which
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says technology isn't and can never be part of the solution,
5:21
and another side which says technology is the whole
5:24
solution. And we've all come across
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people, I think on, on, on both sides of that divide.
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Unless you address the problem of power, which is the great
5:36
political problem, which has to be addressed every single day in
5:41
different ways depending on the context.
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Unless you address that problem, all your wonderful new
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technologies, important as they may be in the right context,
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without that supporting environment, become useless.
5:58
So, for instance, we now have all the technologies we might
6:02
require to create a complete energy transition, everything
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from solar panels to small modular reactors, for example.
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But if you don't have supportive politics, they can be stalled,
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frozen, nixed by various administrations, as we're seeing
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right now in the United States. For example, Trump has declared
6:28
an energy emergency. So you might think he'd say, oh,
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great, let's have let's have lots, lots of new renewable,
6:34
renewable energy. But no, it's the renewable
6:38
energy will be frozen so that we can return to developing fossil
6:43
fuel sources and and you have constantly to challenge the
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political and economic context in which technologies may or may
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not be applied. And is that to make sure that
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the transition actually works? I mean, I guess for me, the
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fundamental question is whether it's possible to get a clean
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energy transition and to address the broader ecological crisis
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within the prevailing capitalist economic system or not.
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And I've heard you assert that it's not.
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And I'm, I'm never quite sure what to think about this because
7:22
I'm kind of a pragmatist. I think, well, if we just built
7:24
enough nuclear power stations, we'd all be fine.
7:26
So I'm kind of amenable to that because it seems like the
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quickest and simplest way to fix what is a very urgent problem.
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Whereas if you have to fix, you have to change the entire
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economic system, then it's kind of not going to happen.
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And we're going to get a great, you know, very high rates of
7:38
climate change. So give me some guidance here.
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Well, the first thing to say is that systems are much easier to
7:45
change than most people will tell you.
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In all my working life now and, and as I say 40 years in
7:51
September, I've been told we don't have time to change the
7:53
system. All we can hope for is tweaking
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the existing system. A little bit of incremental
7:59
change and eventually this will add up to the change that we
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want to see. Well, it doesn't as as we're
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seeing, because while we are tweaking the system, other
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forces are changing the system. And throughout these 40 years,
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I've watched how neoliberalism has radically changed the
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political and economic system and and has made it much, much
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harder to achieve the sort of environmental change that we
8:25
want to see. And now, just within a handful
8:29
of years, we've seen how the new forces of the radical right, far
8:34
right fascists are once again overthrowing the system and
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creating a new political system. These things can be done very
8:43
swiftly and very effectively and it seems comprehensively and and
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we've responded to this with timidity.
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In fact, if you if you push a lot of environmental groups or
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indeed most other groups, particularly the large non
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governmental organisations and you say to them what is your
9:04
theory of change? In my experience, most of them
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look at you blankly and they say, oh, a theory of change.
9:12
Yes. Well, there's an interesting
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one. Yeah.
9:14
No, it's really important. Yeah.
9:16
Theory. OK, so what's your theory of
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change? Well, well, you know, if we
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carry on doing this and doing that and stuff, you know,
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eventually we'll get that it's snowball rolling, then it'll
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happen. He says, sorry, is that a theory
9:30
of change? You know, their theory of change
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basically is incrementalism. Incrementalism fails because
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other people are pursuing systemic change.
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It will always be rolled back by more ambitious, braver people
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who are prepared to take huge steps, even if those are steps
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over the abyss, as we're seeing at the moment.
9:50
And unless we are prepared to take huge, bold steps, we will
9:54
always be worsted in this. So when we accommodate to the
9:57
system and say, oh, it's much easier just to stick with the
10:02
existing system and to try to tweak it a little bit as as
10:06
you're just proposing, that's effectively an admission of
10:09
defeat. We are going to lose if if, if
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we if we attempt that approach. So let's look at another aspect
10:18
of your question, which is this thing sort of fitting in within
10:21
capitalism. I've had loads of debates about
10:25
capitalism and what I very often discover is that the person I'm
10:30
debating with doesn't actually know what capitalism is.
10:33
And very often they conflate capitalism with commerce.
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Now commerce is a very ancient thing.
10:40
We've been doing commerce, buying and selling stuff for
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thousands of years in various societies.
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But capitalism I see as as as a much more modern economic
10:52
system, one which can operate entirely separate from commerce,
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just as commerce can operate entirely separate from
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capitalism. The two things have become
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intertwined and entangled, but that doesn't mean that they are
11:06
the same thing. They are very much not the same
11:09
thing in in fact, in some respects they're opposites.
11:13
Now following the the work of the very interesting geographer
11:18
Jason Moore, I think that there is a very specific origin to
11:25
capitalism, and that's the island of Madeira in in roughly
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1450. Now the anthropologist Carl
11:33
Paleni defines capitalism, I think very successfully, as an
11:37
economic system in which the three crucial economic pillars,
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land, labour and money, have been commoditized, in other
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words, have been stripped of their social and historic
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meaning and exist purely as instruments.
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And it's arguable, following Jason Moore, that the the first
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occasion on which this happened was on the island of Madeira.
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It had been discovered by the Portuguese in 1420.
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It was a rare example of a genuinely uninhabited landmass.
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A small island way out in the Atlantic, named after the thing
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which was impossible to miss. The the trees, the the the wood,
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the Madeira which which covered the island.
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And for a few years they started doing what they had done on the
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Portuguese mainland. Cut down some trees useful for
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making ships, run a few pigs and cattle on the land.
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And then someone realised that it was a good place for growing
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sugar. And then they realised and ran,
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compressing this obviously. But they they realised 3 very
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important things. First off, that no one there was
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stopping them from using the land exactly how they wanted
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because there was no one else there.
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They could use the land as a blank slate.
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They could say, you know, whatever this land is best at,
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we can use it for that purpose. You didn't have to ask anyone's
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permission. You didn't have to negotiate
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with any society. You didn't have to be dominated
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by any historic tradition because there were none there.
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The land could be completely commoditized and when they
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realised that this was good land for sugar, they realised they
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would need some labour for growing that sugar.
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So they could have hired some people, they could have extended
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the broadly surf based system in in Portugal.
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But some bright spot realised we don't have to do that.
