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Another World IS still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose - and now it's collapsing around us. So how do we co-create a Thrutopian future that we'd all be proud to leave as our legacy?
What stories can we weave of possibility? Of transformation? 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 really matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, between ourselves and the Web of Life - so that we can reclaim our birthright as self-conscious nodes in the web of life?
We can do this. Some of us already are. Every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being, courageous pathfinders who are exploring the emergent edge of inter-becoming.
As a species, we have all the answers, we just haven't yet crafted all the new stories and woven them into a future that works. 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.
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.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Thrutopian Futures: solo podcast script
This week is a solo episode. I had a lovely conversation with Marla Lise in Sri Lanka, but the tech defeated us. We'll do it again sometime, because she's an amazing Thrutopian thinker, maker and do-er, but for now, I want to talk you through what's most alive for me at the moment. I just spent a weekend away with some of the people I respect most highly, talking about how we might fashion a convergence of the world's deepest, sharpest thinkers, makers and doers, with the explicit remit of crafting the route maps towards a future we'd all be proud to leave behind. Which may sound familiar. I hope it does. But this weekend, I came up against an understanding of how far we are from this.
As part of our planning, we played a SolarPunk Futures game - we role-played journeying forwards to 2050, then back-casting to the turning point where we began to shift to the future that worked... Sounds like what we're talking about all the time, right?
Right. And yet - Every. Single. One. of us ended up role playing characters who lived in a post-collapse, dystopic future where normal life had disintegrated. So none of us had bullshit jobs - or jobs of any kind - we were not constrained by the need to make money, we were in a world where everyone was acting cooperatively and we were running local food coops based on permaculture principles, practicing herbalism, undertaking Anonymous-style hacking... all the good, utopian things.
It was so depressing. Everybody does this. I'm calling it the Uncanny Chasm, riffing off the 'Uncanny Valley' of robot creation, when we see an almost-there human face and it's not quite right and this stirs deep distress inside. On a slightly different front, there's an uncanny chasm where the route forward becomes fluffy and fuzzy and full of hand-waving - and if I default to this kind of dystopic/solar punk/pseudo-utopian thinking when I'm under pressure to make something up... how can I expect anyone else to do something different?
So now I need to do the work - the extremely hard work, to craft a future from the tools we have now, towards a future we'd be proud to leave behind.
As ever, I'm leaning heavily on something Gandhi is suppose to have said, 'God knows the truth. My truth changes from day to day. My commitment is to the truth, not to consistency.'
So this is my truth for today. By tomorrow, it may be different. But let's lay out the principles.
Going forward to come back
First is that we don't get where we need to go if we start here and imagine what we think is realistic, or possible within the existing system. This kind of thinking is narrow-boundary and holds us inside the current paradigm.
We do need stories that start where we are, but those stories need an aiming point which has to come from somewhere further out - we're emerging from one system into another, and by definition, the detail of the new system cannot be predicted from the old system. If I can see the new system clearly from here, then it isn't the new system, we're just painting the wheels on the bus a different colour.
So we're aiming for a new system that we can't see. Problem one.
There's also a problem of unknowable structures. Imagine that one day a stranger pops out in front of you who says they're from the mid-1800s - roughly 7 generations back - and they want to know what your life is like.
You might say, 'Well, we're online all the time, social media's become incredibly divisive and toxic, we're living with limbic hijack; the race to the bottom of the brainstem is constant, we're existentially terrified of nuclear conflict, but actually, the real jeopardy at the moment is that Generative AI might wreak species-level extinction.' You're speaking in unknowable structures: they would not understand a single word.
But if you said, 'We feel really stressed. We're under extreme pressure to keep producing; we're locked in a system that tells us we're here to pay bills and then die and I'm trying to find a way out of it…' this, they would get.
And then if they asked, 'How would you like to be living instead?' we could answer that we'd like to feel safe, to feel held, to feel connected to all parts of ourselves, to each other, to the web of life; that we'd like to feel confident that we were living lives of value, where we had meaning and purpose; we yearn for a sense of being and belonging.
