Speaker 1What's up? Welcome back to the James Kennedy podcast. How the hell you doing? Man, we got a good one for you guys today. I've been trying to get this guy on for about two years and in that time he smashed out several more books than the one I was originally going to interview him about. So I'm hoping I can nail this guy down today and squeeze out every last bit of info and wisdom I can before he rattles out another ten books whilst I'm still scratching my head over my third one. Now I don't have him for as long as I would like to today so I'm not going to hang around and do all the preamble bullshit but I am going to quickly nag you to subscribe to the podcast. If you listen to this thing, please just click the goddamn subscribe or follow button. Give me a star rating and give me some likes and comments and all that jazz. We don't ask for much. It takes like two seconds. If you could do that for us, that would be amazing and we'll keep all this free goodness coming your way. Now I'm bored of saying that so let's get on to the main juice. The Proceedings. Today's guest needs no introduction. He's been a prolific journalist, author and activist for several decades. He's a hero of the environmental movement. He's loved and respected by many and equally hated and feared by bad guys the world over which is always a good thing. I'm talking of course about the tireless, the unconquerable, the mighty Mr. George Monbiot. George, how are you doing man?
Speaker 2Thanks James. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to be on. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1Well, we've got loads. We've got loads to talk about. I don't have you for as long as I would like, which would be about, you know, a whole weekend's worth of your time. So what I thought we would do to try and get as much into the chat today as possible, because obviously you've got so much wisdom and knowledge that I want to try and tap into. I thought I'd break this up into four sort of bite-sized chunks. Starting with, what's your assessment of where we're at right now socially, politically, economically, and where are we headed if we don't do something about it?
Speaker 2Well, it's a very dangerous, moment. I think what we're seeing is the wearing off of the effect of two world wars, because what world wars one and two did was to really break the power of the oligarchy, which is the kind of default state of politics in centralized hierarchical states like ours. And so, you know, we had 30 years or so of social democracy between 1945 and 1975. And then the neoliberals came in, the Thatcherites, the Reaganites, and the rest of it, to gradually erode that, to increase the power of the rich, decrease the power of the poor. And that led to a widespread disillusionment with politics. People were seeing that politics wasn't solving their problems. And whether it was the Tories or the Labour who were in power, or the Republicans or the Democrats, the poor were still losing. And the rich were gaining more and more. And so we then reached almost inevitably the point at which people say, well, a pox on all their houses, to hell with them. They're not solving my problems. This guy says he stands outside politics. This guy says he speaks for me. He's doing things differently. So I'll try him. Why not? What's to lose? And so around the world, we're now seeing the rise of demagogues. It's Donald Trump. We had Jaya Bolsonaro. We had Boris Johnson in this country. He was very demagogic. We've got Viktor Orban, Recep Erdogan, Benjamin Netanyahu, all over the world. Javier Millet, an endless succession of demagogic people on the far right. Giorgio Meloni, you know, you can go on and on, naming these people. And they threatened to take over all of them. Almost everywhere because of widespread political disillusionment. And so we're returning to a situation very similar to that of 90 or 100 years ago, when Europe was plunging towards fascism. And this is a very dangerous situation indeed.
