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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
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Jeremy Lent: Ultimately, you would in fact have a group of citizens themselves at that planetary level looking at what is really important based not on what one power bloc says, but what actually people want from around the world. This is one of these areas where something really has to unravel before we'll put this in place. Not suggesting this is going to happen 5 or 10 years from now, but what I am suggesting is that the initial notions for this around citizens assemblies, we can put our time and energy and investment in, and we are going to see this system unravel. It's terrifying. It's tragic. I don't want it. None of us who care about any kind of avoidance of suffering wants what we see happening. But it is happening. And we are going to find people asking more and more. We've got to reorganise the world in a different way.
Manda: Hey people. Welcome to Accidental Gods to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we were all to work together, there is still time to lay the foundation for a future that we would be proud to leave behind. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And as we look around the world at a system in collapse, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the old system is eating itself alive, how do we make a world that works for all of us, so that every single part of the web of life can thrive on a regenerating earth?
This is the question that animates this podcast, and it has animated all of the work of this week's guest, Jeremy Lent. Jeremy originally wrote 'The Patterning Instinct' and then 'The Web of Meaning', and now his latest book in this seminal trifecta is 'Eco Civilisation: Making a World That Works for all', and it does what it says on the tin. We spoke to Jeremy back in episode number 301, just after the last huge No Kings demonstrations in the US, and then we laid the foundations of this book. We explored the ways the current system is not fit for purpose, and then left the door open for this episode, which we have carefully timed so that you can pre-order the book in plenty of time.
Manda: It's out on the 26th of May in the US and the 28th in the UK, because historically, UK publishers always put books out on a Thursday so that they would be maximally counted in the Sunday Times bestsellers list. I'm not sure anybody cares about that anymore, but still, books go out on a Thursday because that's when books go out. One of those bits of arcane lore from the old system that maybe one day we will move more flexibly and step past. But in the meantime, there are links in the show notes, and you can follow them up. And I believe you will want to, because this is a genuinely utopian book in that it lays out pathways, route maps towards a future we would be proud to leave behind. Nobody is pretending that these are the only routes, but we are all agreed. I think that the values and beliefs underpinning the new system will have to be coherent. In the same way, the values of power over and beliefs in separation, scarcity and powerlessness are core to what Jeremy calls Wendigo, Inc. and on this podcast, we tend to call the death cult of predatory capitalism. Either way, it is very obviously living true to its name as we speak.
To those of you who have listened long term, I am sure Jeremy needs no introduction, but there's always someone for whom this podcast is new, and you are so welcome here. Thank you. And so for those of you to whom some of the people and ideas are fresh, Jeremy Lent was born in London, has a BA in English Lit from Cambridge, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was a former internet company CEO. Now he is an author, clearly a speaker, and a thought leader. He's founder of the Deep Transformation Network, which is a global community exploring pathways towards an ecological civilisation. And relatively newly, he is helping to co-create an eco civilisation visioning forum and various other umbrella seed banks to help bring into being the ideas that he has researched in such depth and breadth. Jeremy is one of those people who has given his life to the emerging of a system that will work for all of us, for the human and the more than human worlds. And so people of the podcast, please welcome Jeremy Lent, author, activist, thought leader, and disseminator of the ideas that could yet get us through the pinch point of the moment.
Jeremy Lent, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this amazing equinox day?
Jeremy Lent: Well, you know what they always say nowadays? Doing fine considering. It's a beautiful it's like a heat wave here.
Manda: Especially in the US.
Jeremy Lent: Yeah. Once in a historical hot through to climate breakdown heat wave in the west. But here in Berkeley, the weather's just balmy and really sunny and lovely. And, you know, I guess just being focussed so much on what is possible The world may be unravelleing, but I'm not taking it in with quite as much horror as i sometimes do. Maybe should I should be, because things are really bad right now. But it also, I think, is so valuable to just look at what's actually possible and just know all the energies that are around there to really forge something in place of what's going on.
Manda: Yes. And to honour the people who are doing amazing things. I noticed this morning that the Kennedy Centre had given an award to the people of the Twin Cities in Minnesota for their courage in the face of what they very kindly called federal overreach. And I thought that act in itself showed tremendous courage. And of course, the people who came out in their tens of thousands with their 3D printed whistles to to say, 'No, you're not doing this. We're all showing astonishing courage.' And it gives me great hope that as the old system, what you call in the book Wendigo, Inc. is very obviously falling apart. That decent people are stepping up and not going the way of Germany in 1930. We all asked, how did Germany end up where it was? Why did people do nothing? And people are not doing nothing. And I am in awe of those people and hope that as and when fascism comes to the UK, that we will all have similar courage. So - thank you to the people of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Twin Cities, and also to the Kennedy Centre for ignoring the fact that they've been renamed the Trump Kennedy Centre and giving out an award that he probably won't find very pleasing.
Manda: Leaving that aside, you and I talked shortly after the No Kings parades, which were another step forward with people into at least laying a boundary saying, 'This far and no further.' And in that time the world has grown more chaotic and your book has become, I would say, ever more important because, as Milton Friedman said, when things fall apart, the ideas that are lying around are the ones that will get picked up. And you're offering us a whole bunch of ideas. So last time we talked about Tina: "There is no alternative." And Wendigo Inc., which is the Egregore, the Moloch, the what is it? Nate Hagens calls it the superorganism. Right. And why it existed and why it was always inevitably, at some point, going to get to where it's got now. And that's only really the first quarter third of your book, because the rest is a pulling together of the multi-systemic ideas of how we could have an eco civilisation. So in this podcast, I would like to explore the ideas of eco civilisation. Can you outline for us what the basic principles are of an eco civilisation, and then we can begin to unpick how we get there?
Jeremy Lent: I'd love to do that. There's a core basic principle which is so simple. And pretty much anybody, I think in the world would agree with it. It makes so much sense to simply imagine what a system would look like if it set the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerated earth, which I imagine if you're if you're not a psychopath or a sociopath, probably anyone else in the world would agree that the system should be built on that kind of thing.
Of course, we know the system is built on totally different principles of extraction, exploitation, the wealth pump, the whole thing. And you can go one level beyond that core foundation and ask what does that mean? What are the principles that are different if you go to that next level? And there are things like a dominant system based on human supremacy, the sense that humans are somehow uniquely different from all the rest of life on earth, and we have a moral right to do whatever we want to mistreat animals, destroy ecosystems. So an eco civilisation is fundamentally different - based on the sense of the intrinsic value of all life. Human supremacy - that sense of extraction, exploitation - leads to the idea of the dominion of capital. We live in a world where it's considered okay for capital's need to replicate itself, reproduce non-stop - this is considered to be the core of the system. And it's all right.