We might say we want to feel respected, by others we respect in our turn - of the human and the more than human world. While we're thinking of the wider web of life, we might say we'd like to be able to hear birdsong so loud it swamped all other sounds - as they did - or to see the stars in all their brilliance.
We might say we want to live in a world where every single human on the planet lives within a system that is designed to maximise our potential and to help us grow from infancy to elderhood in ways that enables us to build strong, resilient, compassionate connections along the way - and if not this, then what is humanity for?
All of these are true. They don't get us a concrete route forward, but they set up our aiming point, and how this might feel.
Please note that this is an aiming point, not an end point. There is a tendency when we talk about route-maps to leap to the conclusion that they define a singular end point. Which is not a thing. Nobody is suggesting we're going to stop time. Nor do I believe that the evolution of humanity stops with us becoming self-conscious nodes in the web of life - it's just as far as we can see from here. We're in the 'driving in fog at night' metaphor of writing a novel - you aim as far as the headlights can see and when you get there, you can see further.
So there's no singular end point. There is, though, a set of guiding principles - much as our own culture has had - and still has.
In the onward march of predatory capitalism, nobody sat down five or ten thousand years ago and said, 'Here's the route forward to species level extinction. Follow this one single path and you'll have the power to wipe out all complex life by the first century of the third millenium.'
We're here, though. And what our ancestors did establish was a baseline narrative that says, 'Who dies with the most toys wins. Grasping value and holding it against all-comers is your only purpose. You're alone in doing this, unless you can pay or bully or otherwise terrorise other people into coming along with you and even then, you need to ditch them as soon as possible in case they try to climb on your shoulders. The ends justify the means. You can destroy anyone and anything on the path to make yourself extremely rich, which will allow you to exert power over other people, over living systems, over anything and everything else in the span of your reality.'
This is how we end up with a system that Greg Elliott has pointed out is the Dark Triad (which is Narcissim, Psychopathy and raw Cunning plus or minus sadism)
So now we need a countervailing Light Triad. - which I would suggest are Integrity, Compassion and Generosity-of-Spirit.
We'll revisit these in a bit. But before we set off on the route this takes us, I want to look at some of the other 'yes, buts' that come up when we talk about crafting Thrutopian narratives.
First, there are a lot of people who will tell you that we need to hit collapse if we're going to find a decent way forward. This is a reasonable neurophysiological response to not having enough data points to craft a through route. Our limbic systems can hit panic if they're faced with not-having an answer and they'll craft a good reason why not-answering is absolutely fine as a way to escape discomfort.
Nonetheless, it's dangerous nonsense. The post-collapse future is highly unlikely to be full of people running local food networks while rediscovering their great-great-grandmothers' ancient herbal wisdom, lovely though that idea is. It's far more likely to be variants on Mad Max where we're all being kebabbed over piles of burning tyres by our bigger and nastier neighbours. Absent a new set of values that are embedded at a really core level, civilisational collapse is going to leave the Dark Triad running the show. Every lazy dystopian thriller is based on the obvious play out of this and we've said so often, we don't need more of these. They're casting a future we don't want. And they're effortless to write. So please don't.
There's another subset of well-meaning people now saying variations of, - 'I don't want to constrain the future: there are many routes forward and we mustn't impose restraints on them.'
The first part of this is true. The second part is yet another limbic response to the panic of not having answers and we need to stop rehearsing these. Yes, there are many ways forward - but mapping out one option does not constrain the others. It offers proof that there is a way through. Then other people can follow. Someone has to be the trailblazer, the ice-breaker, whatever metaphor works for you.
That's us. This is where this podcast is heading and the good-bad news on this is that it's been done before. If you're interested, I recommend you read Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains' which details the work of James McGill Buchanan - the Koch brothers' tame economist - who offered them a 50 year plan to destroy democracy from within.
He and his funders were of the opinion that 'liberty' was not compatible with democracy - given that 'liberty' for them was the total freedom of the super rich to make obscene amounts money without any form of restriction or regulation. And they're right - nobody would vote against their own interests... except obviously they have.
Buchanan showed them how to break democracy using its own rules. He started out with his 50 year time frame, which was going smoothly Obama was elected, when they panicked and poured a lot of money into speeding it all up - and the Tea Party was astro-turfed within weeks.