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We could instead seek purely commoditised labour, which is
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slavery, and slavery is a form of labour which is completely
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stripped of humanity, stripped of society, stripped of history.
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The humanity of the slaves is not recognised.
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So it's just they are just units of labour.
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They are pure instruments. And then they said, right, where
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are we going to get the money for this from?
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And in on the mainland, you would have to go to the Lord of
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the Manor and you might be charged extortionate rates of
14:05
interest because they had a monopoly on local, local money
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lending. Or, or you might go to some of
14:10
the very few people who were allowed to practice usury by 1
14:14
means or another. But again, there was very
14:15
monopolistic relations and you would have to pay a lot.
14:19
But these people could go to wherever the cheapest source of
14:21
money was because they weren't governed by those same
14:25
relations. So they went to Flanders and
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went to Geneva and got cheap money.
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And the money again was just an instrument.
14:31
It wasn't surrounded by those social relations.
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And the result of this first ever arguably experiment in
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capitalism, where all three pillars of the economy were
14:43
commoditized, was a massive boom in production.
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It was super productive because there were no breaks on the
14:50
system. You could do whatever the hell
14:52
you liked and very rapidly this tiny island became the major
14:57
source of sugar exports worldwide.
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Pretty extraordinary really. And and this very productive
15:04
system that discovered where you can milk the money, you could
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milk the labour, you can milk the land however you want it.
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But what happened with equal speed was that it peaked and
15:15
then crashed, and sugar production fell by roughly 80%
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in the 20 years following the peak.
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And the reason for that was that this highly efficient system ran
15:27
out of Madeira. Madeira ran out of Madeira, and
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you need about 60kg of wood to refine a kilogram sugar in the
15:35
boilers. The slaves had to go further and
15:37
further afield to find this wood.
15:39
So the productivity of labour collapsed.
15:41
And then they did what capitalism has gone on to do
15:44
ever since. Having exhausted that commodity,
15:48
they quit and they moved the whole operation onto Santa May,
15:52
another recently discovered island in the Atlantic.
15:55
All this was before Columbus had reached the Americas.
15:59
But when Santa May was exhausted, suddenly they had a
16:03
whole new frontier to exploit. And they moved up the coast of
16:06
Brazil, burning through the coastal forests, enslaving the
16:10
the indigenous people, destroying whole societies until
16:15
they exhausted those opportunities and moved in into
16:18
the Caribbean, by which time they've been joined by the
16:21
English, the Spanish, the Dutch, and, and, and many others.
16:25
And, and so this is capitalism. And what it does is to boom,
16:29
bust, quit it. It's constantly developing and
16:33
destroying new frontiers. It seizes common property
16:39
through violence or the threat of violence and turns it into
16:43
private property. It's not at all the same com as
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commerce. There isn't.
16:47
There was no commerce involved in the production of that sugar
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because there was no one there to trade with.
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There is no commerce involved in the slave plantations in the
16:57
Caribbean. I'm sure once you produce the
17:00
sugar, then you might trade it for other things.
17:03
But in the production of the sugar there was no commerce.
17:06
And, and so, you know, we have this sort of constant debate
17:10
about capitalism without defining what it is we're
17:12
talking about. And you hear people very often
17:15
saying, oh, it's easier to imagine the end of the world
17:17
than the end of capitalism. Well, of of course it is.
17:21
If you don't know what capitalism is, if you can't
17:23
imagine capitalism in the 1st, 1st place, how Can you imagine
17:27
the end of capitalism? And, and this is a a sort of
17:30
classically lazy formula of, of being just sort of where you
17:34
admit to the limitation of your moral imagination and don't seek
17:39
to overcome that limitation. So are you conflating, sorry,
17:44
are you conflating capitalism with colonialism though in that
17:48
in that example, because. Capitalism is built on colonial
17:51
looting. This is why it's a novel system,
17:53
which we we because you couldn't create that complete
17:57
commoditization until you had a colonial frontier on on, on
18:03
which you could strip away all prior relations and rights.
18:07
And then that's what colonialists do, whereas at home
18:11
it's much, much harder to do that.
18:13
Of course, once capitalism became well established, you
18:15
could then bring it home and, and we've seen the horrendous
18:19
impacts of that. But but this you know, the idea
18:23
that this is somehow the same system as as commerce is, is
18:28
woefully mistaken. Now, I hear you, but you know,
18:32
if, if that were as true as you assert, we'd all be slaves
18:37
living in a kind of capitalist North Korea.
18:39
I mean, the, the, the world has got, you know, there's been a
18:42
development miracle. Extreme poverty levels have
18:44
plummeted, infant mortality is plummeted.
18:46
We've had a medical revolution, we've had the welfare state.
18:50
I mean, people are better off in all sorts of very measurable
18:54
ways, obviously at the expense of the natural world to a, to a
18:58
very substantial extent, hence the ecological and climate
19:01
crises. But the idea that you seem to be
19:04
stating that that somehow capitalism has been this
19:08
uniquely negative experience for humanity, that seems to me to be
19:12
not quite right. Well, what we've seen is a vast
19:14
mobilisation on natural wealth and it's transformation into
19:18
liquid wealth. And much as a tiny oligarchy
19:22
class might try to keep all that to themselves, they have,
19:26
they're unable to do so. And some of that wealth has
19:29
seeped out into why? Well, you could say trickle
19:34
down, but but it's, you know, you know, people have managed to
19:37
hold on to some of it before it all goes into the pockets of the
19:41
very few. And what we've seen in in many
19:45
countries around the world is democratisation movement.
19:48
So I won't say democracy. I don't think we've ever
19:50
experienced democracy. Country like ours, the United
19:53
Kingdom is about 5% democratic. We have elections once every
19:57
five years and in between those elections.
20:00
Politicians can do whatever the hell they can get through
20:02
parliament without further reference to the people.
20:05
It, it, it's a it, it's a centralised hierarchical system
20:09
with some faint democratic features.
20:12
That's that's about the best that can be said for it.
20:15
But those faint democratic features can be quite important
20:19
and they can secure for people a small share of that much larger
20:26
cake than than there was before. A cake, incidentally, which you
20:30
cannot keep growing because eventually you, you, you
20:33
mobilise so much natural wealth that there's very little left to
20:36
mobilise. And the remaining resources can
20:39
be extracted only with much greater energy and much greater
20:42
difficulty and expense. But we what what we see is that
20:48
democratisation advocacy, the ability of very large numbers of
20:53
people to get together, largely because they were compressed
20:56
together into an industrial workforce to serve capitalism.