Speaker 1And you feel that's a very real prospect if you look at the landscape that we're in socially and economically as well. Do you see that as a precursor? It's the same sort of precursor that
Speaker 2almost 100 years ago. Well, 100 years ago, what we saw was capital trying to solve its biggest problem, which is democracy. And capital doesn't like democracy at all, because as soon as people get a vote, they start asking for outrageous things like better wages and shorter working hours and weekends and holidays and not having their arms ripped off by machinery and, oh, welfare state and public services like health and education and clean, clean rivers and clean air and all these outrageous demands that they make of capital. And of course, capital doesn't want to concede to any of that. So it's constantly looking for ways of stopping democracy. And it found this highly effective way in the 1920s and 1930s called fascism. Fascism is a really effective means of crushing democracy. And behind every ranting demagogue, there's always a billionaire who's funding them. And, and that worked very well for capital till 1945. And then fascism ran into a certain minor difficulty in the form of military defeat and, and the complete loss of credibility. And so then they started casting around for some other means of fighting democracy. And they found it in neoliberalism in this doctrine, which had only just been formulated really in 1944, which said that the state should get out of the way. The way we should solve our problems is through buying and selling, not through democracy. We should cast down regulations, taxes, trade unions, protest movements, all these things which might interfere with what capital wants to do. And they formulated this new ideology called neoliberalism, though they later dropped the term. And that later from the late 1970s, when Keynesian social democracy started falling apart, that came to dominate our societies. And now, neoliberalism, as I was explaining, has led to this mass disillusionment, which means that capital wins again, because people then move to the far right and move potentially to fascism. And, and, you know, we can argue about who deserves the label and who doesn't. We can say, is Trump a fascist? Is Musk a fascist? And we can argue about who deserves the label and who doesn't. I think there are arguments saying probably they are, but there are also counter arguments saying, well, they don't tick these boxes. It doesn't really matter. I mean, they're going, you know, they're fulfilling the role that capital wants, which is that they want to crush democracy, sweep everything out of the way, and then blame minorities, scapegoats for the problems. And whether they, they call themselves fascist, whether like Musk, they give fascist salutes or not, the results are going to be the same. A horrible, sadistic politics, where instead of solving our massive problems, you blame other people who aren't responsible for those problems for them. Whether it's Jews, whether it's Muslims, whether it's asylum seekers and immigrants, whether it's trans people, gay people, black people, brown people, women, you know, someone, there's an endless list of people with disabilities. I mean, Trump is already lining them up now. There's an endless list of potential scapegoats that you can turn to and point to. And it doesn't take long for those scapegoats to start to be persecuted. And perhaps it will go all the way yet again.
Speaker 1Right, right. Terrifying stuff, man. I mean, we kind of think that, let me look at the situation in Gaza right now. I, you know, I kind of thought that genocides and things of that nature were of the past. But, you know, the more I see and the more I learn from listening to people like yourself, it seems as if things go in these cycles, doesn't it? And I recently read The Ragged Trouser of Philanthropists, and I couldn't believe in
Speaker 2that. It's such a good book. And, you know, it's a beautiful story, a tragic story surrounding it as well. But it's something which we all should read, you know, to see and to realise, you know, these were our political ancestors. They, you know, fought so hard for the rights that we take for granted and are now tearing up. Yeah. And you're quite right. You know, we see this resurgence of things we thought we'd seen the end of. And the genocide that the Israeli government is perpetrating is a classic example of that.
Speaker 1Terrifying stuff. I mean, Tony Bennett reminds me of a saying that he said, you know, every generation must fight the same battles. There's no final defeat and there's no final victory. And how do you feel about that? Is that, is it as simple as that? Is it, is it different now? Obviously, we've got technology, social media, the oligarchical control over information and the narrative seems more pervasive now, or is it pretty much the same
Speaker 2thing coming back that we've seen before? I think Tony Bennett was exactly right. To that, I'd add, there's no learning either. We sort of seem to have to start again each generation to learn those hard lessons. But, you know, there's this illusion that some people suffer from that state of society is democracy and that what Trump is doing and what these other frightening people are doing is something aberrant and something weird, which stands outside the normal way of doing politics. No, that is a normal way of doing politics for hundreds of years. We've had emperors, we've had kings who have tried to gain absolute power. They've been defended by a circle of courtiers who treat the rest of society as inferior beings and apply arbitrary laws to protect that power, constantly try to extend the power at other people's expense. This is a new variant of it. It's a particularly frightening one because it's backed by the powers of surveillance, by technology, by the means of persuasion, which are far more effective than they ever were before, but it's nothing new. It's a very old established mode of politics, which I think we can reasonably say is the default mode of politics in societies like ours. So to get democracy, or even a tiny bit of democracy, which is all we've ever had, I mean, let's face it, our societies are about 5% democratic, but to get even that, you have to fight and fight and fight for it against the tendency to revert to empire and oligarchy. Now, as I say, we've got this pathetic simulacrum of democracy where you can vote once every five years in our country, once every four years in the United States, and then the winning party or the winning president say, right, I've got a mandate to do whatever I want for the next four or five years, whatever I can get through parliament or congress. Now, so in other words, they presume that we consent to everything because they won an election once. We don't accept the principle of presumed consent in sex. Why do we accept it in politics? It's an absolutely preposterous way to run a country. And our systems, our centralised systems are not designed for democracy. They're designed for autocracy and empire. That's what they're designed for. If you look at even the symbol of parliament, take a look at the symbol, the mother of parliament, see UK parliament. A symbol is a crown on top, right, absolute power, above a portcullis exclusion with chains on either side. What does this tell you? I mean, when a system tells you what it is, believe it. Yeah, they've given away as little as they can possibly get away with. And as a result, we have a barely democratic society at the best of times. And even that now, we're in danger of losing.