Jeremy Lent: So instead, imagine a system where the dignity of all people has primacy rather than the dignity of capital. And it goes on like this rather than commoditisation and homogenisation based on heterogeneity and diversity and rather than hierarchies. And there's a core concept of subsidiarity, which is pushing power to the lowest level in the system. So instead of a structural inequality and the whole system designed for that wealth pump, you design it for equity. It's not saying exact equality, but rather equity, a sense of fairness, a sense that no matter where you're born in the world, you have an equal opportunity, equal rights to flourish in your particular way in the world. And instead of incentives for selfish behaviour, like if you're basically in this system, if you're selfish, basically a true arsehole, that is actually considered okay, and you get rewarded for that. So imagine a system where it was designed for cooperation, where basically acting according to our core human evolved sense of what's fair and right. And imagine if you actually got the rewards for doing that rather than that being working against the system. Those are the fundamental premises, and those things can apply to every aspect of our global civilisation, whether it's economics or wealth structuring or technology or urban design or governance or law. And really what the book does is looks at each of those areas and looks at people who have actually done the work to figure out how a system could look like if it were based on those kinds of principles.
Manda: Thank you - which is absolutely true because a lot of people exactly, as you say, are doing their own bits, but very few people are doing the actually extraordinarily hard work of knitting them all together. And it's the knitting them together that produces a unified theory of change that then for me, anyway, stacks up much more strongly because people can pick a part they're interested in. Let's say we want to change the food and farming system, and there's a shit ton of yes buts that arrive of yes, but you can't do that because. And they're all linked into because the rest of the system is carrying on as before. And this is perfectly true. We can't change just one part within the system. We're going to have to change the entire system.
Jeremy Lent: Exactly.
Manda: And the only good thing we can say about the current leader of the free world and his minions is that they are actually taking a sledgehammer to the system. If Bernie Sanders or someone like him had somehow become president and had even looked at the sledgehammer, there would have been a military coup by the afternoon. But somehow Trump is getting away with just destroying the entire post-war agreements. And everybody's thinking that's not very clever, but nobody's actually stopping him. So given that, as we said, the ideas that are lying around are the ones that'll be picked up. And given that we are in capitalism and it is easier to imagine the extinction of all life on earth than it is to imagine the end of capitalism - and it is the flow of capital and the accumulation of capital and the structures of capital and the vigilante bond markets, stopping governments from actually doing what they're intended to do, which is spend money… i think it's worth first looking at how we could change the economic part of the system in the understanding of ourselves and people listening, that none of this is being done in isolation. The plan is never to do that. The plan is somehow, and I would like to get to this before the end of the podcast, doing it all at the same time. In a world where we're not just foraging for food in the rubble of the last civilisation, which would not be fun. So in your book, you break the grip of capitalism into economics and wealth and finance, which begins to make it slightly easier, although it also means that each of those could be a separate podcast in their own. Each of them could be an entire podcast series on their own. So we're only going to skim across the surface, but with a surface skim. How do we change the ways that we share and account for and accumulate value?
Jeremy Lent: Thank you. This is a core part of it. And I love your focus on the fact that all these things weave has to come together. And so that's really important to remember. Whenever we're talking about each of these things, it's very easy and natural to say, well, that wouldn't work because of this and that. And so we have to think of all this becoming a totally a different coherent system with a different weave. But to get that really great place to begin, really at a very high level, I'll take a look at the sort of headlines for each of those: the economics and finance and wealth distribution, if you will.
With economics, the simple place to begin is looking at what are the fundamental drivers behind economic theory and what people focus on today is this notion of GDP, gross domestic product being somehow like a measure of prosperity, and the success of a politician or a country is based on. Well, how well are they growing the GDP? Is it more than 3% a year? That's good. Or if it's going negative. Heaven forbid it's a recession. And one of the fundamental things together is that that is absolutely the wrong measurement. What GDP actually measures is essentially the rate at which the system is sucking living forces of the of the living earth and human behaviour into the monetised economy. Yeah, that's simply all it measures. So if you have an oil spill, that's great for GDP because then you have to clean it up. And then if people get really sick from it, even better for the GDP, because then they have to be hospitalised. And that's part of this. So it's like everything that is whatever is good or bad is good for GDP. But if you grow your own vegetables in the garden, that's a disaster for GDP.
Manda: Terrible.
Jeremy Lent: And if you give them away to your friends, even worse, because you should be selling them. So it's completely backwards in terms of what it measures. So, you know, an alternative framework is the one that I bet many people here on this podcast know well is Kate Raworth Doughnut Economics, which is a brilliant and like a whole different paradigm of thinking about economics. And one of my chapters is called 'Living Within the Doughnut'. And very simply, the Doughnut measures, the outer elements of the doughnut are basically all the different measurements of what would be required for sustainable living on the earth. And of course, we've blown through most of those, whether it's climate, atmosphere, pollution, you name it. So we have to live within the doughnut on that side. But the doughnut has an inner ring and the inner ring, basically are the things that would set the conditions, the material conditions for people to basically have a normal life, basic access to food, health care, housing, security, education, what are the basics you need? And her point is that's it's been measured and quantified. Like what about what we need to do is live within the doughnut? And when you look at the measurements, there's not a single country in the world that actually lives within the doughnut. Global north countries have totally blown through the boundaries on the outer. Even if some of the inner are somewhat acceptable, and most countries in the global South don't even come close to meeting the inner. And some of them are even breaking through in the outer.
Manda: Can I ask a question that this goes beyond the book? Because this is something I think about a lot. And you think about it a lot. So I don't often get a chance to ask people, and I am enamoured of Kate's work, and I think she should get the Nobel Prize for Economics. I want to lay that on the ground first. I think it's brilliant. It creates a completely different model. That said, the model is still predicated on old paradigm thinking, as far as I can tell, and we need to widen the boundaries quite a lot. The planetary boundaries, which are currently the measure of the outside were created by the Stockholm Institute. They named nine of them, one of which was the ozone layer. And actually the ozone layer is one of those things that was complicated but not complex. Once we stopped producing ozone, it began to close. So that boundary isn't actually ever going to be breached unless somebody starts pumping refrigerants into the atmosphere for the fun of it. But let's assume not. That leaves eight, of which we have blown through every single one. So we need, I would say, some more nuanced measures of the outer boundary. The inner boundary is the one that I find really fascinating. If we are aiming for a future in which all sentient beings can flourish, can have lives of meaning and purpose, where they have agency and freedom to move. And they haven't just got Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but they've got all of what we currently consider to be essential to a life well lived. Then that inner boundary, I would suggest, needs to be predicated on different values. And so, for instance, education being available to all children, we'd have to define the nature of education because at the moment I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK, most schools are still teaching on a 19th century model that produces kids fit to serve, either to manage or work in factories.