21:00
That, as Marx and Engels predicted, has backfired on
21:04
capitalism to some extent. Not nearly the extent to which
21:08
they predicted that the the places where it took off most
21:11
were in feudal rather than entirely capitalist societies.
21:15
However, we that that democratisation, that that
21:22
voting is the problem that capital has been trying to solve
21:27
ever since it it reared its head.
21:30
And because when people are allowed to vote, they demand all
21:34
sorts of outrageous things which capital doesn't want to give
21:37
them, like a share of the wealth.
21:38
In other words, better wages for the labour which has been seized
21:43
by others and is being exploited by others, shorter working
21:47
hours, not having their arms torn off by machinery, decent
21:52
housing, clean air, clean rivers, public services.
21:57
This is utterly unreasonable demands which of course capital
22:00
does not want to to to concede. And so it has used various means
22:06
over the years to try to resist that.
22:09
And it found a highly effective means in the form of fascism,
22:13
which was backed by extremely rich people and was a highly
22:18
effective means of of crushing democratic movements of of
22:23
shutting down the democratic voice and ensuring that far more
22:28
of the spoils went to the oligarchs.
22:32
That ran into certain difficulties in 1945.
22:35
But just in the nick of time, neoliberalism came along.
22:39
First formulated clearly in 1944 in the books of Friedrich Hayek,
22:45
The Road to Serfdom lived with von Mises bureaucracy.
22:49
And while the ideas of neoliberalism were widely
22:53
considered outrageous by by by most people, for some of the
22:57
richest people on earth and the richest corporations on earth,
23:01
they were considered manna from heaven and they poured money
23:04
into an international neoliberal network.
23:08
It was a bit, it was a bit ironic.
23:09
I was thought that neoliberalism was first.
23:11
I mean, so Hayek's, Friedrich Hayek's argument was that the
23:15
road to serfdom was essentially the state bureaucracy, you know,
23:18
that. So any kind of welfare state
23:20
would lead to, you know, to to kind of communism essentially.
23:24
But the neoliberal experiment was first begun, as I understand
23:28
it, in in Pinochet's Chile and entirely dictatorial violence
23:32
system. I mean, that seems to be a bit
23:33
of a contradiction. Yeah, it was a classic slippery
23:37
slope fallacy. You know, if we have a, if we
23:39
have a welfare state, if we have public services, if you have any
23:43
concern shown by a government for its people, that will lead
23:46
inevitably to totalitarianism. It'll lead to Stalin.
23:49
It'll lead to, that was basically what Hayek was saying.
23:53
That was his road to serfdom. And that's, you know, a well
23:56
recognised fallacy. A philosopher will tell you the
24:00
slippery slope argument is, is is basically a false argument.
24:05
A thing should be judged by what it is, not by whether it might
24:10
turn into something completely different.
24:13
And and so and so it was, you know, I'm not saying that it was
24:18
a cynical philosophy because I think Hayek and and von Mises
24:22
did believe in what they were saying.
24:25
It quickly turned into one. And by the time Hayek published
24:28
the Constitutional Liberty in 1960, this movement which he was
24:34
heavily involved in them, starting with the Montpelier in
24:36
society and later with of a whole network of so-called think
24:41
tanks and academic departments and political advisers and
24:44
journalists around the world, lavishly funded by some of the
24:47
world's richest people and corporations.
24:51
The Constitution Liberty in 1960 was just a peon of praise to the
24:56
ultra rich. These are wonderful people.
24:58
We, whatever the ultra rich say or do, we should accept that
25:03
because they are social pioneers, they blaze the trail
25:07
which the rest of us should follow.
25:08
And it doesn't matter how they made their money, whether they
25:12
inherited it, whether they stole it, They are the good people.
25:15
You can tell they're the good people because they've got the
25:17
money. And you can tell who the bad
25:19
people are because they haven't got the money.
25:21
And that is a natural order. And anything which interferes
25:24
with the discovery of that natural order, such as tax, such
25:28
as regulation, such as public spending, such as trade unions,
25:34
such as protesters, such as politics itself should be swept
25:38
out of the way and issues should be decided through economic
25:43
power. I mean, what what what the
25:45
neoliberals call it is the free market.
25:48
But it's exactly the opposite of the free market.
25:50
You know, they're not talking about commerce.
25:52
They're talking about the raw power of capital, the economic
25:56
power of the rich to crush the poor.
25:58
And so that became the core philosophy of the very rich.
26:05
It was funded and funded and and projected and projected until it
26:08
became the hegemonic ideology of our times.
26:14
And even when it collapsed spectacularly in 2008, it just
26:18
picked itself up and kept walking.
26:21
But now we're seeing that system leading to another, leading to a
26:26
further political system change, because what neoliberalism does
26:32
is to cause mass political disillusionment because it says
26:35
governments are not here to solve your problems.
26:38
Government shouldn't solve your problems.
26:41
Anyone who intervenes in in in public life is basically
26:46
illegitimate. And because there's been a broad
26:49
political consensus formed around that, you know, between
26:54
Keir Starmer and the Tories here in the UK, to give one example,
26:58
but between Republicans and Democrats and you know, in most,
27:01
most rich nations, there's been a political neoliberal
27:04
consensus. Then people feel that that
27:07
government is a waste of time in it's current form, that politics
27:11
is not going to solve their problems.
27:13
A pox on all their houses. They're all useless.
27:16
They're all as bad as each other.
27:17
Here's this colourful character coming along saying I stand
27:21
outside of all this. I'm going to RIP it all down on
27:24
your behalf. I'm going to do things
27:26
differently. I speak for the common man and
27:28
woman, largely the common man, and against these political
27:33
elites. So go with me.
27:35
And people say, well, why not? What have I got to lose?
27:38
Yeah, I mean, what? What?
27:40
There's so much to talk about here, but what's I find striking
27:44
really is how a lot of the demands that the left were
27:48
making back in, I don't know, 10 or 20 years ago, particularly
27:51
against globalism. I mean, I remember the battle,
27:55
battle for Seattle, wasn't it, against the WTO?