Speaker 1Terrifying times, man. But fascinating to have your historical framing of where we're at now in that kind of cyclical pattern. So this is this is not a new battle, this is almost like like you described it as the default mode of politics. This is how politics gets done. And you describe in your latest book, The Invisible Doctrine, that one of the more recent tools in their ideological arsenal for perpetuating this age old system is called neoliberalism. And so I wanted to ask you if you could explain to the listeners what you mean by neoliberalism and what role it has played in getting us to where we're at in these terrifying
Speaker 2times today. So neoliberalism is a political tool used by capital to defeat its great enemy, democracy. And and the tool consists of of a philosophy, which claims not to be a philosophy, it just says this is a description. This is just the way human beings are. It's completely false. But it says, our primary characteristics are selfishness and greed. Our main form of relating to each other is competition. These are all good things. We should be selfish, we should be greedy, we should elbow everybody else out the way and grab what we can because in so doing, we will generate wealth, the rich people will become richer and their wealth will trickle down to to to enrich, to enrich the poor. And so therefore, in order to allow this process to happen and to allow the right people to come out on top, we've got to get politics out of the way. These these annoying, frustrating things like voting and protest and trade unions and regulation and taxes, all those interfere with the discovery of the natural order where the virtuous people come out on top, and the bad people end up where they belong on the bottom. And when this, this doctrine was first proposed, or formalised by people like Friedrich Hayek in his book, The Road to Serfdom and Ludwig von Mises and his book, Bureaucracy, both published in 1944, many people thought they were absolutely outrageous, obnoxious, disgraceful, things to be calling for. How could anyone in their right mind think that this was a better way of organising society than the the social democracy, which was then very much in vogue? But there were some people who thought, oh, I like this, I like this very much. And these were among the richest people on earth and the richest corporations. And within a few years, they were lavishly funding the creation of a neoliberal network operating internationally, started with a group called the Mont Pelerin Society, and then it proliferated into hundreds of these so-called think tanks. A lot of them don't disclose who's paying for them. They're really lobby groups operating on behalf of corporate and oligarchic power. But their role was to refine the outrageous, obnoxious things that Hayek and Mises were talking about, and, and try to make them sound like common sense. You want this, this is going to be good for you. This is, this is going to work. And also, this is just the way things are. There's no alternative. You know, and Mrs. Thatcher, she picks up this phrase, used it so often that it became an acronym, TINA, there is no alternative. This is, this is just humanity. We're selfish and greedy. Live with it, enjoy it, accept it. But the truth is, the great majority of us aren't, primarily. We have a cluster of values, and included in them is selfishness and greed. But they're by no means the dominant values for the great majority of people. The great majority of people, the dominant values are things like community, belonging, family, friendship, altruism, empathy, kindness, and selfishness and greed are way down the list. There is, however, about 1% of the population whose primary values are selfishness and greed, and we call them psychopaths. Now, you might think, well, we don't have to worry too much about them. They're just 1% of the population. Unfortunately, they tend to end up in charge. Broadly speaking, we are a society of
Speaker 1altruists governed by psychopaths. 100%. That is a conclusion that I have come to myself in all of these conversations I have had on this podcast and in my own experience of life as well. It's in trying to understand how we got here and how we stay there. You can only come eventually to the conclusion that we are governed by a sociopathic system that is run by and for the benefit of sociopaths. And I mean that in the literal sense, you know? And far from humanity at large having those values of selfishness and greed that you've outlined, it actually seems more obvious to me that we're actually predominantly quite trusting and gullible and innocent and kind and, you know, community-orientated, which is why we're so easily, kind of duped and dominated by these scumbags. So given the fact that this is a pattern that's been going on, you know, since the dawn of civilization, are we the 99% because of our inherently and innately decent nature just destined to be forever duped and dominated by
Speaker 2sociopaths? Well, we're really not destined to live like that. And there's a couple of brilliant books I'd point you to. One which some of you may have read, which is called Some of Your Listeners Might Be Familiar With Already, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengro, which looks at how humanity has organized itself in different parts of the world and at different times in history. And there's a vast range of ways in which we've done our politics. And there are some societies which have been highly hierarchical and oppressive, and there are others which have been totally egalitarian and distributive. And, you know, there's no one way. There are loads of alternatives. Tila, I don't know, or Tala, there are loads of alternatives. I don't know exactly what the acronym is, but, you know. And the other book is Jeremy Lentz's magnificent book, The Patterning Instinct. Really must read it. In fact, it took me six months to read it because every page, it was like, oh, well, that's just changed my life. It was really fascinating. It's an extraordinary story of how human cognition works and how it's changed across the centuries and how certain cultural influences drive us down certain paths, which we're really completely unaware. And one of the things that I'm constantly trying to do, and it's a sort of theme of several of my books, is say, you