What Seems Impossible Can Become Inevitable

George Monbiot talked with journalist Rachel Donald of Planet Critical.

In a nutshell, Monbiot has many views in common with Chomsky: People with the money have become the people with the power, and the masses are voting based on "presumed consent," which means we cast a vote before it's clear what they really stand for. Times of equity in the west, were often times of brutality internationally as capitalism is a looting machine. But nation states are a recent introduction that we struggle to see past and assume it has to be like this. Things can change. It's useful to know the people at the top who are commanding or allowing the pilfering to continue, but also be aware that this current structure is the problem. We have made huge sweeping changes in the past, and it can happen again when just a quarter of us recognize that we're in a huge systems crisis. We can all live with sufficiency individually with luxuries once we recognize the benefit of our luxuries being public (everything from healthcare and education to community swimming pools). We're generally good people, but we're a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. Something will change.

Here's the video and a slightly abridged transcript below it. 

I tried to just remove any repetition of ideas along with all the filler words, and I took out Rachel's questions (a questionable choice because she added some excellent points), so this is all Monbiot's words. Bolding is all mine for faster skimming, and the link choices are mine as well. It's very long, so a perfect place to add in this very long xkcd cartoon! 

"I believe the fundamental issue is that economic power has been turned into political power. People with the money have become the people with the power, and the democracy we were promised has not materialized. Instead we have the power of these special interests who have a a particular interest in keeping things broadly as they are because that's how they got their money, that's how they achieved their power from business as usual and they don't want that to change. They might want to accelerate it; they might want to make it worse, but they don't want to make it better because that would mean either ceding power to us as a whole or ceding power to other interests which might, for instance, be trying to protect the living planet. So what we see again and again is these urgent calls for action from scientists from activists from everybody who understands and is concerned about these huge planetary dilemmas we face. And those calls are just brushed aside by governments who are listening to other people altogether, the people with the money.

We suffer from something which some political scientists call the folk theory of democracy. There's a very interesting book by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartles called Democracy for Realists where they say, in effect, that the great majority of people possess no politically useful information whatsoever and vote on the most ridiculous and trivial of concerns: the way someone looks, sounds, or something which has actually got nothing to do with that particular party. It's about feeling; it's about sensation. The idea that we judge politicians by their record and we vote accordingly and then those politicians go on to represent us because we've chosen them to do a particular job, that has never happened. I mean it's happened to a greater or lesser extent along a very narrow spectrum far far away from what democracy claims to be. Democracy is and has always been a kind of dust sheet thrown over oligarchic and corporate power. You can still see the shape of the oligarchic and corporate power underneath us, and it's a thin and fraying semblance which is covering up something much much bigger than itself. I think what we call democracy is actually radically ill suited to the task it claims to address, which is the task of representing us and ensuring that the people control their own destiny. Part of the reason for that is that society is a complex system, and complex systems cannot be controlled from the center. If you try to control complex systems from the center things are bound to go wrong. 

You could conceive of a democracy which did function but it would be one based on very different principles to the thing we call democracy today. It would be run on participatory and liberative democracy. There might be a role for representative democracy as well, but that would be secondary to the basic characteristic that the system would be run by the people themselves, and it would be far more responsive and far more engaged day-to-day process than the one we have at the moment. This thing we call democracy at the moment works as follows: every four or five years, you and I get an opportunity to put a cross on a piece of paper. If we're very lucky, and I don't think it's ever happened to be once at a general election, the people we voted for might come to form the government, which claims to represent us. But even if that miraculous thing does happen, what what have we actually voted for? We've voted for the entire manifesto. We've either voted to accept that manifesto in its entire or to reject that manifesto, and we've also voted for everything they might choose to do for the next four or five years. Now no-one in human history has ever voted for all of those things, not least because you can't anticipate what they might choose to do for the next four or five years. In other words this system is based on presumed consent. If you've got a majority you presume that the nation as a whole even including the people who didn't vote for you consent to every single thing that you choose to apply from your manifesto plus a whole lot of stuff which wasn't in the manifesto that you want to do for the next four or five years. Now we don't accept the principle of presume consent in sex; why should we accept it in politics? It's a profoundly illegitimate principle. We should not accept it. Because democracy is so innately corrupt for these reasons that it can't actually represent us, then it's wide open to subsidiary forms of corruption. It's wide open to the corporate lobbyists, the oligarchs representatives, getting the ear of government rather than the people being heard. Again and again what we see being passed is legislation that favors particular interest groups particularly those that fund political parties rather than society as a whole. . . . 