27:59
And here you've got the Trump administration bringing in
28:02
tariffs and essentially destroying the international
28:05
free trading system. And obviously in a different way
28:08
from the the way that the anti globalization movement was
28:12
probably asking for back a decade or two ago.
28:15
But, you know, they're still smashing a system of global
28:19
institutions, which has, you know, essentially been around
28:22
since 1945 in different forms. And I'm not sure quite well, I'm
28:27
not quite sure whose interests are serving or why they're doing
28:30
this, but they seem to have been voted into power by working
28:32
class people who are voting for them for cultural reasons,
28:36
partly that they feel that the sort of liberal elite, the woke,
28:40
the whole woke thing fits into this as well.
28:42
Of course, isn't, you know, is looking down on them and is all
28:45
very Snooty. And so let's vote for a crazy
28:49
outsider, like a kind of crazy clown.
28:51
I think you've said, like Trump or Bolsonaro or whoever these
28:55
people are. Yeah, who?
28:56
Who are going to smash the system because the system is so
28:59
fundamentally rotten and it might as well be destroyed.
29:01
Sure. So, so the far right is always
29:04
opportunistic. It's ideologically incoherent.
29:07
It always has been. You know, it's not, it's not
29:10
socialist, it's not communist, it's not purely capitalist.
29:14
It's not this. That is whatever works, you
29:17
know, because basically we're talking about highly
29:20
unscrupulous people. And so they'll just seize on
29:23
anything which will serve their purposes.
29:25
Politics is entirely instrumental to them.
29:28
I mean, for many politicians, politics is instrumental, but
29:32
you know, hear any pretence of any higher ideal.
29:35
But pure instrumental seizure of power has has been dropped.
29:41
And so when they can use, for instance, tariffs and trade wars
29:45
as a means of distracting people from from the real source of
29:50
their problems, which is the extreme concentration of
29:53
political and economic power and the destruction of, of, of, of
29:57
their conditions of life, well, trade wars will do fine.
30:00
So will scapegoating immigrants. That will also do fine.
30:03
So will Islamophobia. That's another good run.
30:06
Oh, women. Yeah, let's, let's have a war on
30:08
women because, yeah, our followers don't like women very
30:11
much. How about disabled people?
30:14
How about trans people, gay people, whatever.
30:16
You know, it's, there's always something else to point to.
30:19
And if you can generate conflict and if you can show
30:23
performatively that you are beating someone or something up,
30:27
including other countries through a trade war or through a
30:31
real war, then then that that will always work well for you.
30:36
If if you're that kind of politician and you know, the
30:39
great discovery of the conflict entrepreneurs and it's something
30:42
which people have kept on rediscovering for about 3000
30:46
years, is that it doesn't matter if people's conditions of life
30:51
are deteriorating. If you can show that someone
30:54
else is suffering worse than they are.
30:56
So, so you know, you're the people who might have voted you
31:00
in, some of whom will be working class people whose, whose
31:06
conditions of life have been getting worse, have been getting
31:09
a smaller share of, of that bigger capitalist cake.
31:13
And, and, and seeing public services deteriorating, seeing
31:17
themselves become less economically secure as time has
31:20
gone by, seeing it becoming harder and harder to get a
31:24
decent home, seeing, seeing good jobs disappearing, all of these
31:30
things going on, even though you're going to do all that and
31:34
worse, you're going to make that situation much, much worse.
31:38
They'll vote for you because you're saying I'm going to make
31:40
these people really suffer. And by comparison, you're going
31:44
to be doing great. So I'm going to throw these
31:47
immigrants into Guantanamo Bay and we're going to see them
31:50
suffer. And and then and, and what
31:54
people tend to do, and it's a very common and long standing
31:57
human weakness is, is, is to compare themselves to some
32:02
designated group and, and feel that things have improved for
32:07
them because things have got much worse for that designated
32:11
group. Right.
32:12
I mean, another fallacy I think is that things can't get, can't
32:15
get any worse. Things can always get worse and
32:18
they can get much, much worse as well.
32:20
And that's something that people, I guess, just learn over
32:23
and over again through history. And I, I hear what you're saying
32:26
about capitalism and the, the sort of the inequalities and the
32:29
exploitative nature of that system.
32:32
But what I have to say, what I really worry about is
32:34
authoritarianism and the, you know, we could be moving into a
32:38
world where the fully authoritarian United States, you
32:43
know, there's obviously authoritarian movements on the
32:45
far right close to power or, or in power in in Europe as well.
32:50
I don't have to reel off the list of them.
32:52
But this is a world presumably where we'll have Jack roots
32:56
again and people being sent to gulags and the end of political
33:00
freedoms that we've known for for decades now, and potentially
33:04
a world with a return to to aggressive, of course, as well
33:07
of conquest. I mean, yeah.
33:10
I've been slowly reconciling myself to the fact that I'll
33:12
probably end up getting executed.
33:18
Yeah. I mean, we, we, we are in in a
33:22
fantastically dangerous situation.
33:24
And and it's hard to see what's going to stop it right now.
33:27
I mean, you know, I can propose ideas and I will continue to
33:30
propose ideas and, and suggest forms of political organization.
33:34
But you know, it's, it's not just that they're using all the
33:38
traditional tools and and that, you know, we, it's a sort of
33:41
million stand behind me thing where, you know, there's,
33:44
there's all the richest people in the world are lining up
33:47
behind authoritarians now and funding them and, and amplifying
33:53
their voice and their power. But it's, they have this new
33:56
tool called social media, which is highly effective at
34:00
penetrating our minds, at reaching into the deep core of
34:03
the self and getting us to see things the way they want us to
34:08
see them, much more effective than the legacy media.
34:12
And, and we've seen how, you know, with with through means
34:17
that we cannot detect, like tweaking Alka, tweaking the
34:22
algorithms, for example, they can ensure that there are
34:26
certain messages we hear again and again and other messages,
34:30
countervailing messages we hear, hardly hear at all.
34:33
And, and we hear them whether or not we buy a newspaper or watch
34:39
TV, they're just there. They're the ambient noise of our
34:42
lives. And, you know, we're going to
34:46
have to be very smart and very clever and very innovative if
34:50
we're going to combat these forces because authoritarianism
34:54
is now, we were talking earlier about technology.
