TED Talks Daily - (#5) Elise’s Top Ten: The new political story that could change everything | George Monbiot

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

To get out of the mess we're in, we need a new story that explains the present and guides the future, says author George Monbiot. Drawing on findings from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, he offers a new vision for society built around our fundamental capacity for altruism and cooperation. This contagiously optimistic talk will make you rethink the possibilities for our shared future.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Time to check on the skies. It's another sunny day in Calgary. Forecast calls for high levels of economic activity. Late afternoon, we've got a burst of potential in a place ranked North America's most livable city. Tomorrow, blue sky thinking in the blue sky city should hold steady. And the outlook remains optimistic throughout the week. So come grab your dreams and enjoy watching them take hold. It's possible in Calgary, the blue sky city.

For the full economic forecast, visit Calgary Economic Development.com. Hey everyone. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, the show where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. Welcome back to My Top 10 TED Talks, our first ever podcast playlist where we share a curated list of TED Talks from the archive on our feed all at once. The first few talks on my top 10 list have asked us to look inward. because the way we view and relate to ourselves affects who we are and how we act in the world. But now I want to look outward. So next up, I want to share journalist George Monbiad's talk from 2019 on the political stories that shape everything in our societies. It's a framing for understanding the modern world.

It feels like the world's in crisis and upheaval. And for me, this is a vital talk for the time we're living in. He explains why we're stuck in a system that just keeps failing us and offers a potential way out. Do you feel trapped in a broken economic model? A model that's trashing the living world and threatens the lives of our descendants, a model that excludes billions of people

while making a handful, unimaginably rich, that sorts us into winners and losers and then blames the losers for their misfortune. Welcome to neoliberalism, the zombie doctrine that never seems to die, however comprehensively it is discredited. Now, you might have imagined that the financial crisis of 2008 would have led to the collapse of neoliberalism. After all, it exposed its central features which were deregulating business and finance, tearing down public protections, throwing us into extreme competition with each other, as, well, just a little bit flawed. And intellectually, it did collapse, but still it dominates our lives. Why? Well, I believe the answer is that we have not yet produced a new story

with which to replace it. Stories are the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals. When we want to make sense of something, The sense we seek is not scientific sense, but narrative fidelity. Does what we are hearing reflect the way that we expect humans and the world to behave? Does it hang together? Does it progress as a story should progress? Now, we are creatures of narrative, and a string of facts and figures. however important facts and figures are, and I'm an empiricist, I believe in facts and figures,

but those facts and figures have no power to displace a persuasive story. The only thing that can replace a story is a story. You cannot take away someone's story without giving them a new one. And it's not just stories in general that we are attuned to, but particular narrative structures. There are a number of basic plots that we use again and again. And in politics, there is one basic plot which turns out to be tremendously powerful.

And I call this the restoration story. It goes as follows. Disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interests of humanity. But the hero will revolt against this disorder, fight those powerful forces, against the odds, overthrow them, and restore harmony to the land. You've heard this story before. It's the Bible story.

It's the Harry Potter story. It's the Lord of the Rings story. It's the Narnia story. But it's also the story that has accompanied almost every political and religious transformation going back millennia. In fact, we could go as far as to say that without a powerful new restoration story, a political and religious transformation might not be able to happen. It's that important. After laissez-faire economics triggered the Great Depression,

John Maynard Keynes sat down to write a new economics, and what he did was to tell a restoration story. And it went something like this. Disorder afflicts the land, caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the economic elite, which have captured the world's wealth. But the hero of the story, the enabling state, supported by working class and middle class people, will contest that disorder, will fight those powerful forces by redistributing wealth,

and through spending public money on public goods, will generate income and jobs, restoring harmony to the land. Now, like all good restoration stories, this one resonated. across the political spectrum. Democrats and Republicans, labor and conservatives left and right, all became broadly Keynesian. Then when Keynesianism ran into trouble

in the 1970s, the neoliberals, people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, came forward with their new restoration story. And it went something like this. You never guess what's coming. Disorder. conflicts the land, caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the overmighty state,

whose collectivizing tendencies crush freedom and individualism and opportunity. But the hero of the story, the entrepreneur, will fight those powerful forces, roll back the state, and through creating wealth and opportunity, restore harmony to the land. And that story also resonated across the political spectrum. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and labor, they all became broadly neoliberal. Opposite stories with an identical narrative structure. Then, in 2008, the neoliberal story fell apart,