The rest is a direct line to Trump and Project 2025. The thing they didn't predict back in the late 90s, was the routes to riches taken by the social media tech-bros, and how easy it would be to manipulate a bunch of adolescent neurotics into supporting them. The Koch network had oil money, but that's nothing to the tech money that's being leveraged now.
And it's getting them the narratives they want.
When was the last time you switched on the TV and saw a police thriller, or a game show, or a medical drama that wasn't predicated on the existing system being strong and stable? When did you last switch on the news and hear someone pointing out that you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet, that the existing system is dysfunctional and we can replace it with something better?
Our third push back is from those who feel safe in the blame game. For decades, a certain tranche of progressives have told people that the climate and ecological emergency is all their fault without offering any sense of agency other than recycling more and flying less, perhaps changing diet - all of which is so obviously not going to change the overall system that it's guaranteed to leave people feeling angry or disempowered and depressed - or all three.
Nobody is going to change their behaviour if they don't have a seriously good reason and 'feeling less guilty' is not good enough. We also cannot change until we have ideas of what we're changing to - that will clearly work.
So let's recap
We're aiming for a future where we're proud of our humanity and every single human on the planet is exerting all our amazing curiosity, creativity, courage and compassion in service to life.
This involves a lot of inner work, though, and not everyone has the time, the skills or the bandwidth for this. Therefore, we need also to offer a future that's more tangible.
To get to these, we need founding values - the super-organism works in a world of scarcity, separation and powerlessness. We need a world of sufficiency, connection and agency driven by values other than greed, fear and righteous anger.
I already suggested a Light Triad of integrity, compassion and generosity-of-spirit in everything we do (though, as ever, I'm open to improvements).
If these are going to land, we need to lay the four foundation stones of a new world:
• Motivation - the light at the end of the tunnel
• Agency - the means to get there for each of us individually and collectively
• Direction - the next best step
• Empowerment - freedom from the hamster wheel of the existing system. We were not born just to pay bills and then die but while we are struggling to pay those bills, it doesn't matter how much we yearn for something different, we won't have the time, energy or bandwidth to act.
To create narratives that embrace these pillars, we need two linked creative fires.
Our first fire is a set of slogans as simple and powerful as 'Stop the Boats!' or 'Make America Great Again!' - offers that are simple and straightforward and don't take a lot of explanation to have impact.
Clearly, we don't want to fall into the limbic hijack of the populist movements which activate righteous anger in a dopamine-laden soup of self-reinforcing triggers. Righteous anger is one of the most self-reinforcing feelings we have. Finding something as compelling, as fast, as inherently satisfying is one of our biggest challenges
Reciprocal respect is one option. The drive for respect is one of our strongest after the base needs of food, water and shelter and we will do a lot to feel respected by people whom we respect in return. Similarly, we will work hard to leave a legacy that is valued by people whom we hope will respect us, putting our shoulders to the wheel for the sake of those we care about can take us up Everest or into wars, across open oceans in a small boat or into jobs we loathe that suck us dry. What happens if we do this in service of all life, seeking the respect of the More-than-Human world as well as of our communities of place, purpose and passion?
Slogans arising from this could be as simple as: Take Back Tomorrow! , or Working for a future that works! neither of these is right, but they're a work in progress.
Our second fire is the crafting of a detailed route-map and this is where the rubber hits the road - it's also where the Uncanny Chasm opens up.
We live in a hypercomplex system. We need complex answers when our brains are wired for linearity.
As a baseline, though, we need a new - different - governance system in which people of good faith engage with others in good faith to solve collective problems. A system in which every single person is valued and in which the creativity of the whole is understood to be greater than the sum of its parts, a system where problems are devolved to those nearest and most affected, with a transparent, fully accountable tree heading up to the level of whatever we want as the highest realm of governance.
Which, I would suggest, means rethinking the nation state itself. The idea, which runs from Hobbes through to Max Weber's definition, of a territory within which one political body claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence needs to go. We'd be far better served by Joe Brewer's vision of BioRegions , perhaps combined with Primavera De Filippi's idea of Co-ordiNations than by borders drawn on maps by the winners of particular wars.