34:57
You know it is empowered by new technologies which can work
35:02
devastatingly to to to their chosen ends.
35:07
Yes, I mean, they're they're just so effective.
35:09
I was just scrolling on TikTok. You get, you know, I found my
35:12
attention span stand for about 15 seconds now and you know, and
35:16
the algorithms are, are so clever at finding what it is
35:19
they think might pique your interest.
35:22
Obviously they're just responding to the feedback of
35:23
you, your interaction with the screen.
35:25
But everyone sees a different one.
35:26
So the days where we all bought the same newspapers or, you
35:29
know, watched the same TVI haven't bought a newspaper or
35:31
watched normal live TV for, for for years now.
35:35
So it's a, you know, it's a social media dominated sort of
35:40
information ecosystem really. And unless you can play that
35:44
game and play it effectively, you're not going to get your
35:46
message out at all. But it's difficult to trust in
35:49
how that can be the case when the social media algorithms are
35:53
controlled by the oligarchs, the, you know, the, the Musks
35:56
and, and, and the Zuckerbergs who of course are, are running
35:59
the system in their own interest and in the interest now of the,
36:03
these this new oligarchic regime which seems to be in power in
36:07
Washington. Yeah.
36:08
I mean, I think, you know, we, we can discover means of
36:13
fighting these, this new authoritarianism, but we haven't
36:18
discovered those means yet, not the effective ones.
36:21
And and I think what I fear more than anything is, is that the
36:27
opposition remains weak and timid when it needs to be very
36:34
strong and very determined. So for instance, come back to
36:38
our own country, the, the, the UK.
36:41
It's almost as if the current government is rolling out the
36:44
red carpet for the far right because it it's telling us, Oh
36:48
no, you can't have good things. We're going to have to continue
36:52
austerity. We can't fund public services
36:54
properly. It's going to be cuts, cuts,
36:56
cuts because there isn't enough money.
37:00
You know, Clement Attlee never worried about that.
37:02
He just spent the bloody money. And he knew that if he spent the
37:05
money, that would generate money.
37:07
And it would, you know, by spending into public services,
37:10
you, you employ more people and money gets circulated back into
37:15
the economy. But this lot is are still locked
37:18
into neoliberal orthodoxy. Trump doesn't care about
37:22
neoliberal orthodoxy. He's he's abandoned all that.
37:24
He's jettisoned that. That's fine.
37:26
I mean, he'll apply some some aspects of it to the NTH degree,
37:30
but other aspects, you know, to hell with it.
37:32
We'll have a trade war. Why not?
37:34
Whoa. But you know this, this slot,
37:37
those who are supposed to oppose that on our behalf, they're
37:40
completely locked into this rigid way of, of thinking which
37:45
has delivered unfailingly delivered right wing
37:49
authoritarian parties to power. Because there's this lovely
37:55
definition by Professor Will Davis of neoliberalism.
37:59
Neoliberalism is the disillusionment of politics by
38:02
economics. It is a disillusionment machine.
38:05
It says politics cannot solve real problems, should not solve
38:09
real problems, will not solve your problems.
38:10
And when you have governments like Keir Starmer, it's like to
38:14
a lesser extent, Joe Biden's who are saying, yeah, yeah, yeah.
38:18
We buy that. We're not actually here to
38:20
change the system. We're not here to fix things.
38:22
We're not here to transform your lives.
38:24
We give you little bits crumbs, but we're not going.
38:28
You won't notice any really big difference then.
38:32
Then that's just an open invitation to be usurped by the
38:36
far right. And it's even worse when they
38:40
then try to steal the clothes of the far right and say, oh, a lot
38:43
of people are voting for the far right, therefore we should be
38:46
more like the far right. Let's have a really nasty
38:48
immigration policy. And all that does is to
38:51
legitimize far right positions to say, yeah, yeah, there's
38:54
there's Trump and Farage and and they're like, they've got a
38:57
point. Yeah, absolutely.
38:58
You know, if even Labour or the Democrats are saying this, then
39:01
then they must be right. So let's vote for them.
39:04
You know, how many times do we have to learn this lesson?
39:07
How many times do governments need to make the same mistakes?
39:10
After Italy, after Hungary, after Austria, after the
39:14
Netherlands, after Sweden, after Finland, all these unlikely
39:18
places, after Germany, after France?
39:21
You know where we see this far right resurgence and, and, and
39:25
governments respond to it by pandering to the far right.
39:28
And lo and behold, the far right does even better.
39:30
How many times do we have to keep making that mistake?
39:34
So, so why is it so difficult to advance radicalism from the left
39:39
in that case? I mean, you know, Trump is
39:42
radical. He's completely reversed decades
39:44
of U.S. policy on on Russia, let's say, and everyone's just
39:47
had to go along with it. And it's suddenly a new reality.
39:50
I mean, I guess Bernie Sanders tried it again, looking at the
39:54
US and that didn't. That didn't succeed.
39:56
What? Why?
39:57
Why? Why not?
39:58
And it didn't succeed partly because he was crushed by the
40:00
Democratic Party. Just just as, you know, here in
40:03
the UK, Jeremy Corbyn was massively undermined by his own
40:06
party. I mean, there were lots of other
40:08
factors as well. You know, there's no single
40:10
issue. But but the the these party
40:15
establishments cannot tolerate that sort of radical left
40:19
challenge. Even though it could be the only
40:21
thing that will ever rescue them, you know to from complete
40:26
oblivion. But they do tend.
40:28
To win elections. I mean, I don't know whether
40:29
Bernie Sanders would would have beaten Trump.
40:31
We'll we'll never know that. But Jeremy Corbyn was tried and
40:34
failed very badly at the ballot box.
40:36
Well, he he very nearly won in 2017, he lost very badly in
40:39
2019, but by then the whole project had completely fallen
40:44
apart. And that was partly because of
40:47
in the internal collapse of the Labour Party.
40:49
And and I was quite closely involved because I I spent a
40:55
year writing a report for Corbyn called Land for the Many.
40:59
What AII was one of six authors looking at how you could have a
41:07
a radical change in the way that land is used.