Manda: And this is not the future that we are offering to them. We also would need concepts of what life is for. Jobs are a product of capitalism. Indigenous cultures and communities don't have jobs. They just live together in community and the community flourishes and produces joy and wonder and in passing, there is food to eat. I did hear a podcast the other day`; Your Undivided Attention, in which Asa Raskin was sayingthat somebody found an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and gave them all Starlink phones, and within a month they were starving because the hunters were all hunched over their phones. And this proves that it's not our culture that's bad. It's the phones that are bad. (!) And that exploded so many parts of my brain, and it was splattering off the ceiling. And I still can't believe that somebody would do that thing. But the concept that that's a good thing - that needs to be eradicated as part of our baseline. And we need to be looking at what is it really? What is it that allows human flourishing? And I think it's more complex. I think Kate did a very good job of taking what we currently consider within the UN and sustainability goals and all the rest of it for human flourishing. But I'm really interested in what you if you were redesigning the inner ring of the doughnut, the floor through which we must not step - have you any ideas of what would be there? I understand that I haven't asked you this before, and it may be that this is just too complex, and here is not the time. But I'm curious just to see where you take it.
Jeremy Lent: Yeah. No, absolutely. And that's, I mean, in a way, this is why the book looks at every aspect of what we call our world system, what was known as civilisation, whether we agree with that word or not. So in a way, you know, Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics is one aspect of what, maybe 10 or 12 different dimensions of what we're looking at. And appropriately as an economics, it does look at material conditions, you know, more than some of these other things. So a lot of what I look at actually is some education is a great example. Other examples like law or finance actually. And in many of these examples, what we find is that things we take for granted as just sort of the way it is, is actually the product, just like capitalism, just like so many other things, the product of this really weird way of thinking that arose in early modern Europe around the 17th century in the state of education is more like the 18th, 19th centuries. But these are things that are absolutely against what is required for human true human flourishing. So education, to your point, exactly. The very notion we have of kids, you know, in geometric room, sitting at a desk with sort of total surveillance being looked at by this great authority, the teacher at the very top, telling them what they need to think, conditioning ways of thinking in them if they want to go to their bathroom to put their hand up and be allowed out, like it's the actual structure of this was not in order to allow children to learn how to flourish.
Jeremy Lent: It was basically designed by Bismarck's state of militarised Prussia to actually turn the whole population into military machines. So it was like it was designed and it was actually there was a quote from one of the sort of philosophers helping to design it, that what we've got to do is basically destroy the sense of free will of the children and turn them into people who, like, accept love of their nation, love of their country, love of, you know, what is good, which is determined by the authority that tells them so. Our entire system is designed not for to create people, to question, grow, flourish, but quite the opposite. And it's done a great job of that. And of course, market capitalism took the idea of that militarised state and then transformed it into inculcating basically consumerist ideas and the ideas of if you want to be successful, you've got to get really good at tech so you can get status in the world.
Jeremy Lent: So education is one of these things that actually has been totally thought rethought in different ways. Somebody called Manish Jain and many others developing a whole network group of real thinkers. They call themselves eco cities around the world, really focusing on this idea of unlearning, unlearning the conditioning that society puts into people. And it turns out that if you actually set the conditions for just little kids to create their own education to do what they want and go where their interests are. If you do that skilfully over years, they actually end up not just being much more fulfilled human beings, but they love the idea of education and they end up wanting, once they discover this is the way the world works, you got to like pass exams to get. They end up doing better on a on exams, doing being more successful at college, being more self-directed because they've been developed in their own way. This is one example of so many. When you look at what our systems that we just take for granted, you find that they didn't just arise in some evolved way. They rose for very for as part of this authority, this kind of wealth pump concept that has gone through and through.
Manda: Right. Thank you. Yes, yes. Daniel Schmachtenberger was home educated, which always is my core example of the fact that home education is a good thing if you do it right. So I think we're definitely agreed that we want a ceiling beyond which we don't break, and a floor beyond which we don't sink within an economy that is predicated on flourishing of the ecosphere rather than extraction from and pollution of destruction of all that lives. How then, does finance and wealth accumulation fit in?
Jeremy Lent: Right, exactly. I'm glad we went back to that original trio, which really works well together so well. Finance is another one of these really just like education. You know, we it seems so complicated and we just take for granted that money just appears and that's the way it is. And then you do a little bit of delving into it and you discover the way money works is that banks create money because they create debts. And the government told them to do that or changes interest rates if they want more money. And that's how money works. Well, it turns out it's not just how money works, it's how it developed to work within this monetary system. And basically it's this whole notion of debt based money is something that simply began actually in England when the king, a few hundred years ago needed to get a loan to finance his military. But all the different wealthy merchants of the time, they said, well, I'll tell you what, we'll loan you money, but we're not going to loan it to you, King. We're going to loan it to the country and then the whole country has to pay us back. Well, that was the beginning of debt based money. That was the beginning of the Bank of England. And ever since then, basically the way money is created is by the banks, like privately owned, shareholder owned entities are given the power to actually just create money out of the blue. Basically, it's called fiat money, which is basically like the first sentence in Genesis, you know, and God created the earth, this word, because that's how money gets created. They just decide we're going to do it.
Manda: Yeah, they just make it up.
Jeremy Lent: But it's done through debt and they decide where to send that money based on where they can make the most money. So the entire system of money creation is structurally designed to create debt, which then has to be paid back in an interest rate, which is why you have to have a growth based GDP growth economy just to keep things stable. It's like a game of musical chairs where they keep taking a chair away and no one wants to be the one to default. So everyone's got to fight harder to make sure they're the one in the next chair. It's a design system to get everyone at each other's throats to beat the other one. So they're not the ones who go down with because they can't pay the debt. That's the way it does. It doesn't have to be anything like that. There are serious minded, sober economists and financiers for the last hundred years that have basically looked at what would happen if the state democratically decides to create money by putting it into where it's needed the most. So the state can choose to give money basically as universal basic income to everybody, or it can decide to put money into some institutions.
Manda: Hospitals.