There is what the French call Les Trente Glorieuses, the 30 glorious years between 1945 in 1975 when, in the Western World, governments were more representative of society as a whole. In the UK during that period we had the NHS introduced, mass council housing, a proper robust economic safety net created the welfare state. In other words, we had major investment in public services. We had the sort of public infrastructure built that we still benefit from today. So you could say that those governments were closer to the people than the governments before or after. 

But at the global level there is still grotesque exploitation taking place and driven often by those very governments that we look back to with such fondness. We almost look at the history of the world at that time as if there were two completely different worlds. There was one in which you had inspiring leaders such as Clement Attlee who were providing us with the kind of state support and public services that we all deserve, and on the other you had this succession of appalling coups of colonial brutality, of attempts to crush independence movements, the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba and Salvador Allende, coup d'état in Guatemala, in Iran, the hideous treatment of people in Kenya where all the Kikuyu were herded into concentration camps. Endless atrocities all over the world. What you can say about that period is that the fruits of colonial exploitation, of colonial looting, were better distributed within Western Nations than they had been before. But the coercive relationship between the rich Nations and the poor ones was the same as it was before. . . . 

There's an argument that exploitation actually intensified during that period. The brutality was really quite something. It was the end of Empire as previously constituted, and so there were sort of extremely vicious attempts to put independence back in its box. But it was also a time in which the Cold War was used as an excuse for supporting the most horrendous dictators, proxy leaders effectively, people who are operating on behalf of either Western interests or of Soviet interests and brutalizing their own populations on behalf of those interests. So in some ways things were even worse than they were before. The looting machine continued. That is what capitalism is: it is a looting machine; it's an ever expanding frontier grabbing resources, exploiting people, people sucking the value out of them, and transferring that into the hands of more powerful people. . . . 

With virtually every aspect of our economic and political organization, you have the sense of "I wouldn't start from here." if we're trying to solve a problem like the existential environmental crisis the Earth systems crisis that we now face, I wouldn't start from here. But sadly here is where we are. The nation state itself is woefully ill suited to this challenge, and, in fact, for most people around the world, the nation state is a very recent introduction. If you were to wander around Europe in the middle of the 19th century and ask people which nation they belong to, most people wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about. They might be part of a city state or a province of a wider enormous empire, but there just weren't the nations that we see as set in stone today. So, many forms of our organization, like the current form of so-called representative democracy, which really isn't anything of the kind, we assume that it could only be like that; that's the only way things could ever be. There can't be anything better. There are maybe some things worse than that which occurred in the past, but this is now set in stone. One thing that any good history of the world will show you is that there are many many different ways to do things, many different forms of organization, and many potentials which haven't yet been explored. We have an incredible capacity to do things differently both individually and collectively, yet we get stuck, trapped in a single mode. That applies in our own individual lives just as much as it applies in the national or the international scope of life. In Dante's Inferno, the seventh circle of hell was a place where nothing ever changed. He got that so right. . . .