41:10
And that would have massive beneficial effects on making
41:15
sure that everyone had a home, making sure that there is much
41:18
better Environmental Protection, much fairer use of our our core
41:24
resource. And, and because I was, I was
41:28
editing the report and I was working quite closely with, with
41:31
his team, I saw just how much chaos and dysfunction there was
41:36
within it. It wasn't just the Labour right
41:38
attacking the Labour left. There was huge fighting,
41:42
infighting, Indonesian wars within the Labour left as well.
41:47
And by the election in 2019, they're completely given up.
41:51
And, and, and, and what this reflects, I think is, is that
41:57
there's this paradox of politics where the right talks constantly
42:01
about individualism, but it moves as a herd.
42:05
So, you know, they just all sing together from, from the same
42:10
sheet. You know, if, if it's culture
42:13
wars this month, they're all pressing the same culture war
42:16
buttons. They're all using the same
42:18
words, they're all saying exactly the same things.
42:20
They will unite in tremendous solidarity around wealth and
42:24
power. And the left preaches
42:27
collectivism and solidarity. And we spend our whole lives
42:30
fighting like cats in a sack each.
42:33
Everyone say I've got the best idea.
42:35
No, I've got the best ideas because your ideas differ 5%
42:39
from my ideas. You are the Antichrist.
42:42
You should be cast into the outer darkness.
42:44
And that there's this cliche that the right seats converts,
42:48
the left seats traitors. And boy are we good at that.
42:51
You know that there are some, you know, there are a lot of
42:54
good open hearted, open minded people on the left.
42:58
But you can have a lot of them, and you can have just 10% of
43:01
people who are absolute ordinary bastards and who just prevent
43:06
any good stuff from being done because they launch witch hunts
43:11
and attacks on anyone whose ideology they disagree with just
43:16
a little. Bit it's true, isn't it?
43:17
I think, I don't know. I feel I've been more savagely
43:20
attacked from the left and from the right, and maybe you as
43:22
well. Me too, me too, you know, here I
43:25
am. I spent my life on the left, but
43:27
and of course I get attacked by the right and by the far right,
43:30
but then by far the most vicious attacks come from other people
43:34
on the left. And it's like, you know, how the
43:38
hell are we going to organize anything?
43:40
Maybe it's because of the kind of moral morale, some moral
43:43
virtue, virtuousness that the left is seeking, perhaps, And
43:47
that makes it much more about your, your identity, your value
43:51
as a person. Whereas the right doesn't care
43:54
about that. They just want, they just want
43:55
more money for the rich. Yeah, I mean, you know, people
43:58
really believe in what they're doing, what they stand for on
44:01
the left, whereas the right's much more cynical, you know,
44:04
it's like, you know, it's, it's wealth and power.
44:07
And, and if we support rich people, we'll get power.
44:10
You know, that's basically all, you know, we, we do a deal.
44:14
You know, they, we, we, we give them what they want, they give
44:16
us money, we get power. That that's how it works.
44:20
But if you really believe in something, if you're in the game
44:23
of politics because you want some positive change.
44:28
I mean, as I say, there are plenty of people who can do that
44:33
and be nice people and be warm and welcoming and kind to other
44:37
people. But there are other people who
44:40
who, who, who take this sort of inquisitorial approach.
44:43
Whereas, you know, if there's any deviation, slight deviation
44:47
from their rigid belief set, then they they will viciously
44:52
persecute that while completely ignoring the threat from the far
44:55
right and and all the other forces we might might be
44:58
confronting. It's just so stupid and so
45:02
self-destructive and so endless. This endless viral of internees
45:06
sign conflict, you know, inevitably leads to failure.
45:10
Somehow we got to transcend that.
45:12
I think there's plenty of people ready to do do that.
45:14
But I think we have to be very firm.
45:17
We have to say to people, you know, if you're going to be
45:19
close minded, if you're going to be intolerant, you're not going
45:21
to be part of this movement. It's, it's Popper's paradox, you
45:25
know, to, to, to have a tolerant society, you have to exclude the
45:29
intolerant. Otherwise you end up with an
45:31
intolerant society. And so, so you know, it's, it's
45:34
a difficult and paradoxical situation, but you have to be
45:37
quite firm about this. You know, there's some people
45:39
who are just not team players, are not going to contribute to
45:43
to a better society. And so you have to be quite firm
45:47
in saying sorry mate, come form your own thing.
45:49
You're not part of this. I also don't think people should
45:52
be allowed to contest elections who are going to overthrow
45:55
democracy. I mean, that's otherwise, you
45:58
know, you, you get where we are. But some, I mean, this, this has
46:01
happened to our own environmental movement as well.
46:04
And that there's people who've moved to the far right.
46:06
I mean, even within the eco modernist scene that I've been a
46:09
part of, Michael Schellenberg has now a fully paid up MAGA
46:13
mouthpiece. It would seem there's and.
46:18
And yeah, the opposite to the eco modernist, seen people like
46:21
van der Meshiva on the other side, you know, who's now sort
46:23
of great mates with Robert Kennedy and Russell Brand and
46:27
and is very happy to recite far right themes.
46:32
And so you got these sort of two completely different branches,
46:36
antagonistic branches of environmentalism and and yet all
46:40
being sucked by this into this gravitational field of the far
46:45
right. And why does that happen?
46:47
I mean, are there elements of environmental thought which have
46:51
far right sort of overlapped with them?
46:54
I'm thinking of the sort of blood and soil and the organic
46:56
movement perhaps maybe in the very early days and sort of
47:00
notions of, of, of belonging. I mean, it's not, you know,
47:03
you're not, you could, I can imagine a situation where you're
47:05
not open to immigrants because you believe that you belong on
47:08
the land. And you know, that's, there's
47:10
plenty of environmentalism there as well.
47:12
I'm not putting it very well, but do you know what I mean?
47:14
Well, well, there's, there's loads of that and there always
47:16
has been and has been for 100 years, at least of, you know, of
47:22
this, you know, we are the people of the land.
47:24
We, we value and respect this land.
47:27
We love this land and we're going to protect it from those
47:29
aliens, from those people who will come and take it from us.
47:32
And, and, and that has been a very strong theme within
47:36
environmentalism for over a century.
47:40
And, and is, and so there is a sort of green fascism developing
47:44
now. We've sort of seen it in the
47:46
Netherlands in particular. They're coming for our land.