Jeremy Lent: Hospitals. Exactly. Or an area that has really been you know, it's going through very economically hard times. It can choose to put money into whole department to restructure that area. It can choose to do that. The only thing stopping it is the system that is institutionalised, this basic element of capitalism. So this is one example of like, once you look at this, it's it's like, are you living in Alice in Wonderland? No, this is actually the world we live in. Yeah. And at first when I was discovering this, I was going, well, maybe I'm reading some radical polemicist. Let me read another researcher on this, let me read another one. And I started to realise that all the people who have looked at this are saying the same thing. So and that's a big part of what this book is about, is not to try to put harebrained ideas out that some brilliant genius might have come up with, but others don't agree with. These are solid ideas that are based on real thoughts. Yeah. So that's kind of finance, if you will, just at the top level, but then wealth distribution. I mean, even more amazing when you think about it. So there's this kind of myth that goes on in the world today. Like basically, maybe some people agree that if you're an inherited billionaire or something, it's kind of not fair. You're a nepo baby or whatever it might be. But people say, well, at least you know the most of the billionaires are self-made and they're entrepreneurs, they kind of deserve it. Look what you know, look what they've done. And they've really made all of us given something to all of us. Whatever.
Manda: Do you know anyone who actually says this anymore?
Jeremy Lent: Well, I don't know personally, some of these people, because I tend to be in a particular place. But I think that this is the mainstream way of thinking and this is what is this is why it's allowed, and this is why we don't see a popular movement to say, we've got to do something about this. But these are the ideas that this book looks at. If you actually look at the wealth and there's this, you know, there's this massive wealth in the world today and material wealth, and we recognise that a lot of this wealth has been created at the extraction from nature and from the living earth, and that's something we can then explore maybe in a few minutes. But the fact is, we live in a time of unprecedented material wealth in the world for human beings. But the thing is, 99% or whatever, the vast amount of that wealth does not by right belong to any one person. It's an accumulated accumulation of wealth over the millennia. It's a wealth that first happened when people first developed basic technologies, and when people learned about farming and developed seed resources. And it's wealth. That was really the moral right to all of us. And then it's when people discovered electricity, and then more recently, things like the internet or all of these things that doesn't belong to one person. It's something that a simple fact of being born into this earth today gives each person an equivalent right to what, what I call him the book and what other people have called the common wealth. So take that idea, that ridiculous colonial English idea of the Commonwealth. Actually use those words how they're meant to be. And there is a Commonwealth and that is available.
Jeremy Lent: Should be available to all of us instead. Mark Zuckerberg comes along, does a few tweaks to the tiniest little 0.1% of all that Commonwealth that allowed him to be in this place creates something called Facebook copyright it and now he's worth like whatever, $350 billion when basically almost half the world is not able to even earn enough money to ensure that they have enough nutrition for a long and healthy life. Now, that to me is the most extreme moral egregiousness of this system. And you know, once you start from that foundation, you lead to very different ways of thinking about wealth distribution. You look at you can look at things like universal basic income, which, you know, we both talked at other times about those challenges about in this current system, a universal basic income just applied could backfire in all kinds of weird things would happen. But if you consider it not even as a universal basic income, but a universal common dividend that is available and should be available and should be given by some trust to every person by virtue of just being born into as a human being on this earth. And that would fundamentally change essentially every aspect of our economy and how the world works. It doesn't mean that you can't have people, you know, enjoying wealth from something that they have done that is very meaningful and valuable to people. But there would most definitely be a a cap on that wealth. And, you know, there's some somebody called Ingrid Robeyns who's written a really great book recently, what she calls Limitarianism, which is really laying out the very clear and simple philosophical foundations for exactly that, establishing that kind of cap on wealth.
Manda: Oh, I want to talk to her because Plato suggested that there should be a limit of 20 to 1 on the highest paid to the lowest paid. And that seems to me, you know, if you're going to have I think there shouldn't be pay. I think money shouldn't exist. I think we should be moving into a post financialized world, in which case all of this is hypothetical. But on the way there, we definitely need caps.
Jeremy Lent: Yeah, absolutely.
Manda: The argument against them seems to be so. Richard Murphy is a modern monetary theorist in the UK, and Modern monetary theory is the one that says governments make the money and they have a duty to make it and spend it. And the vigilante bond markets should not be allowed to stop us. He had quite an interesting conversation with Zack Polanski, because one of the things that's happened since you started writing this book is that Zhoran Mamdani in the US and Zack Polanski in the UK have come along and are making very clear new or new to the legacy media commentary and ideas that taxing wealth is absolutely essential and useful and good, and it's really hard to argue against it. Richard says you won't be able to tax the billionaires because they'll just move their money away, which I find it interesting because he's a monetary theorist. He definitely knows that it would be a good thing. His book was called the Joy of Tax. He just says, you won't get it because they have the capacity to slide it away. And I am thinking that most of the tax havens in the British Virgin Islands are whatever Panama are actually British protectorates, and anywhere else is probably under the sway of the US or has been until very recently. It should not, i would have said, be impossible to tax the billionaires to make sure that they cannot move their money offshore. And if they do, then you start taxing assets. And if they move everything into cryptocurrencies, which seems to be stablecoin, seems to be at the moment, the potential shift of choice, because they can see that the dollar is no longer going to be a fiat currency, then we have to find a way to tax that. And I wonder, is that something that you're thinking about or that you're seeing in the, the groups that you're in?
Jeremy Lent: Yes. And you know, you raise a lot of really important topics there. So let me kind of unpack a few of them. I mean, one is there is this argument, of course, that everyone uses all the time. The billionaires will just move out. In California, we're looking at the legislation for a one time wealth tax, and that's the argument people use, the argument people have used in New York with Mamdani and all this stuff. Well, actually, practically speaking, just so you know, it turns out that doesn't really happen very much. Doesn't happen in practical terms. People don't want to move out of where they. Of course, if you're a billionaire and you spend your life in your superyacht, that's one thing. But for most people, they actually want to live in the area where their family is, and they're not going to do that anyway. But the point is, if they were to do that. If that's the risk it points to the fact that what is needed is basically common collaborative approaches to these things. This is part of the reason why our system has evolved in such a terrible way, because it's almost like this notion of the race to the bottom. And you see this in the US, for example, where Delaware gave the best laws for corporations to basically extract and exploit for maximum shareholder value. Other, other states were more constrained. You shouldn't. So of course, every corporation goes and then incorporates in Delaware, simple.
Manda: Has its head offices in Delaware.