What we have constantly is governments trying to tell us, "We're all in this together." In fact that was a phrase repeatedly used by David Cameron and George Osborne who were two of the more elite ministers we've ever suffered in this country who were definitely not in it together with us as they imposed swinging austerity, horrendous cuts to public services, because it didn't matter to them because they didn't use those public services. The people they represented didn't use those public services. About the only ones they used and only occasionally were the roads, which is why so much money gets poured into roads while everything else is starved. They didn't use the National Health Service or public education service. They just didn't need the great majority of public services let alone the welfare state because they're able to buy themselves out of that. Their government, just like the current one in the UK, is the perfect representation of the "them and us" political culture. They claim to speak on our behalf; they claim to govern on our behalf, but in reality they do no such thing. They are the representatives on Earth of the oligarchs and the corporations. So we have this illegitimate political model which is legitimized by the claim that it's a former democracy when it patently is not, unless you're talking about democracy in the weakest and thinnest of all possible senses. 

We should look at who are the people in particular pouring money into politics, which is perhaps the most important of all issues. We need to know who those people are, what they represent, and what they want. But we also need to see the the big structural picture because this is something which doesn't fundamentally change. The individual faces and names might change from one generation to the next, but those structures of oppression and coercion remain in place. So we need to know the names, but we need to be able to see beyond the names as well to see that this is something which is baked in to the current political model. Then, having seen that and decided that that is a repeated feature of the model, we can make more sensible decisions about what the alternatives might be. . . . 

At first I thought [government stripping the right to protest] was peculiar to to the UK. The introduction of these extremely repressive acts: the 2022 Police Act, the 2023 Public Order Act. These laid on top of a whole lot of previous extreme acts like the 1986 Public Order Act, the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, and a whole load of others since then. For a while they were the most repressive Draconian laws introduced in any OECD country in modern times to crush the life out of protest and specifically out of environmental protest. But now very similar laws have been springing up all around the world. It turns out that these laws have been pushed by the dark money network of junk tanks, the organizations that call themselves think tanks, but there's nothing to do with thinking in them at all. They're just lobby groups hired by billionaires and corporations, and they've been pushing a corporate template for the laws they'd like to see to prevent us from challenging their destruction of the living planet. So we now see very similar laws cropping up across US states being introduced at the state level, specifically by the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, which was one of the groups funded by the Koch brothers among others. We see the use of the Atlas Network, which is this overarching meta junk tank set up by Antony Fisher, the same guy who set up the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK whose purpose is to coordinate the activities of these dark money neoliberal networks that's been introducing or pushing for the introduction of very similar laws across several European countries and beyond. So we see this horrendous ramping up of repression against people who are trying to challenge those who are destroying our life support systems. Now the penalties for peacefully protesting against the destruction of the living planet have just gone off the scale. It's just got utterly ridiculous. For peaceful protests in this country, you can get ten years in prison. If you very grievously assault someone, you get less than that. This is a sort of legislation that you would expect to see passed in China or perhaps in Egypt. In a so-called democracy, it's another sign of just how skin deep this claim to be a democracy is when peaceful protesters - who will be seen undoubtedly in future as heroes - are having the book thrown at them to this extent. Now in court, people are being deprived of the right to defend themselves because they can't talk about why they have taken the actions that they have. So you get the most unselfish people who are trying to protest against the destruction of what counts for all of us, which is a habitable planet, being treated as if they were a bunch of thugs having a ruck after closing time because they can't explain why they took the action that they took. So it just looks like mindless vandalism. That's how the government wants it to be portrayed. It's shocking how the judiciary, or parts of it, have fallen into line with this and just given the government what they want. There are no proper separation of powers in this country. . . . 

In Italy now environmental protesters are having anti-mafia laws thrown at them. They're being treated as if they're an organized crime network. We're constantly being told we're terrorists, and we have anti-terror laws thrown at us. In fact the 2000 Terrorism Act has been used against environmental protesters in this country when we're the most peaceful protesters in history. It's remarkable how amazingly peaceful we have remained. Every so often there's a massive media drive to try to characterize us as violent thugs, and it never works because they can't find any actual instances despite all the efforts by the police. Spies are working as a provocateur to try to get us to ramp up protests so that they become violent. We're just innately resistant to that as a movement. The environmental movement does not like violence, and it doesn't do violence, and they're constantly trying to portray us as if we do. They're constantly trying to make us do it. 