47:49
They're going to replace the farmers with immigrants.
47:52
That's a sort of great replacement theory applied to
47:55
the Dutch nitrate crisis and, and LED to the electoral success
48:01
of hit fielders because he he was able able to capitalise on
48:07
that. And there's a sort of deference
48:09
towards farmers, you know, and, and oh, they're the true people
48:12
of the land. They're the real sons and
48:14
daughters of the soil. So if they want something, we
48:17
must follow where they go. And, and they exercise a great
48:21
deal of cultural power. And when the far right mobilises
48:24
a farmer's campaign, then that can very quickly turn, turn into
48:31
political success. And, and so, yeah, there's
48:35
always been those elements. There's, there's always also
48:38
been a sort of technocratic fascism at work where, you know,
48:45
particularly arising from the futurists in, in, in Futurists
48:50
in Italy, who themselves sort of built out of the decadent
48:54
movement at the end of the 19th century.
48:56
The Futurists of the early 20th century, they're all about
48:59
machines, steel, speed, flight, the transcendence of earthly
49:05
reality. And, and so we can see these two
49:09
strands emerging from certain aspects of the environmental
49:13
movement and converging on, on fascism.
49:15
Maybe they'll all become great mates now that they're now that
49:18
they're in the far right. But, and you know, the far right
49:24
is, is very attractive to certain people.
49:27
You almost instantly get far more attention and far more play
49:32
than you get anywhere else on the political spectrum because
49:36
of the algorithms, because these very simple, stark messages are
49:41
much easier to to put out than the more complex and nuanced
49:45
things that you and I might talk about.
49:48
You know, generally, you know, if you want online success,
49:53
switch to the far right. And if you're a tall articulate,
49:57
you're almost certain to achieve it, whereas, you know, on the
50:00
left or elsewhere, it's much more of a struggle.
50:03
So for opportunists, you know, that'll be an attractive option.
50:08
And yeah, I mean, but you know, what we're seeing is people from
50:12
all walks of life being drawn to the far right now for all of
50:15
those reasons. So we sort, the problem is you
50:17
sort of end up defending the status quo ante, don't you?
50:20
And almost it feels like you're defending an ante on regime of
50:23
sort of gradualist centralism. And I worry we'll go on.
50:27
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the problem
50:29
if you don't have an alternative vision of your own.
50:31
And, and in your previous question, you, you mentioned the
50:34
issue of belonging. And I think that's absolutely
50:36
crucial. So one of the exercises I did a
50:39
few years back was to say, you know, we need to name our
50:42
values. What, what are our values?
50:45
And, and so I made a list of my sort of dominant values, the
50:49
things which I, you know, values are things you, you can express
50:53
with one word. So for instance, kindness is a
50:57
value or community is a value or strength is a value, or honesty
51:02
is a value or loyalty is a value or truth is a value.
51:06
And, and so I sort of said, right, what what are the values
51:10
I value most? And they are things like
51:13
community, kindness, family, friends, you know, you know,
51:21
there's, there's friendship. Rather friends are not a value.
51:24
Friendship is a value. Such things like that.
51:28
And I thought, which of the things that I most value and
51:30
which of the things that we most value on the left are valued
51:34
right across society. And the one which came bouncing
51:38
out at me was belonging. Because you can, you can go to
51:42
the far right and say we we should all be kind to each
51:44
other. And they say fuck off.
51:46
Kindness. What sort of a pussy are you,
51:48
cuck, soy boy? We don't want to hear about
51:51
kindness. We don't want to hear about
51:53
empathy, about altruism. Belonging.
51:56
Yeah, Yeah. Everyone wants belonging, right?
51:59
And belonging is very strong on the far right.
52:02
You know, it's the, it's, it's a very stark form of belonging
52:06
where you all have the same skin colour and the same haircut and
52:09
the same uniform. When you March to the same music
52:13
and you shout the same slogans, you know, and for lonely young
52:16
men, it can be very attractive because you, you now you're part
52:19
of something. Here's your community.
52:20
We've got a community right here for you.
52:23
You join this, you'll never be lonely again.
52:26
And, and what we mean on the left by belonging, you know, is
52:30
an inclusive form of belonging. We might have a neighborhood
52:33
where everyone is welcome, everyone can be part of things,
52:37
we will set up community actions where you know, you can all come
52:41
and join in, we can all work together to make a better
52:44
neighborhood, etcetera. But but because, you know, even
52:48
if we see it in different ways, the notion of belonging, this
52:52
value of belonging is universal right across the political
52:56
spectrum. I came to the conclusion that
52:59
what we've got to do is to develop a politics of belonging,
53:02
a positive, inclusive, progressive politics of
53:06
belonging, where we say unless we create an inclusive
53:10
belonging, unless we make everyone feel welcome in a
53:14
positive way, the fascists will create an exclusive belonging
53:18
and draw people to them. And So what I've tried to do
53:24
with Peter Hutchison, my co-author in in in our in my
53:28
latest book this in the invisible doctrine is to say,
53:30
look, what would a politics of belonging look like?
53:33
A positive politics of belonging and, and, and seek to develop
53:37
that. Now I'm not saying that, you
53:40
know, we've necessarily got the right answers.
53:42
I don't think anyone person or two people have got the right
53:45
answers. We, you know, it needs to be a
53:47
collaborative effort, but, but it's that sort of positive
53:51
vision where we say we've got this propositional idea where
53:55
we've got something which could theoretically appeal to people
53:58
right across the spectrum. You know, lonely, isolated
54:01
people come here. We've got something for you.
54:03
We've got a community for you to be a part of community where you
54:08
can feel you, you belong to something where you, you feel
54:11
you're, you're not on your own anymore.
54:14
And, and, and we can do that in, in a positive way, which is not
54:18
only going to make you feel great, but it's going to make
54:20
other people feel great as well. I think we've got a potential
54:24
to, to appeal very broadly with, with, with a framing like that
54:30
and with the framing of the story, which Peter and I have
54:34
tried to come up with, which reinforces that.
54:37
And I'd rather go into the details, but they're all in the
54:39
book of anyone's interested on the off chance and the but you
54:46
know, you're right. If we don't have that
54:48
alternative proposition, absolutely we will lose.