know, we've got to foreground stuff. We've got to be aware of stuff. We've got to name our values. You know, what are your most precious values? Name them and then say, does this line up with these values? If it doesn't, let's not do that. let's do something else let's name the political forces so neoliberalism you know one of the great powers of neoliberalism is that it it became anonymous in about the mid-1950s they stopped using the term they they called themselves neoliberals in the 1940s and early 1950s this is what we are we are neoliberals this is our philosophy and then they stopped using the term and didn't produce any other term because they were saying this isn't a philosophy this isn't an ideology this is just the way things are right this is like we're talking about gravity or talking about evolution it's just the way things are which you know patently is not true but that's a very powerful position you know to close down the moral imagination and so what i've tried to do and and in in our latest book it's it's not just me it's um co-written with with the wonderful peter hutchison what what we've tried to do is to reopen the moral imagination by bringing these things together and to bring them together and to bring them together and to bring them together out of the shadows and saying right you know here is what's been happening there are labels to put on these things which help us to understand them we're doing what the great theologian walter wink said was naming the powers it's a really important thing you can't fight the powers until you've identified the powers until you know what you're talking about and we've tried to open up a whole series of terms which which disguise things rather than reveal things like the market or investment for example you know which actually um are recovering a veil put over a whole can of worms because um they when you actually open these terms up and say what does this mean what does capitalism mean for example you find it doesn't at all mean what people think it means i mean to give that example yeah almost everyone seems to think that capitalism is the same as commerce it's like buying and selling stuff right um and and commerce is something we've been doing for thousands of years in lots of different ways and there are good ways and there are bad ways of doing it but it can be a very egalitarian thing like you know the street market you know if you think of the market what is the market you think of a street market right with stalls with stripy awnings and you know and and the people selling you stuff have a very similar economic position that that you do and you can walk along the stalls and you can choose say i don't want to buy my apples from that one i'll buy my apples from this one there's choice there's going on that's commerce it's absolutely not capitalism capitalism is a totally different thing that started well we date it back to the island of madeira in 1450 a very specific origin following the work of the tremendous geographer jason moore and um and it's it was founded on colonial exploitation on grabbing on a boom bust quit model extremely rapid exploitation profit making destruction of resources whether it's ecological resources whether it's um community society human bodies human minds and then you abandon it abandon the frontier move on open up a new frontier and burn through that instead this is a completely different model of organization based on the simultaneous commodification of land labor and money and it hadn't been done before and and it's it's totally different to to it's it's a completely different model of organization based on the simultaneous commodification of land because it involves coercion physical violence the seizure of shared resources and the conversion into private resources um and um and the uh total catastrophe in terms of ecological and social destruction um and so you know what we see is neoliberals in particular who are constantly trying to sell capitalism to us deliberately conflating capitalism with commerce and saying you know if you're against capitalism you're against buying and selling you're against the the the the person selling you stuff in that market stall you're against your local bakery you're against everybody because we're all involved in in commerce um and and and selling capitalism which is the domain of extremely exploitative brutal horrible psychopathic oligarchs as being
Speaker 1the thing that we all do and it's not brilliantly put yeah i totally agree with you it's it's often portrayed as the economic system is just like the weather you know it's like you know the economy's gone up it's gone down that's just what it does we just have to grim and bear it like we have to do you know a rainy day or whatever but it's not these are man-made constructs and they behave accordingly to rules and boundaries that are put in motion by the very people that benefit from them which is this uh the psychopaths that you're talking about so it's brilliant what you and is to demystify some of these ideological tools and excuses that enable the system to stay afloat for the for the few and not the many because it's a bit like the emperor's new clothes isn't it once people can understand that this doesn't have to be the way that it is and we can see through the bullshit then the possibility of change and a better future in a better way in a better life seems all the more real and achievable so i'd like to steer the second half of this conversation into some of those alternatives some of those better ways that we could be living our lives and also how we get there because it seems like we've got pretty formidable enemies especially now with the um the addition of all of this like digital technology as well like it felt initially when social media came on the scene that that was going to be you know a helpful tool for for the 99 of us but now that's being co-opted and you can't tell what's real anymore even if you're watching a video of an event you can't tell whether that's actually what you're looking at or whether it's something else you it's very confusing there's a lot of information overload and onslaughts out there so how can we inspire hope and clear purpose and a sense of possibility in people at the moment who are who are understandably feeling very ground down very pessimistic very apathetic and very confused as to how else we could live our lives and how else we could we could achieve that so