Jeremy Lent: And you get the same race to the bottom in globalisation with countries, you know, one, one country tries to protect its workers and says, we've got to have a minimum wage so they don't like end up working 18 hours a day and still live on starvation wages. Another country says, hey, yeah, we've just been taken over by another neoliberal autocrat. Welcome corporations. Where are the corporations going to go to the country that allows them to do whatever they want. So that's what we've seen with decades of globalisation. But the same thing applies to things like wealth tax. And the thing that is hopeful is that they're actually over the last 10 or 20 years, the G8, like the most powerful countries economically in the world, came together with a similar kind of issue to tax corporations. I mean, one of the biggest basically frauds that goes on in the world today is global corporations hide the vast bulk of the profits they make in every country through like basically illegal transfer pricing where they pretend the pricing is different. So in countries where they would be taxed high, they're subsidiary. Oh, lo and behold, it doesn't make any money. And it ends up all the money seems to get made in this one tax haven.
Manda: In Luxembourg.
Jeremy Lent: Exactly. But the G8, I think it was the G8 might have been the G20, but I think it was the G8 came together and said, we're going to apply a tax rate across the board. So the corporations can't do that. And it worked. And actually, the amounts of remuneration that countries get from taxation on corporations now has increased as a result of that. So there is work going on around trying to get a general consensus about applying a wealth tax among different countries to avoid some of those problems. But this does come again and again to this core issue, that it's a little bit like this notion, the prisoner's dilemma, that it's only through working cooperatively with different nation states and different groups agreeing that there is a greater good, we have to work for that. A lot of these ideas will come about. So I think it's a very, very key point. It can be done, but it can. I think it can only be done by setting a different moral foundation. And that's why this is why it's so core in this book, to realise this is not about like one country saying, well, we shouldn't do that because, you know, people deserve all the riches they have, and if they're poor, it's because they didn't work hard enough. All this kind of stuff. We've got to set a different moral foundation, like this notion of the Commonwealth, and from that, a whole different array of solutions or next steps begin to apply.
Manda: Yes. So this is veering off the book slightly, but I'm bringing together a number of things that you just said and that I've heard elsewhere. So we need a new moral foundation actually, in the book. You go quite well through the ISDS. The investor state dispute settlement. And it seems to me this is a thing for people who didn't haven't yet listened to our last episode. It's a particularly egregious global setup that basically everybody seems to have been forced to sign into at the point of a threat of a something bad that's probably already happened. That basically means that a company can sue a country, not just if the country passes a law that says no more fossil fuels, then the fossil fuel companies can sue them not just for loss of current income, but for loss of projected income, which would absolutely bankrupt most countries. If they are going with the bizarre idea that they need to take money in as tax in order to spend it. And I say this often enough in the podcast, that's not how money works. When you take money as tax, you destroy it. No government needs to take in tax. They make the money. But what they do need is for the bond markets not to crash their economy, because the bond markets want the tax take and the government spend to be somewhat in the same order of magnitude.
Manda: But it seems to me that if companies can set up an ISDS, which is global, then they could also set up a system by which everybody's going to pay fair tax. And for me, that would mean there's a ceiling of here's your profit limit of, let's say, 999 million. And after that everything is taxed. But to get to that, we would have to have a complete change in values. And I was listening to the Bold Politics podcast with Zack Polanski and he was talking to Kean West, I think, who's a social scientist who's done a very interesting experiment where they offer a variety of people some money - say a £10 note, and they have to share it with this other person. And the deal is, you either have to share it 50:50, in which case you get £5 each, or you can have £3 on the other person has £1. Those are your only options. And here are the people that you're sharing with - we will describe them, make your choice. And there are a number of people who, when given that option, will have the £3. So they will make themselves poorer in order that the other person only has the £1. And they will particularly do that if the other person is not the same race.
Manda: Well, basically not white, because it's white people who tend to do this or they're a man and the other person is a woman, or they perceive the other person to be an outgroup that they don't like. And I didn't want to explore this more because my basic feeling of life is that offered that everybody would go, well, 50:50. That's obvious. But there must be a significant number of people who will go the 3 to 1 route, which makes a lot more sense of MAGA in the US than Reform in the UK, and makes it a lot harder then for us to shift the value set towards empathy and compassion and mutual flourishing. And I have no idea how we would begin to shift the dial on that, other than 80% of the population is living in empathy and compassion and mutual flourishing, and the 20% who would give you £1 so they could have £3 and the other £7 vanishes, see it and realise that it's much, much better. And I'm wondering what you thought about this probably more deeply than I have. How do we create the social shift that creates the value shift that creates the energetic shift and the emotional shift that allows the changes that you and I both want to begin to emerge.
Jeremy Lent: Yeah. Profound investigation, Manda, I love this. And, well, I think I'd begin with recognising that what we're not talking about trying to do is kind of shifting these people who are acting in that more sort of self-centred or even negative for self or other way. We're not trying to sort of get them. We're not trying to improve them or whatever. What we're really looking at is getting back to a value system that is our evolved human nature. That what we need to recognise is the people who are acting in that that sort of destructive way that you just described have only gotten to that place by being conditioned by a society that has brought out all of the most selfish and fear driven and ego driven instincts that in in there from that kind of education system that we were just describing before. And from the whole system that says, you've got to like, um, that your in group is what you've got to fight for and the outgroup are the enemy and all that stuff, which is designed to deflect people's attention from what is really causing them to be so desperate. And so this is where really the strength and the possibility and the hope for what's possible comes in that as human beings, we evolved in completely the other way. As human beings, we evolved in nomadic hunter gatherer bands to actually have a sense of really strong group identity and a sense of what is right and wrong. And, you know, again, we've been trained by biologists like Richard Dawkins ever since the 1970s to believe in The selfish gene and to believe that actually people are selfish. And, you know, Richard Dawkins tries to explain that, you know, he's not an immoral person, but what his whole thing is to call people to overcome their innate selfishness by trying to be good or whatever.
Jeremy Lent: And so this is not a critique of his morality, but it's a critique of his understanding, which has shown to be absolutely flawed, both about biology itself and in particular about human beings. And we actually evolved to be one of the most cooperative species in the world. And among mammals, we're incredibly cooperative. And especially what is almost unique about us is we're cooperative with super co-operators with those who are not kin. And this is how we evolved in those nomadic hunter gatherer bands to be successful. And as a hominid species, to evolve into humanity. So we have emotions like embarrassment or guilt or we love people that we see being generous and kind. And these are deeply felt emotions. And this is who we are as human beings. But our dominant culture has to basically wipe that out of people from infancy onwards. So it uses whatever the internet and commercials and serial, you know, like toys and serials and all this stuff right from the very beginning to try to instil selfishness and greed and status, anxiety and stuff and little kids, so they'll grow up into being good consumers of this dominant society. So that's where once we recognise that it gives us this sense, what we want to do is allow people to reconnect with what is in their hearts deeply already, not try to over not try to sort of get to some next level of human species and greater level of consciousness.