54:52
You know, we will endlessly lose and there will be no resistance
54:56
because resistance has to involve that positive attempt to
55:01
change the system. If you're not trying to change
55:04
the political system and the economic system, and if you
55:08
don't have a coherent story to tell about how you intend to
55:12
change those systems, you will lose.
55:16
Incrementalism means failure. Well, I don't want to let you go
55:21
before you give us some advice about how to how to do this.
55:24
I mean, we started with a movement that we called Eco
55:26
modernism. You've engaged with that a bit
55:28
and you've been quite critical of it, although I think your
55:32
Regenesis book was was pretty eco modernist in many ways.
55:35
We could discuss that another time maybe.
55:38
But yeah, well, I don't know. I'd love you to give us some
55:41
advice for how we build a kind of progressive, pro science
55:44
environmental movement. That's that's pragmatic, but
55:46
also does does engage with this issue of power and also does try
55:50
to figure out positive ways of belonging that can that can
55:54
really give give people something to believe in as a
55:57
real alternative to this kind of March of fascism.
56:00
Yeah, so, so part of what I've been trying to do is to promote
56:04
what I call private sufficiency, public luxury, and to say, you
56:07
know, drawing on environmental science, what we know of
56:12
planetary boundaries, we cannot seek, what capitalism tells us
56:17
it will deliver to us and patiently will not because it is
56:21
a system based on exploitation, a situation in which everyone
56:25
enjoys private luxury. The only reason that people,
56:29
some people can enjoy private luxury today is that other
56:31
people don't. One, because they've exploited
56:34
other people's labour and stolen other people's resources in
56:37
order to create that private luxury.
56:39
But two, because there's simply not enough physical space, let
56:42
alone ecological space for everyone to pursue it.
56:45
I mean, it's, it's literally an impossible dream.
56:49
You know, you can't all have your massive garden in the
56:53
capital city. You can't all have the vast
56:55
mansion. You can't all have the, the 2nd
56:58
and 3rd and 4th homes, you, you, you can't all have your yacht in
57:03
the Marina and whatever else your private plane that, that,
57:07
that extremely rich people have. Because there's not even the
57:10
physical space, there's not enough land on Earth for people
57:14
to, to, for everyone to have those things, let alone the
57:18
ecological space. You know, Roman Abramovich is
57:21
said to have a carbon footprint of 30,000 tonnes per year CO2.
57:25
That's 15,000 times the, the, the footprint, which is
57:30
considered the, the maximum global average footprint to stay
57:33
within various planetary boundaries is probably itself
57:38
too much. So, you know, if we all live
57:41
like Roman Abramovich that the planet screwed in about 10
57:44
minutes, you know, we, we just cook ourselves straight off.
57:47
It's, it's just an impossible proposition.
57:50
But it's a reason that people consent to capitalism because
57:55
they believe that they're temporarily embarrassed
57:57
millionaires. They think the finger is going
58:00
to point to them next and that they can be the ones with the.
58:03
It's true. Actually, I've got, I've got a
58:05
friend who's got a tennis court, but it's no good term on his
58:07
own. So I've, I've encouraged him to
58:09
join our, our club and he has a much better time with like 20 or
58:12
30 people to play tennis with. And you know, I guess that's a
58:15
common, it's a communal experience and it has that
58:17
social element which is actually much more, much more valuable
58:20
than the private one. So we can have luxury, public
58:23
luxury, you know, we can have magnificent public tennis courts
58:26
and public swimming pools and public art galleries and lots of
58:29
other public wonderful things which allow us to live a life of
58:33
luxury. But don't take that away from
58:35
everyone else. And because there are many, many
58:38
people sharing those resources, as you say, you don't need to
58:41
keep on replicating those resources.
58:43
You need far fewer of them. So private sufficiency, you
58:48
know, I'm, I'm, I, I, I'm not someone who believes that all
58:50
our property should be taken away from us.
58:52
I think we should have our own modest domain, a modest home
58:56
with our things in it. That's fine, but if we want
59:00
luxury, if we want to spread our wings, we seek it in, in the
59:03
public domain. Now that's entirely compatible
59:06
with a science based view of the world.
59:09
It's a framing of, of, of the future which we might like to
59:13
see. I'm not by any means arguing
59:16
it's the only one. And if you don't accept that in
59:19
all its details, you are the Antichrist because we, we, we've
59:23
seen far too much of that. But it's one idea which we can
59:26
throw out there in the hope that maybe it'll be superseded by a
59:30
better idea. I don't care.
59:31
I, I, you know, I really don't care whose ideas come out on top
59:35
as long as we have this positive propositional narrative of the
59:39
different world we want to see which is better than the current
59:43
one. And because we've utterly failed
59:46
to produce that. But even when neoliberalism
59:49
collapsed, you know, we had this golden opportunity to come
59:52
forward and say, here is a different, better world.
59:56
We because we failed to produce that, that zombie could get back
59:59
on its feet and carry on walking.
1:00:02
And, and you know, what the fascists offer is, is a vision
1:00:06
of a different world. You know, a world where you will
1:00:09
be triumphant, where you will crush your enemies, where, where
1:00:13
we will create this pure white domain, where straight white
1:00:18
males will be able to dominate everywhere else, when straight
1:00:21
white males can say, oh, that sounds good.
1:00:23
Yeah, I'll have some of that. You know, it.
1:00:26
It doesn't actually solve any problems, but it creates a
1:00:30
different vision of a world at a time when people are desperately
1:00:34
craving a different vision. And if we fail to produce a
1:00:37
vision while our opponents are producing a vision, we will
1:00:43
lose. Thank you, George, so much.
1:00:44
I mean, you don't, you don't sound like a pessimist.
1:00:46
And I think that's so important. And, you know, thank you for
1:00:50
your hopefulness and your your leadership and your bravery.
1:00:54
Because we can't, as you say, we can't afford to give up.
1:00:56
If you cede the political space to the fascists, then then
1:01:00
everything that we that we love and, you know, have all fought
1:01:03
for us is lost. And that just can't be allowed
1:01:06
to happen. So.
1:01:06
So giving up is not an option. And yeah, and I think we've
1:01:10
heard that loud and clear from you.
1:01:12
So thanks again so much for for joining us on the podcast.
1:01:15
Many thanks, Mark, Faithful pleasure.
1:01:20
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