If we embrace these, then we start at the lowest level and ensure that everyone who wants one has a voice that counts. No bullying. The loudest voice isn't the only one heard.
This is already happening. Flatpack Democracy in Frome, the Preston model of community wealth building, Civic Square in Birmingham, Audrey Tang's vTainwan, Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting systems…there are many, many examples and they're growing by the day.
Let's imagine the structure. Take a parish of, say, 150 people. They meet regularly on or off line, perhaps with trained facilitators at the start to ensure they're working fairly. After a while, they choose five or ten people to go up to the next level, either by lot, or from among their peers because they think clearly and speak clearly. Every meeting is open. You can go, or you can watch it online. And if your representatives aren't speaking for you, you have an absolute right of immediate recall/replace.
This continues at every level: parish to town, town to district, district to county, county to region, region to nation, or - in time - Co-ordiNation or BioRegion. And on to an international body. Transparency is baked into everything. We get rid of the entire adversarial, public school debating society model of politics. It was never fit for purpose and it's in the process of demonstrating levels of corruption so blatant that it'll be over the day we present something that's clearly better.
It's worth saying at this point that the top level national council is not there to make decisions. It's there to find the best way to implement the decisions made by the people beneath it. And where something genuinely needs to be decided at a national scale - ways to bring regenerative farming across the board, or ways to implement useful social care, or to renationalise the health service, say - its job is to convene one or more citizens' assembly(s), and to bring the widest possible range of voices before the people therein. The assembly decides. The governing council works out how to make the decisions happen.
Obviously there are flaws in this. I can think of several: who sets the agenda? How do we protect minorities? But the biggest by far is the old saw of computer programming: garbage in, garbage out.
Because if limbic hijack is still a thing when this comes into play, if social media is still racing to the bottom of the brainstem, if people can still be micro-targeted with messages designed to change the fundamentals of what they believe and how they think; if sense-making has still not been sorted - then all of this falls apart.
Media and social media
This is the nature of complexity. We don't just need new governance, - to allow the new governance to work in good faith, we need a new economic system, a new legacy media ecosystem and a completely different premise for our social media. This, too, is not impossible. China may not have invented social media, but if Tristan Harris is right, they have put in guardrails that make it a whole lot safer than the predatory model we have where American companies can do whatever they like as long as they continue to make obscene amounts of money for their founders.
If you don't like China as a model, then let's go back to Audrey Tang. In Taiwan, they brought in a tool called Pol.is which is designed to surface the statements that people on different sides can actually agree on. It amplifies the people reaching across the divides, and quietens the ones magnifying them. There's no reply button, so the trolls have nothing to grab hold of, and the bot farms don't work. Better than relying on Ukrainian drones, right?
Money and the economy
We need a new way of storing, accounting for and exchanging value - which is to say, a new economic and monetary system that doesn't allow for the hoarding of wealth, and which is not predicated on the commodification of suffering.
Put plainly - the day the dollar ceases to have any value is the day the tech-bros are just ordinary (for a given value of 'ordinary') people in a world where there is equality across the board.
If we have new currency, generated in new ways that don't see the banks simply make it out of thin air and then sell it to us at a profit…if we have new ways of helping that currency to flow, then we can end the current financial system which is predicated on the maximisation of profit.
We also shift the point of any company from a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder value, to one of flourishing in a thriving web of life.
This will inevitably mean that some companies either go out of business or totally change their business model, but that's a given. I'd suggest that selling caramelised and carbonated sugar-water that's designed to promote addiction and as a side-effect creates diabetes and liver failure, does not promote the flourishing of the web of life. Building small local factories to produce kombucha and water kefir might well be, as long as they're not hoarding water to do it. So they'd have to be an integral part of a water flow system that sees the land regenerated and returned to its pre-industrial-agriculture levels of water retention, which, coincidentally would increase the soil depth, thereby increasing carbon sequestration and increasing soil biodiversity which would, in turn, increase above-ground biodiversity and ensure that any food crops grown on it were considerably more nutrient dense than the empty calories created by industrial farming. These are the kinds of loops we see in complex systems.
