Well
worth watching this video of George Monbiot talking at the World
Transformed, or read the accompanying article, which address the very
biggest question we face: how do we
bring about real political change that reorganises our societies and
saves our environment? He offers some useful ideas about we might get
there, and, more hopefully, how close we already are to achieving real
change.
He also highlights a
key point about human nature that has been intentionally obscured by
those in power precisely because it helps keep them in power.
Monbiot:
This story is inspired by the remarkable new findings in neuroscience,
anthropology, evolutionary biology – by comparison to other species of
animals, humans are bizarrely altruistic.
We are constantly told
that we are this selfish grasping species, and that everyone wants to
grab as much wealth as they can and get everyone else out of the way –
and yes, that is how our leaders behave, and Trump is an example of
that, and the news is dominated by people doing stuff like that. But
what we don’t realise is that these people are highly atypical.
About 1 per cent of the population are psychopaths, who don’t have those
capabilities for altruism or empathy: sadly, a lot of them end up in
charge. Studies show a massive preponderance of psychopaths in power.
And we allow ourselves to be dominated by that politically and
socially, and we begin to reproduce that, but in doing so we ignore all
the mundane daily acts of altruism, which if we saw in another species
we would be astounded – helping people who are not related to us, or
giving money to charity. ...
That capacity has been thwarted ...
by the neoliberal ideology that’s says you are selfish, you are out for
your own and that is a good thing. Greed is good. Extreme competition is
good. Extreme individualism is good. We absorb that, believe it and
accept it, but that is not who we are. And our task is not to change
human nature, but to reveal human nature for what it really is.
We do this by rebuilding community, and rebuilding political life, and
you have to do that from the top as well as from the bottom. There is so
much you can do at the community level, creating this participatory
culture, by creating thick networks of community projects – like
bringing in the commons which make sense of community. A community has
an economic presence: an economic reason to sustain itself, and a way of
sustaining its own members.