Speaker 2i'd love to get your thoughts on that yeah well again peter and i have quite deliberately and unconsciously tried to answer that question and you know we we recognize that unless you have a clear aim and a clear path to get to that aim and a clear story which tells you how you're going to get um down the path then you're going to achieve nothing at all and and as as you hint at so so so rightly you know we're flailing around at the moment because um we we don't have that clear way out of the situation we're um we we we just being very reactive we're we're responding to all the stuff which is being thrown at us and they're deliberately people like trump are throwing so much stuff at us that we can't cope with it all you know and so you know just as you're sort of reeling in shock from the first thing he hits you with the next thing this is this um sort of shock and awe tactic which he himself talks about using you know he's not shy about explaining what he's doing um and um and so we're constantly on the back foot we're constantly on the back foot we're constantly reacting and you know we can't afford to be in in that place so um some years ago i i conducted this sort of exercise in my own head and said right you know having listed my values and the things which i thought were good i looked at these values and thought is there any of these values which is shared right across politics you know i'm very much on the left but i recognize that if we're going to have big enough political movements we've got to attract people who are in the center and indeed the center of the movement and so i've been doing that for a long time and i've been people who've been seduced by the far right right you know we've got we've got to get people from from from right across the political spectrum behind a set of social and environmental values which are going to work but you know you name a lot of those values and people say oh don't be so wet don't be ridiculous empathy and so so which of the values is common and the one which absolutely stands out is belonging everyone on earth has a craving for belonging to something somewhere where they feel seen where they feel heard where they feel they're part of something bigger than themselves this is such a fundamental human urge and you can see belonging uh as this tremendously powerful political value which is uh which brought together the left which um has brought together liberals but has also brought together the far right now we might mean slightly different things when we talk about belonging i mean belonging on the far right is a very frightening thing you know it's it's ethnically determined you um you know you belong if you're white you belong if you're straight you belong if you have a a very determined set of political views and you prepared to wear the same uniform and march to the same music and give the same salutes you know but you know it's a very powerful belonging and a lot of lonely young men are strongly attracted fascism because it says this is somewhere something you can belong to something bigger than yourself you're going to have lots of mates you're going to be surrounded by by people who are going to protect you and you're going to be part of it and and that's something that we all want but unless those of us on the left or even the center um offer an alternative form of belonging something else to belong to then people are going to go for that brutal exclusive form of belonging that's and inclusive belonging. This is something that which anyone can can belong to this is something where you're going to feel nurtured you're going to feel looked after you're going to feel you're part of a community uh but it doesn't matter what your background is what your skin color is what your beliefs are all the rest of it and and peter and i feel strongly that this has has to start at the local level it has to be in the neighborhood it has to be in the community because that is the one place where everyone is everyone even if they're there just for a short period of time they are in a place the workplace used to be the focus of political organization but that really has been smashed and dispersed you know we don't have these huge industrial workforces in fact even when we did a lot of people were excluded i mean at the height of the industrialism in in in britain there were more women working in domestic service than there were men working in heavy industry and they didn't have a voice they weren't included in that so even at the bottom of the list there were women working in domestic service and there were women working in domestic service and there were men working in heavy industry and they didn't have the best of times it didn't bring everyone together i mean there was tremendous and incredibly useful organizing done around the workplace you know and it built the labor movement yeah um it built it built our welfare state it built so much that we we still benefit from but we can't replicate that we have to find another locus of belonging and and the obvious one is the place where we live and we build what peter and i call a politics of of belonging based on place but bringing in um um the some of the innovation which we've seen around the world in terms of politics and economics and the political innovation is it sort of pushes in the opposite direction to that sort of presumed consent you know the election every five years and then yeah you the electorate fuck off and leave us alone we're going to we're going to govern the country um it's it's about participatory deliberative democracy democracy where you can join in the process of decision making whenever you want to it's it's an ongoing rolling thing which which which you can be part of on a daily basis if you want and and there's there's an extraordinary aspect of participatory democracy which is it works much better in practice than it does in theory you know if you say to political scientists well you know our idea is that everyone can be a decision maker is that the the ordinary citizen in fact is just as good at making decisions as as a professional politician and we should be enabled to play that role they'll say well don't be ridiculous you know what does the ordinary citizen