You'll be very well aware of the whole spy cops scandal where we were comprehensively infiltrated, and women were effectively raped by policemen pretending to be protesters systematically over many years. Those police father children with those women. It's utterly shocking and extraordinary episode in our history. We know that the undercover cops are still in our movement, and they're still trying to do the same things. They're still trying to turn us into a violent movement. It's quite extraordinary how we've resisted; it's a brilliant thing. But it doesn't make any difference to the media, and it doesn't make any difference to the government, both of whom are faithfully following the script written by the dark money junk tanks operating on behalf of the oligarchs and the corporations. It is a script. We've seen now how this Atlas Network is pushing exactly the same story everywhere. It's a story founded on lies about who we are, about what we're trying to do, and it's a story that leads to Draconian repression. There's nothing ad hoc or accidental about this. This is a program, and we're subject to that program. The great courage of people like Gail Bradbrook and of the many other activists who have who have remained resolutely nonviolent despite endless provocations, endless attempts to portray us as otherwise and yet still remain calm and proud and still in the midst of this media storm, is one of the things that inspires me most.

I define violence as assaults on people. We constantly see governments and police and courts trying to define violence as assaults on property, but that's not violence. You can say it's criminal damage, but that's not the same as violence. Violence is hurting a person or potentially another living animal. It's hurting something sentient which can feel pain. Damage to property, in many cases, I believe that is justifiable, particularly when that property is being used as an instrument to cause much much greater damage. For instance if it's an oil pipeline or mining equipment which is destroying our precious Earth systems - damage which will be felt for the whole of the rest of the span of humanity's time on Earth - then absolutely you can commit the crime of criminal damage to prevent a far greater crime. That's always been seen, under sensible laws, as a defence. In many cases it's been used successfully as a defence by nonviolent direct activists. . . . 

The most important thing [for environmental movements] to do is to grow; in this case this is one of the few forms of growth which is actually positive. We just need to get a lot bigger, and in fact we know more or less precisely how big we need to get: we need to reach 25% of the population. There's been a series of both observational and experimental studies showing that 25% is more or less a social tipping point. If you can bring 25% of the population on board, committed to a new idea, a new way of doing things, new perspective, then we see society tip. Social tipping points have been known about for a while. It's recognized that society, in common with ecosystems, with banking systems, with so many other systems, is a complex system, and complex systems have tipping points. They have adaptive and emergent characteristics. They stabilize themselves under certain conditions of stress, and then they accelerate towards a critical threshold when the stress gets beyond a certain point. Then they'll suddenly flip into a different equilibrium state. In the case of society, those characteristics, which are innate to all such complex systems, are amplified by the fact that we are hyper-sociable mammals constantly looking at where the social wind is blowing. Our whiskers are twitching all the time to see which way things are going, and we don't want to be left behind. If we perceive that the wind has changed, we tack round to catch that wind. What seems to happen is that at 25%, that's the point at which we perceive the wind has changed. So you'll get then a general social movement towards that new place. This is how so many things that seemed impossible when we were in the thick of them, suddenly changed. 