Manda: I would like that.
Jeremy Lent: It's about reconnecting with our core humanity. We'd love to get to a level of consciousness, but that may not. That might take a while. But the thing is, and this is where there's been like generations of work done on basically what it is that does give these incentives for more prosocial behaviours. You know, many people will be familiar with the name Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for economics, the first woman to do so after studying for spending decades studying the Commons and the Commons, basically is really interesting because it's the economic manifestation of that evolved human self-organized sharing that I was just describing. And it's exactly in contrast to the wealth pump and to empire and to the rise of global capitalism in the last 500 years. But commons existed, groups existed all around the world that shared their resources, work together, not through some leader telling them, this is what you've got to do, but through actually a set of self-organized principles, like basically a shared sense of identity, of values, recognising if somebody started to break some of the guidelines, they'd have what what was called ratcheted sanctions. At first, it would just be, hey, you're not meant to do that, guy, you know?
Manda: A stern look.
Jeremy Lent: And most people would would get that. And then if people keep being basically, you know, jerks, at some point the whole group says, no, this is not acceptable. Maybe they get ostracised, something extreme that works and that leads to stable, very flourishing groups around the world. What's fascinating is that the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, he's one of the leading evolutionary biologists in the world today who came up with this whole sort of, say, biological theory of sort of sort of co-evolution of different groups. But basically, he worked with Ellen Ostrom, took that work and used it to look at what are the core principles for prosocial behaviour in groups in general, not just in traditional commons. And that's something that in a way, when you look at ways to organise ourselves for this eco civilisation, that's a foundational set of precepts, because that actually brings out the best in human beings. We actually do want, I mean, for that study that you described, there's also there's studies that actually go the other way. And actually, it turns out that most people at random will want to give to those they don't know. And there's even a sense of wanting to punish people who you see being basically really, you know, really aggressive and nasty, even if it hurts yourself. It's called altruistic punishment. And it's part of what we evolved as human beings to do to look out for the group.
Jeremy Lent: So, you know, if you see somebody butting in in the queue ahead of you or ahead of other people, and you're not even in the queue, but you don't, you don't like that. And sometimes, you know, you might have the courage to go to the hey, hey guy, you're not meant to be doing that, even if it puts you at risk. That's the kind of sense that makes us really caring human beings. But I think that's the kind of instinct that then got hijacked and manipulated to cause exactly what you're describing. By inculcating in somebody, you are the in-group and that's what your morality is based on. Then they're ready to do their own altruistic punishment for themselves, to stop that outgroup person from getting anything at all, because they're because they care so much about their value system. So I think it's a lot of the, of what happens is basically our value system arises ultimately from our sense of identity. And if we're told we're separate individuals and our only identity arises from the in-group will lead to one value system. If we begin to see ourselves as being part of all of humanity and as humans, being part of all life will naturally come up with a very different set of values.
Manda: Yes, yes, even as you're talking, I was remembering Jon Young telling us that by the age of 12, the average indigenous youngster has made meaningful relationships with over 400 other species. And these are reciprocal relationships, give and take and and it's much harder, I would imagine, to consider your in-group to be a small subset of humanity when you know yourself to be an integral part of the web of life in that much, much bigger orders of magnitude, bigger scale than that. Okay, so we're beginning to build a picture of different ways of exchanging, storing, and accounting for money, different ways of educating different floors and ceilings for how we might want our civilisation. And we're going to use that because I think it works as a word, to be honest. Although there have been discussions as to whether it's right. It covers the bases. There's a lot to cover in the next ten minutes. We still have to eat, we still have to have clean water and clean air and water. Seems to me to be one of the commons that certainly in the UK we have failed on very badly and actually, I think pretty much in the US, Australia messing up our water has begun to become an issue and as data centres take more, it's going to become more of an issue.
Manda: But again, we're at one of those fracture points. If it is likely the case that we cannot get industrial agricultural chemicals because the Straits of Hormuz are closed. It might be the end of industrial agriculture, which I think would be a remarkable thing. I was listening to a podcast earlier today who said that by year five people who moved to a regenerative agriculture system have eight times either the yield or the profit, and I can't remember which - and they're not exactly coterminous, but eight times Manda: (retrospective edit - it's eight times more profitable. The podcast was Nicki Yoxall on Farm Gate podcast saying that the data shows that Pasture for Life accredited farms are 8 times more profitable than their conventional counterparts in the UK). And the person who has this data goes around big agricultural conferences and the industrial agriculture people actually don't believe it because they've been told the narrative that we need industrial agriculture to feed the 8 billion. And it's not true, but we might be just about to discover that it's not true. So this is, again, it's a whole other podcast because food and health are so intimately intertwined. If we have good nutritious food, we are much more healthy. And conversely, we have ultra processed nonsense and toxic water, then we're not going to be healthy, and that's going to cost the health system a lot of money. How in our evolving concept of a different way of doing things, how do you see us feeding ourselves into each other?
Jeremy Lent: Yes, absolutely. And I have a chapter just focusing on agriculture, of course, which is so fundamental. And the first thing to recognise is just what you were saying. Basically this our entire food system is broken is a disaster from beginning to end, from the way food is grown to the way people eat and the whole system through and through all the intermediaries, every aspect of it is essentially owned by Big AG, which is like a big tech company, big finance or whatever. Yeah, these corporations have gobbled up other corporations. And, you know, it's a joke that people talk about the free market. They're thinking they're supporting the current system because it's anything but free. It's like basically these monopolising institutions that essentially set the price for everything. Make sure that farmers get to be sucked into being part of the monetised economy and having to sell their coffee beans or their other commoditized produce a tiny rates so that they're basically barely able to stay alive while big AG takes all the profits. And I mean, it's broken in so many different layers. The whole notion of industrial fertiliser, this this kind of theory, like you say, which another myth that Big Ag puts out that this kind of stuff is necessary to feed people, whereas actually. And yeah, and I refer to other studies, detailed studies, as you said, that show that agroecology or regenerative agriculture can be every bit as or more productive when applied properly in different, different areas.