know about politics what do they know about policy what do they know about economics what do they know about all these crucial things well when it's allowed to happen extraordinary things result so for instance in the brazilian city of porto alegre between 1989 and 2000 the the people of the city were allowed to set the municipal budget every year and every year tens of thousands of people came together to decide how the money should be allocated and and it was disproportionately because they were the most affected and they could see this it was disproportionately the very poor who turned up and and a large number of them were completely illiterate they could not read or write and and you know a lot of people would say well so who were to make decisions but it turns out that the decisions they made were far better than the decisions that the city council had been making city council which was in hock to the local mafia in in hock to you know my brother-in-law wants to build a bridge right we're giving some money you know the what what we saw in porto alegre was that this city which had been right down towards the bottom of the human development and index the human development index in brazil came out at budgetary budgeting wow um massive decline in infant mortality in maternal mortality massive improvement in sanitation and clean water in public transport in primary education in primary health care on and on it goes because because the people were were making decisions in their own interests it wasn't somebody else at the top um saying you people need this and you need that which just happens and it happens that um uh my husband can deliver the contract for it or my son so so it's um and and it was utterly transformative for for for the life of the people in the city we're seeing similar things happen in taiwan uh which has had this remarkable success with its v taiwan um participatory project in in seoul in south korea um uh for a while in reykjavik in iceland we've um seen um similar programs in madrid in barcelona um where it's allowed to happen it can have absolutely transformative results now you know we're not allowed to do that at the national level in countries like ours we have this highly centralized system which is constantly vulnerable to co-option by elites by corporate lobbyists by oligarchs uh you know and we see the results all the time and and we become disillusioned with politics as a result but we can start doing it at our community level at our neighborhood level we can get together with our neighbors now look like we have around where i live um as a result of the pandemic we have a whatsapp group where where people share things and and help each other out and stuff and that can become the basis i mean it's just one example but one way in which it can become a basis for shared decision making about quite important things and then if we can introduce elements of economic democracy and in fact you know one thing that can be said for the current government in the uk is that it's introducing a community movement and it's introducing a community movement and it's right to buy like they have in scotland so that communities can then own land own buildings own crucial assets which surround them then you see how you can start to make quite powerful decisions about the the development of your neighborhood and and the things that that that you might need and might want to use and and what we could see then is the revival of the commons now the commons is a great neglected sphere of the economy and of the economy and of the economy and of the economy once upon a time most of our resources were held in common the community owned and managed these resources together and had a duty to pass them on to the next generation in good condition whether it was land whether it was forest whether it was water sources all sorts of things were held in common and a huge huge variety of assets can be held that way but then capital comes along and steals it all basically um it was enclosed it was stolen and it was privatized um and and what we need to be aiming for is a reversal of that and so we make ourselves powerful local citizens and then we start bringing those local communities together and in a system which was very well described by the american political ecologist murray bookchin we can then start devolving decisions upwards so the primary unit of political decision making is is the local borough the the local village your your your neighborhood your community um and then he proposed this we think very clever system for for how you can then um and move those decisions up the system rather than having decisions imposed from the top down and landed on top of you from a great height yes um so so this is this is the sort of beginning of the new political story which we're trying to sell trying to tell sell as well whatever um and um uh and um but but it's it's not the end of it because yeah you know we feel we've got to take a sort of broader perspective in in this as well and if you look at the the standard approach which is capitalism because that has become the dominant um economic practice everywhere even if the great majority of us don't actually participate in it except being persecuted and then we've got to take a sort of broader perspective in this as well by it um um what what capitalism promises and the reason that people consent to it is that everyone's going to be a millionaire right yeah everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and one day that finger is going to point at you and you're going to be covered in gold and then you can have luxury you can have your yacht you can have your five super homes you can have your island your swimming pool your art collection your tennis courts or all the rest of it now well number one capitalism depends on exploitation the reason some people are extremely rich is that they're exploiting other people taking their resources taking their labor and keeping them poor um that's how it works it's not a distributive mechanism it's a mechanism for concentrating well right sure it mobilizes wealth it turns natural wealth into money and um and a wider group of people benefit from that in the short term but of course in the long term it means the collapse of natural wealth and earth systems collapse and the rest of it and none of us