If a generation or two ago you'd asked gay rights campaigners if there was a real prospect of equal marriage legislation in countries like the UK, many people would have said, 'Well you know it's what we want and what we're striving for but just look at how conservative this country is. Of course that's not going to happen.' If you said, What do you think the chances of it happening under a conservative government are?' They said, 'Don't be ridiculous.' And yet it happened under one of the most appalling conservative governments we've ever suffered, which was the Cameron government, because the government had no choice. Society had changed. It changed not by accident - it didn't just happen - it was because gay rights campaigners very successfully expanded the concentric circles of consent for the new perspective until they hit that critical threshold. And it happened more or less simultaneously across Western Europe. Suddenly you had an acceptance of equal marriage when it was just almost unthinkable before. So what seems impossible becomes inevitable, and it can switch between those two states very quickly just as in other complex systems. They can switch between one equilibrium state and another. We've seen that happen again and again: with smoking, with sexual liberation to a point but not nearly enough obviously, with women's liberation, with the rights of people born out of wedlock for instance. We never think about that today, but, by God, 100 years ago, if you were born out of wedlock, you were just a second class citizen from the outset, and you would never achieve the same status as anyone else. We don't think about it now because that's just disappeared as an issue altogether because, again, it reached a social tipping point. We see a situation which seems completely hopeless where people say, 'Well I've got to persuade everyone: my grumpy father-in-law who reads The Daily Mail, he's never going to agree to this. But he doesn't have to consciously agree to it. To go back to to the marriage equality issue, because I find it such an interesting one in that we've gone so far on that from this position of extreme rejection and conservatism and open homophobia right across the board and the stuff the media would say and then suddenly the change happens, I know someone who told me with a straight face of course 'I've always been in favor of equal marriage.' Now I know for a fact he was adamantly opposed to equal marriage, but if that's what he wants to believe, that's great! After the war everyone became a member of the resistance. People want to believe that they were on board with this before. That's fine; job done. . . . 

This isn't just about fuel sources. Of course fuel sources is absolutely crucial, but we're facing another systems crisis, and we got to be very careful not to reduce it to a climate crisis. It's an ecological crisis. It's an oceans crisis. It's a forest crisis. It's a soil's crisis. It's a novel entities, in other words, synthetic chemicals crisis. It's a cryosphere crisis. Every single aspect of Earth systems are in crisis. Every subsystem of the earth system is in crisis. It's a whole organizational basis which needs to change. It is of course a much much bigger ask than equal marriage, for example. But I still think that we can use the amazing work that previous generations or campaigners on other issues have done as part of our template for change. Things can seem just impossibly enormous. 

Another example of an extraordinary tipping was the cascading collapse of the Soviet Union where again it just seemed absolutely locked; it seemed set in stone. That's how many people record perceiving it, people who lived within the Soviet Union: This can't change; the power is so absolute, and the surveillance is absolute, and there's just no way of organizing; there's no way of breaking out of this. If you put a step out of line you're going to get sent to the gulag, and you'll never be seen again. So how on Earth do you change your system? Then suddenly it's gone, with extraordinary speed. That was a huge system; it dominated its part of the world absolutely. That's what we mean by a totalitarian system. Now we live under a totalitarian system; it's a system called capitalism. It's an extremely effective totalitarian state. In fact it seems to me sometimes there's more dissent under regimes that we acknowledge to be totalitarian than there is under our regime of supposed representative democracy. It works very effectively. I mean how many people in public life challenge economic growth? How many people in public life challenge the fact that a few people own so much while everybody else owns so little? How many people in in in public life challenge this extraordinary presumption in capitalism that the numbers in a person's bank account equate to the amount of natural wealth that they're allowed to own? How the hell does that work? Where does that come? It's just soaked into us; we don't even think about it how many people challenge capitalism. 

You have ferocious defenders of capitalism, but they don't even see what it is. They genuinely don't know we're just completely brainwashed, and very few people are prepared to dissent. There are dissenters, but somehow this combination of fairly Draconian laws (not as Draconian as in totalitarian regimes, but still pretty horrendous), ambition and the curtailment of ambition - you will not have a career if you step out of line - and the sort of force of social conformity reinforced so much by the media, which is generally dominated by offshore billionaires, people who don't even bloody live in this country but still tell us how to vote and think, this combination is extremely effective at making sure that we don't step out of line. So in some ways we're in a very similar system to the Soviet Union except we don't all immediately get thrown out into prison for dissenting. We don't have to be because on the whole we don't dissent. It can feel just as locked in as that system was, but it's potentially just as fragile. After all we are many there are few. We've got a very small number of people who benefit from business as usual, and it's shrinking with every year that passes as the whole planet gets used as a sacrifice Zone. As capitalism exploits people more and more in ever more extreme ways, fewer and fewer people are benefiting from this. The true beneficiaries number in the hundreds - people who basically make the system run as they want it to run and get exactly the results they want - they number in the hundreds. They're a tiny number of people. Sure the faces change, but it's that tiny group of people who needs to be overthrown. This is not a massive task any more than the overthrow of the power system in the Soviet Union was. Obviously they are massive tasks, but they're not a bigger task, and it's not a more impossible task than that. I think what we' got in our favor, if we can only articulated as such, is a potential for a very positive and inspiring vision of an ecological civilization.