and its opponents came forward with nothing. No new restoration story. The best they had to offer was a watered-down neoliberalism or a microwaved Keynesianism. And that is why we're stuck. Without that new story, we are stuck with the old failed story that keeps on failing. Despair is the state we forward. Despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails. When we have no story that explains the present and describes the future, hope evaporates. Political failure is at heart a failure of imagination. Without a restoration story that can tell us where we need to go, nothing is going to change. But with such a restoration story, story, almost everything can change. The story we need to tell is a story which will appeal

to as wide a range of people as possible, crossing political fault lines. It should resonate with deep needs and desires. It should be simple and intelligible, and it should be grounded in reality. Now, I admit that all this sounds like a bit of a tall order, but I believe that in Western nations, there is actually a story like this waiting to be told. Over the past few years, there's been a fascinating convergence of findings in several different sciences, in psychology, in anthropology, in neuroscience, in evolutionary biology, and they all tell us something pretty amazing, that human beings have got this massive capacity for altruism. Sure, we all have a bit of a bit of.

selfishness and greed inside us, but in most people, those are not our dominant values. And we also turn out to be the supreme cooperators. We survived the African savannas, despite being weaker and slower than our predators and most of our prey, by an amazing ability to engage in mutual aid. And that urge to cooperate has been hardwired into our minds through, natural selection. These are the central, crucial facts about humankind, are amazing altruism and cooperation. But something has gone horribly wrong. Disorder afflicts the land. Our good nature has been thwarted by several forces, but I think the most powerful of them is the dominant political narrative of our times, which tells us that we should live in extreme

individualism and competition with each other. It pushes us to fight each other, to fear and mistrust each other. It atomizes society. It weakens the social bonds that make our lives worth living. And into that vacuum, grow these violence. intolerant forces. We are a society of altruists, but we are governed by psychopaths. But it doesn't have to be like this. It really doesn't,

because we have this incredible capacity for togetherness and belonging. And by invoking that capacity, we can recover those, those amazing components of our humanity, our altruism and cooperation. Where there is atomisation, we can build a thriving civic life with a rich participatory culture. Where we find ourselves crushed between market and state, we can build an economics that respects both people and planet.

And we can create this economics around that great neglected sphere, the commons. The commons is neither market nor state, capitalism, nor communism. But it consists of three main elements, a particular resource, a particular community that manages that resource, and the rules and negotiations the community develops to manage it. Think of community broadband or community energy cooperatives or the shared land for growing fruit and vegetables that in Britain we call allotments. Commons can't be sold, it can't be given away,

and its benefits are shared equally among the members of the community. Where we have been ignored and exploited, we can revive our politics, we can recover democracy from the people who have captured it. We can use new rules and methods of elections to ensure that financial power

never trumps democratic power again. Representative democracy should be tempered by participatory democracy so that we can refine our political choices. And that choice should be exercised as much as possible at the local level. If something can be decided locally, it shouldn't be determined nationally.

And I call all this the politics of belonging. Now, I think this has got the potential to appeal across quite a wide range of people. And the reason for this is that among the very few values that both left and right share are belonging and community. And we might mean slightly different things by them, but at least we start with some language in common. In fact, you can see a lot of politics as being a search for belonging. Even fascists seek community, albeit a frighteningly homogenous community where everyone looks the same and wears the same uniform and chants the same slogans. What we need to create is a community based on bridging networks, not bonding networks. Now a bonding network

brings together people from a homogenous group, whereas a bridging network brings together people from different groups, and my belief is that if we create sufficiently rich and vibrant bridging communities, we can thwart the urge for people to borrow into the security of a homogenous bonding community defending themselves against the other. So, in summary, our new story could go something like this. Disorder afflicts the land Caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of people who say There's no such thing as society

Who tell us that our highest purpose in life Is to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin But the heroes of the story Us will revolt against this disorder We will fight those nefarious forces by building rich, engaging, inclusive and generous communities, and in doing so, we will restore harmony to the land. Now, whether or not you feel this is the right story,

I hope you'll agree that we need one. We need a new restoration story, which is going to guide us out of the mess we're in, which tells us why we're in the mess and tells us how to get out of that mess. And that story, if we tell it right, will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum. Our task is to tell the story that lights the path to a better world. Thank you. That was George Monby.

at the TED Summit in 2019. This is the fifth of 10 talks from the TED archives that we are reposting as part of our first podcast playlist of my top 10 talks. As we consider the narratives of the world, the systems that we're in, it really leads well into the next talk about institutions and institutionalized and structural racism. That's coming up next. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was produced and

edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonica Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballerazo. I'm Elise Hu. Thanks for listening. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month.

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