are going to benefit from that yeah uh but ultimately it is a great concentrating device which is why for instance the 12 richest people in the u.s have tripled their money since 2020 and now have two trillion dollars between them just to give you one example sanity that's that's how it works so um so number one that's why it went over number two What if it did work? What if we did all become millionaires? and we did all um be able to buy a huge mansion with an estate and tennis courts and swimming pools etc well we run out of land apart from anything else there's not even the physical space if everyone in london had that then then it would cover the whole of england where would anyone else live but also of course we don't have the ecological space it would burn the planet in about 10 minutes yeah yeah roman abramovich he consumes 30 000 tons of carbon a year now you know climate scientists say the maximum is about two tons of of carbon dioxide and and you know this is 15 000 times that amount how can we all live like that we can't it's impossible so we can't all pursue private luxury but we can all pursue public luxury we can have magnificent public swimming pools and public tennis courts and public art collections and all the other things that we might wish to expand into but we can do so together and in doing so you know when you create a public park for instance you're not taking land away from people you're opening up land for people if you create a private estate you're creating a big wall and you're keeping people out and there's less land for everybody else so so one of our our principles um which we're building a lot of this around is what we call private sufficiency public luxury so we can all have our own modest domain our own home where we have the things that we need i want rather more books than i need but otherwise try to live quite modestly um yeah we have our our own place that's you know fine and we should have much better access to decent housing or all that but if we want luxury we pursue that in the public domain so private sufficiency public
Speaker 1luxury absolutely amazing love it and what a way to go out you're getting me fired up just listening to you honestly man i was going to go out and set my pitchfork on fire but i think your solution is uh is is a much better one um hold on that pitchfork we might need it later well i just want to ask you i mean you've been in the game a while now and you've been very very active obviously in in the environmental uh game which is you know a whole of the subject we could get into which isn't looking great in fact it's looking pretty tragic um how do you maintain your hope how why haven't you just given up by now and gone like this is pointless you know how do you
Speaker 2keep the fire going well it is sometimes tempting but i mean it's been 40 years now and you know there's been a lot of disappointments along the way i can't can't pretend you know i don't want to claim that uh you know i just bounce out of bed every morning say it's fine it's great we're going to save the world today um you know that you're endlessly endlessly crashing into the brute power of oligarchs of emperors of capital um all all the time and this you know this is the reality of the world you i was very naive when i started off you know when i was 22 years old i got my first job in journalism um i was obsessed with environmental issues as i still am today um and i thought all you need to do is to provide the information and people will then see what needs to be done and everything will happen and it was a sort of magical thinking i didn't realize that's not how it works at all it's about power and this is why you know i got so into all the you can't achieve anything environmentally unless you address power which is destroying the living planet as surely as it destroys human society and the human psyche um and um and so what what i've found over the years is that as i've come to understand a bit more and of course every day there's i realize there's still a mountain to learn you know all the time but as i've understood a little bit more and i learned a bit more you know and i've learned a little bit more you know constantly constantly reading um everything from scientific papers to government reports to to interesting opinions whatever it might be just piling on the reading all the time you begin to see where the possibilities are where the chinks of hope are and that's part of it that that's that that's part of what gives me some optimism but the other part is is the tremendous capacity of human beings to respond to change to to to to step up the courage which people have i mean throughout my whole campaigning career which has run alongside in parallel to my to my journalistic career i've seen amazing feats of courage i was very heavily involved in the 1990s road protests which was the most successful environmental action there's ever been in the uk we stopped this massive road building program and the people at the forefront of it the great majority of them were young women and they were the bravery i saw people hurling themselves at these massive machines of swinging through the trees in front of men with chainsaws to stop them cutting the trees down and the physical courage but also the moral courage primarily of young women quite a few men as well you know and i i thought i was i was pretty brave and pretty tough when i turned up at the roads protest because you know i'd done some crazy things in in my youth abroad but oh boy you know i was i was really brought up short about just seeing just how much more courageous other people could be and that gives me hope we need to focus for it you know when people are focused extraordinary things happen i mean we saw that enormous rise of fridays for future and extinction rebellion for example up until 2020 and then they were killed by the pandemic it was really unfortunate you know everyone had to go home and the movement fell apart but but it had got to the point where it looked very close to a tipping point to look very close to effectively changing the status quo forcing governments to to to respond to the ecological crisis and radically changing policy in many parts of the world well it was a near miss but we can get there again right you know we have to have faith in each other and in ourselves