There are many people who I believe have brought forward elements of that vision: Jeremy Lent with his fantastic writing in the patterning instinct; Kate Rayworth with with donut economics, many other people are putting in pieces I'd like to see being part of this vision, this thing I call Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury: the idea that we can't all aspire to private luxury. There's just not enough ecological space; there's not even enough physical space. Some people can enjoy public luxury today only because other people can't, a) because they're exploiting those other people - that's where the luxury comes from is from the exploitation of other people - but b) because if everyone in London had their own swimming pool and their own tennis court and their own art collection, London would cover half of England; England would cover the whole of Europe. There's just literally not space for it let alone ecological space. You would cook the planet in minutes if everybody tried to have their super yacht and their their super homes and their private jet and all the other things that the billionaires have. But we can all aspire to public luxury. We can have magnificent public art galleries and public parks and public swimming pools and public tennis courts and public health services and public transport systems and the rest of it, and those don't take space away from anyone. By sharing resources, we make them go much much further, and we don't push people out; we bring people in. So private sufficiency - we all have our own modest homes and our modest stuff within those homes - but if we want luxury, we pursue the luxury in the public domain.

By bringing together ideas like this, we create a picture of an ecological civilization which can become very attractive. Obviously a big part of that picture is the question of power: who's is in charge; who controls things; who makes decisions? The obvious and only answer is we do. There are templates, there are precedents for this: The participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, this city in southern Brazil, between 1989 and 2004, where really the people were in charge of the budget. They completely transformed the city as a result. 50,000 people every year would come together to decide how that money was going to be spent. It went from being at the bottom or towards the bottom of the human development index in Brazil to the city at the top of the human development index: Massive improvements in maternal mortality stats, infant mortality, in primary health care, in primary education, and sewage, in clean water, in public transport, you name it. To the extent that what any political scientist would tell you was impossible, happened. People took to the streets to demonstrate in order to have their taxes raised. They demonstrated in favor of higher taxes because they realized that if they spent their money together it went a lot further than if they tried to spend it individually. . . .

We don't have to be what we are, and we certainly don't have to be what we're told we are. We're constantly told we're worse people than we actually are. It's drummed into our heads all the time: the fundamental human values of selfishness and greed, and you're never going to change that. It's just not true. There's good science in this - loads of it across social science, anthropology, neuroscience -  those are not our fundamental values. Sure we've all got some selfishness and greediness but they're way down the list. Up top is like family, community, belonging, benevolence, altruism, empathy, wanting a world that's good not just for us but for other people as well. People have this sort of this really weird view of human nature because if you say to someone, 'What do you want to see happen? What sort of world do you want to live in?' They'll give you a nice vision of the world, a world that's good for everyone. But if you say to them, 'What sort of world do other people want to live in?' They say, selfishness and greed, fighting like stray dogs over a dustbin. That's because of the media. We're induced to believe that, and it's just not true; it's just not the way the great majority of people are. There are some people who are like that, and we've got a name for them they're called psychopaths. We are a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. That's our fundamental problem.

I'd like to platform a remarkable activist and thinker called Emma Smart who has served time in prison for her climate activism but has also had an amazing history, an extraordinary history of just fighting for the natural world by every nonviolent means possible in lots and lots of different roles and guises. I think she'd be an amazing person to interview if she would be up for it."