So agroecology is a hugely important movement, which, led by these groups like La Via Campesina, which is this huge.It's probably the largest single people's movement in the world today. There's hundreds of millions of peasants in South America and sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia who are part of this umbrella group of basically people who work. It's called like campesino a campesino. They work together. When they discover something that's work in their area, they'll share it with the group next to them. As far as what actually works on for their particular area, for what their particular whole section of soil and needs where they are. And that basically has been shown to work. So one of the most important things we need to do is get rid of that myth, but it goes all the way through to how food is marketed and consumed that, you know, right now, many people in the global South, many children in the Global South, believe it or not, suffer from a twin ailments of malnutrition because they don't have access to healthy food and obesity, because the only thing they do have access to are these disgusting, super ultra processed snacks with sugar. Not even real sugar, but fake sugar anyway, but basically putting all this like really bad stuff into their bodies and because they don't have access to nutritional food, they're hungry, they eat all this crap. And so there's a terrible, terrible epidemic of ill health going around the world that these very big ag companies have been responsible for producing. So all the way through, from producing food to it, being processed, packaged, and then sold.
Jeremy Lent: It's an absolute iconic example of recognising that basically the system is designed from the outset for extraction and exploitation, not for the benefit of all people. And there's ways that we can change all aspects of it. So localisation is a key part. Yeah. Regenerative agriculture is a key part. And there's also recognition that a lot of the food that people rely on are the, are these sort of the few big grains, which are a more challenging problem because the grains themselves work through basically denuding the soil of, of its nutrients, and then they have to be replanted each time. So you need fertilisers. So this continual kind of treadmill that you're on, there's great ideas around perennials, for example, which have been developed by different groups coming up with versions of wheat or rice that don't have to be replanted every year, but can actually be planted once and then stay there, deepening their roots and being healthy for the soil and producing for many years in the future. That's received maybe like 1% or 0.1% of the investment of the and other things like genetically engineered food or whatever, because it would take away from the profits of big AG. But this is what an eco civilisation is about, is recognising these things and knowing we don't have all the answers to some of these bigger questions. But there are people who are pioneering the answers. That's what we need to be looking at and investing in.
Manda: Yes, and again, if we cannot ship our food around the world because we don't have any oil left that's going to be a problem. I was listening to an economics podcast the other day, and farmers in India are being given two litres of fossil fuel something or other a day, and that's not enough to keep the water pumps going. So we're heading for a global food crisis, but that's going to mean people are no longer going to be able to produce food in the extractivist way that industrial agriculture wants, and they're going to be feeding themselves and their families and with any luck at all. I just joined a seed saving group locally, and I discovered that the big seed companies would go into places like India, and they would do a swap of, we'll give you this amazing new seed that we have developed that you can get from us, and we'll give it you free, provided you give us all your seed that you've been saving for generations. And then two years down the line, you discover that this new seed needs continual inputs, exactly as you said. And you've given away all the seeds that your ancestors have had literally for thousands of generations.
Jeremy Lent: And even worse than that, the next level is so insidious, it's hard to believe that even these corporations can be so evil about it. The seeds that they then train the farmers to start using basically are patented, and they're not allowed to just take the new seeds that the crop puts out and replant them the next year.
Manda: They get sued.
Jeremy Lent: They'll actually get sued. They'll go to jail. And so basically, they've given away their livelihood. So the actual seeds themselves have been like brought into have been enclosed essentially. It's one of the greatest producers of common wealth over the millennia is now systematically being sucked in by Windigo incorporated.
Manda: Yes, yes, seed saving is a political act. People do it. Start learning how to do it. There's some really nice books about it. In fact, I will probably bring somebody on to talk about seed saving at some point. We're very nearly out of time and there's so much I still wanted to talk about. But as a last thing, we're going to need laws that work and a global governance system for this. We've already touched on that. We can't create a global financial system. Then there are going to be people running off to create their network state in Greenland or whatever it is that no democracy, no death, no taxes, little fantasy world that they live in. And we need that not to be a thing. So what do you see as the future of a global governance system that is benign and that enables all life to flourish within a regenerating planet?
Jeremy Lent: Yes, this is one of the most difficult questions. And I do have a chapter devoted to global governance. Maybe even before we go there, let me just back up one step to look at governance itself, because, you know, we might think of something like where the United Nations at least is a good thing because there's some sort of cooperation between nations. But even when we look even the very notion of democracy and our so-called leaders that we that we choose, that we think we're choosing democratically, it turns out that so-called electoral democracy itself is every bit as made up as the things around education or finance that we've been talking about earlier. It's not actually a democracy that we're part of. It's essentially you can view it as an electoral oligarchy or oligarchy by consent that basically every 4 or 5 years, people in a country get to choose. Even that itself is conditioned by the billionaire owned media, of course, but at least think they can get to choose, but not between a real leader or another one, but which oligarch, basically, which oligarchic party sets up the people who are the only ones who even trying to get elected are people who, by their nature, are more the more sort of narcissistic or ego driven or populist oriented, even to get into that place in the first place. It seems almost hopeless, but it's not, because what is, to me, one of the most inspiring things I've come across in all this research is this concept of deliberative democracy, which has its manifestation in what's known as citizens assemblies.
Jeremy Lent: And these are groups of people chosen by sortition, basically lottery, essentially from the ordinary people, from the population as a whole. And if it's done properly, and if it's facilitated with care, you can have groups of people together when they get together to deliberate about an issue, and they know that they're what they're coming up with has impact on society as large around them. They tend to leave behind to jettison all these polarising ideas. And I belong to this party, or I'm a racist or whatever, and they start to like, actually hear and respect the views of other people. And even though individually as people, we tend to be pretty lousy decision makers, we've got all these kinds of prejudices implicit that we don't even know about that. Things that we, we we bring in to come up with maybe the wrong decision collectively as human beings, when we actually put our minds together and work in a way that each person's voice is heard. We come up with far wiser decisions than any kind of electoral body tends to. So Citizens Assemblies have got a fantastic track record. And a big part of what I look at in the book is really rethinking what democracy actually means to be part of this kind of a grassroots, polycentric sort of notion of citizens assemblies, essentially going from local levels all the way up to a national level.