but we find faith in ourselves by having faith in each other you know we we we gain our strength through our communities and one of the great sort of paradoxes of you know this we're endlessly told um by by neoliberalism that we're consumers that we're individuals i mean we don't talk about people anymore we'll say an individual was walking down the road you know and that we're atomized and this was always a policy to atomize and rule um but but actually you you find your own individuality through other people's you know it's when other people are there to nurture you encourage you um support you that you can be your best self so for instance if if like you you're you're a musician you know you need people around you to say hey that's great that's fantastic you know you should take that on and oh i know someone who could help you know you build it through the community and you say you know you're producing your own music which is very much your music but you're able to do it express that creativity and that individuality because you've got a supportive community around you and and so you know we have this sort of tremendous paradox that you you can't really be your own true self without the people around you it's the society which enables you to to become that person and we strengthen ourselves through strengthening each other and and and it's a question of building that community and building that community and building that community building that sense of belonging and turning it into something very deliberate very focused where we're going to walk the path together and so what peter hutchison and i've done is to try to distill this into a very simple political story because the story is absolutely crucial in politics and it goes as follows it says the world has been thrown into disorder by the powerful and nefarious forces of capitalism and and their neoliberal attack dogs tell us that our role in life is just to smash each other down and to grab everything we can and to behave like selfish greedy bastards because that's how they behave and they assume that we're all like them uh but we're not and and the the inflection point comes when the heroes of the story who are the ordinary citizens of the land realize that that's not them that's being described at all because there are very different people we are kind decent empathetic people who want to belong we want community who want to look after each other who want a better world for themselves but for everyone else at the same time and by coming together and by building this politics of belonging based around the strengthening of our own communities the strengthening of our decision making the strengthening of our economic control of what surrounds us we can restore harmony to the land
Speaker 1wow well i'm not even gonna try and follow that with anything so i'm just gonna tell everybody listening george's new book written with peter hutchinson called the invisible doctrine is out now it is available everywhere please buy a copy buy two steal it share it do whatever you got to do but make sure you get your hands on it and read the thing george can also be followed on blue sky at george mombio and please check out his amazing website at mombio.com for all of his latest writing events and loads more cool stuff as well george thank you so much for giving us your time today mate it's been a real honor and thank you for always being such a beacon of wisdom and light and clarity and sense in a world that often feels like it's going crazy Your work has inspired and continues to inspire millions around the world. So, thank you so much for everything you've done to fight the good fight for your entire life. And long may you continue. Thanks, George. We appreciate you, man.
Speaker 2Thanks so much, James.
Speaker 1Total pleasure. A real delight to talk to you. You too, man. Thank you so much. Cheers, George. Thanks, mate. Bye-bye, then. See you, man. Bye. And he's gone. George Monbiot, ladies and gentlemen. What an absolute legend. Some people have just got it figured out, man. You know what I mean? And he's always been able to explain things in a way that makes sense in a very non-academic and technical way. He's just fucking right on, man. I've been a fan and a reader of his for many, many years. And he just continues to deliver the goods time after time after time. So, if you're new to George's work, you've got a lot of good stuff to catch up on, man. Check out George Monbiot on YouTube and all of his previous podcasts and interviews and articles and books. And he's just a dude, honestly. I hope you enjoyed that little preview there of some of the stuff he does a deep dive into in his latest masterpiece, The Invisible Doctrine. And please go and show him some love on all of his socials and get involved and amplify the message and the cause. And, of course, heed the words as well. Because, as George said, if we're going to change anything, it's going to be on us, man. We've got to change it from the bottom upwards. It ain't going to come down from the top. So, let's get connected, man. We're stronger together. Let's work together. Cast our petty differences aside and realize that if we yearn for belonging, then the best, coolest, most powerful club to belong to on Earth is the one that's right on your doorstep. And if you want to connect with me as well, I'm also on Blue Sky. I don't use that other place anymore, that cesspit of hell broth formerly known as Twitter. Unfortunately, I built up a big following on there. I loved that place for years, but I refuse to use it. I'm now over on Blue Sky at James. And on Insta at JamesKennedyUK and all the usual other places. Please help me out by subscribing to the podcast. It's free. It doesn't cost you nothing. You're not going to end up on a mailing list. You know, it's nothing like that. It just helps the algorithm to... I don't know what the fuck it does, but it does something. So, help me out. Just click the damn button. And that's it, man. I'm over and out. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. And I will see you next time with another awesome guest and another brilliant conversation. In the meantime, you know the drill. Take care of yourself, man. Scary times out there. And always take care of each other. Love you guys loads.
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