Working on from there, if we bring water companies into community ownership worldwide, and our non-negotiables are in place, then the rivers run clear and we're not creating dead zones in the oceans which means we may not end up switching off the AMOC and/or creating one giant dead zone where the water ceases to be a net oxygen emitter and becomes instead a net oxygen sink.
This is where we get to when we begin to craft a more proximal picture of where we're heading - but we're still in handwaving territory.
Concrete steps
To create more clarity, we need to establish the actual route by which the current system could be shifted. This will be different in different nations, but I'd say that while PR and Citizen's Assemblies are useful - and in the long term are a necessary part of the answer - in the current world of high-net-worth lobbying of representatives, combined with micro-targeted memes and AI driven limbic hijack of potential Assembly-members, they're vulnerable.
Clearly, lobbying has to go - that's easy legislation, but we'd need a government with the courage to do it, filled with people who weren't already bought and paid for. It's up to us to vote these in - and one of the ways to identify them is that the legacy media hates them.
Following on from this - or perhaps in parallel - we need total transparency in government. Imagine if every single governmental transaction was indelible and visible - forever.
Imagine if every company that took government money could only do so as long as their accounts were also indelibly visible forever.
Imagine if their C-suites were not populated by testosterone-soaked suits whose only aim was the next mega-yacht (and/or global hegemony) and instead they had members elected by a suite of stakeholders. The investors still have one seat, but it's one amongst 5 or 6 others: of equal weight to someone representing the workers, someone for the customers, for the supply chain, the local people, the global environment - and future generations.
There's a model for this. Hugo Spowers founded Riversimple, in Llandrindod Wells in Wales. They make hydrogen fuel cell cars which will hit the roads when the time is right. But in the meantime, he built his board on something close to this model (I added future generations, but he had the other six). Forget B-Corps, imagine a world where every company is run like this? Imagine living near the business, being a worker, maybe also a customer, caring about the local and global environment... you have four or five people speaking for you, where the investors have one. Your belief in what's possible changes.
At a more national scale, if governments shift the tax incentives as suggested by Jamie Driscoll in 'Hostage Nation' then we remove the power of the vigilante bond markets to hold governments hostage and begin to move towards a system that acknowledges how money works, rather than how we've been told it works (I'll do another podcast on this if anyone still believes that governments need to take in tax in order to spend, but the short version is: the government makes the money. It's their duty to make it, and then maximise the velocity of that money, which is to say, the number of times it changes hands before it returns to the government, soaked up as tax. This is what governments are for in our system - to generate capital and see that it is spread equitably. They just don't actually do it.)
Added to this, we could follow the suggestions laid out in Christian Felber's book, 'Economy for the Common Good' and offer tax breaks to companies that treat their workforce and the environment in ways that are in service to life - while heavily taxing those that are not - use the current system of incentives to change the system. It's not rocket science. It just needs people with the guts to make it happen.
If we follow Jason Hickel's 'Degrowth' process to reach Kate Raworth's 'Doughnut Economic' model of an economy that acts in service to people and planet, regardless of whether it grows, then we stop aiming for GDP as a metric of success on the international stage and aim instead to build a future within the means of the living planet.
Living differently
If we design our homes for 'private sufficiency and public luxury,' using the latest biomimicry design principles, we begin to live in simpler ways that connect us to other people and the web of life.
If we drop our water closets and replace them with earth closets (aka composting toilets) using the latest hi-tech designs, we reduce our water use - and we don't give it to the AI data centers, we extend it into the living web of life.
There are so many options, so many ways of living a better life. We just need to pull them all together and build at least one roadmap that takes us from where we are, right to the emergent edge where we lift off to a different way of being. We can't see it from here; but we can imagine the take-off point. You can probably imagine better, more creative routes and you may imagine a better, more creative end-point than us realising our birthright as self conscious nodes in the web of life.
Close
I'm going to stop now - Storm Austen is biting and I have to go check the farm is still intact. I'll leave you with this:
How do you want to feel when you wake up in the morning? What's the best the world could be? Imagine it. Then imagine something better. Challenge your own expectations of what's possible. What do you want? In your wildest dreams, how would you live if you could? What do you think everyone else wants in their wildest dreams?
How do we make this happen?