Jeremy Lent: And I just wanted to get that there before I talked about global governance, because really, you need that foundation to then think about what global governance would look like, because there are very many issues that do need planetary kind of decision making, whether it's climate breakdown or the oceans or militarisation or so many different things. Absolutely. Um, but we're not going to get good decisions when we have well, of course, right now, even the United Nations has been supplanted by the sort of power blocs of the US or Russia or China or whatever it might be. But even back to when there was a more working United Nations, that body in itself was kind of flawed in many ways, by the very notion of nation states being the ones to make the decisions for people anyway. So there's actually a movement right now to create essentially a global citizen's assembly at the United Nations as a separate sort of advisory body, almost like the camel's nose under the tent sort of thing, which is something I would I think we should all support really powerfully, because that's actually the way in which ultimately we can get good. Planetary governance is by this polycentric notion of decisions being made when they can be done more locally at the local level.
Jeremy Lent: This concept of subsidiarity. But then when there are decisions that need like higher and higher levels of scope in order to make them properly, it has to be done through each layer. Choosing people to represent them at the next level up so that ultimately you would in fact have a group of citizens themselves at that planetary level looking at what is really important based not on what one power bloc says, but what actually people want are from around the world. Yeah, we're a long way away from that. I'm not saying suggesting this is one of these areas where something really has to unravel before we'll put this in place. Not suggesting this is going to happen 5 or 10 years from now, but what I am suggesting is that the initial notions for this. Around citizens assemblies, we can put our time and energy and investment in. And we are going to see this this system unravel. It's terrifying. It's tragic. I don't want it. None of us who care about any kind of avoidance of suffering wants what we see happening. But it is happening. And we are going to find people asking more and more, like, we've got to reorganise the world in a different way. That's why these ideas to their original Milton Friedman quote you were saying earlier are so important. We need to put them in place so they're available.
Manda: Beautiful. That feels like a good place to end. I would, of course, like to ask you, what do we all need to be doing in the as the next steps? But actually, I think what people need to be doing is read your book and then you're doing tours in the US and the UK so people could come along and talk to you about these things. So do you want to let us know? We will put links in the show notes of everything, but just tell us a little bit about where people can find where you're going to be in, in the various countries.
Jeremy Lent: Sure. Thank you. Happy to. And I'd love to see, uh, you know, anyone who's listening in to this podcast at some of these events when they're happening. So the book itself is coming out to the end of May in the US. It's May 26th and in the UK May 28th. And basically, I'm going to be doing a few launch events here in the San Francisco Bay area and that last week of May and early June, I'll actually be in New York for a few days doing some events there, and then mid-June coming to the UK, and I'll be there for until early July. And I'm glad to say I'll be doing, actually a conversation with George Monbiot that's actually going to be happening at RSA in London. It's actually going to be called yes, there is an alternative, and so we'll be exploring that together and honoured to be able to talk with George there. But also there'll be different events in Bristol and boss other events in London and events in most likely in Oxford and probably one in Cambridge, and some of them will be with other people whose work has inspired my own, such as Luke Kemp, who's written a great book, Goliath's Curse, where we're hoping Jonathon Porritt, who's been an incredible thinker for decades, will be probably talking with me in Bristol. So there'll be a lot of events that'll be really exciting and conversation with real leading thinkers. And so, yeah, I'll share some of those with you.
Manda: Yeah. Please do. Yes. Is there one going to be an event page on your website or something so that people can go and just see where they all are?
Jeremy Lent: Yes, there will be also. Yes.
Manda: Okay, we'll put that in the show notes and we will put links to where people can get your book, because absolutely people are very interested in utopia in future, then this is the book to read because it's it's so well researched. I know I said that in the last podcast, but honestly, the depth and breadth of your research is amazing and your intellectual capacity to hold all these ideas and bring them into a coherent model is fantastic. This is the theory of change that we need to be running with, and we can tweak it slightly as things emerge. But if we could bring this into wider awareness, then I think the world would change really quite fast.
Jeremy Lent: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for that. Manda. And the one thing I'd add to what you just said is I do want to emphasise that the book, while it does look at all these different possible futures and show what's possible, it is not a blueprint. It's not like me looking at all these great thinkers and saying, this is how it's going to work. And more than anything, it's like, I want it to be a conversation starter. It does set a framework. There are core principles that we all need to agree on about setting those conditions for thriving, etc. but from that, there's all kinds of interpretations, all kinds of different cultures and different groups that might interpret things in different ways. So let's think of this more as a conversation starter We're almost like setting an ecosystem for change that then people can come into it and say, actually, I kind of prefer this. I focus on that. But then we're all working together to create that diversified, really a plural vessel, um, future. Rather than suggesting that there's a future that is available to us, it's the right one. So I just wanted to emphasise that for it. Yeah.
Manda: Yes, absolutely. Yes. The future will be multifaceted for sure. Thank you. Brilliant. I look forward to talking to you again sometime when we find out how the book has landed. And maybe you can look at some of the changes already being made. But in the meantime, thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Jeremy Lent: Thank you so much, Amanda. It's been great talking with you as always.
Manda: There we go. That's it for this week. Enormous thanks to Jeremy for everything that he's doing, for bringing these ideas into the world with such clarity. This book is genuinely the one that we need now. It lays out in absolutely excruciating detail, the structural deficits in the current system and the belief systems that underpin it. The people at the top are not intending to do good things for anybody who is even a step below them on the very steep sided pyramid. And it's not hard to imagine a world better than this. A world where everyone, human and more than human, is leading, creative, flourishing, fulfilling lives. What's harder is imagining how we get there. This utopian route maps. And as Jeremy says, there are a whole load of people, each exploring their own individual avenues in economics, in food and farming, in design, in technology. All of the things that we explore in this podcast, but very few people have done the extraordinary work to bring it all together. And Jeremy has, if you've already read The Patterning Instinct in the Web of Meaning, you will already know that you want to read this. If you haven't, I would strongly recommend you start here because time is short. You will want to go back and read the others, but start with eco civilisation and then let's see what we can build together. If you're in the UK or the US, then do go and visit Jeremy on his tour.
Manda: There's a link in the show notes so you can find out wherever he is that's within reach of you. And then share the book because first steps are building the knowledge bank of people who understand where we're at and what we can do. And this book is definitely going to help do that. So there we go. We'll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to corrosive for the music at the Head and Foot to Alan Lowell's of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lew Mayer for doing the video. Even though we are on a course this week. And then she's moving house to me for the transcript because Anne has big family things going on this week or will have because we're recording this quite a bit in advance to face Tilray for holding the fort, for holding things together, for holding the ideas that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. We wouldn't be here without you and we genuinely appreciate your attention, your time, your care, and your help to build the eco civilisation that we all need. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand how we could build a future that we would be proud to leave behind, then as ever, please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.