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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
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundation for a future that all of us would be proud to leave to the generations that come after. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And if you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, then you care about people and planet and how we make it through the potential crunch point where all our crises hit the end buffers all at once. But what if you knew you were not alone? That beyond the listeners of this podcast, and thank you to every one of you, there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, actually billions more who really get it and really care. What if you knew that almost everybody in our culture cares about this? They just don't know what to do about it. And everybody thinks they're alone, so everybody stays quiet, within reason obviously. What the majority do not have yet is what this week's guest, doctor Liam Kavanagh, calls the victory stories, to show how we make it through. Liam is a founding co-director of the Climate Majority Project, of which a friend of the podcast and recent guest, Rupert Read, is also a founding co-director. The CMP is an organisation that has worked since 2022 to extend climate action beyond the vocal minority of activists to the concerned but quiet majority. Liam's social science background informs CMP's theory of change and its strategy.
Manda: As you'll hear, he began his career as an applied economist in New York and Tanzania. Motivated by questions of ideology and cognitive dissonance in political economy, he completed a PhD in cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. I am not remotely envious about that. Okay, obviously I am. In 2016, Liam co-founded Life Itself, a European poly crisis response network, and we spoke to Sylvie Barbier from Life Itself a few weeks ago. There is a link in the show notes. Liam has authored two books and numerous reports, and it's the latest of these that we're talking about today. Mobilising Silent Majorities is one of the absolute must reads of the year. There is a link in the show notes; please do download and read the PDF, even if only the executive summary. This is a long, detailed, dynamic look at how many people really do care about the poly crisis. As he says in the introduction: "Across society, many people recognise serious risks; climate disruption, inequality, instability. But these concerns often stay private. This report identifies six silent majorities whose hidden views, if we brought them to the surface, could shift what feels politically possible". And so that you've heard them ahead of us speaking about them, these six are: The climate concerned majority. It is the case that most people see climate change as a serious threat, but rarely talk about it in daily life. Next is The climate concerned business majority. There are, it transpires, many, many business leaders who see climate risks but hesitate to speak publicly, partly because they think they're going to lose their jobs if they do. What would happen if they could see each other and know that they too, were in the majority?
Manda: Then, and really importantly, there is The reticent scientific majority. So many scientists privately worry about worst case scenarios, but they are desperately cautious about what they say. Partly for fear of frightening people, which I think is reasonable. But fear is a motivator if we have a sense of agency, direction and empowerment. And it's that combination that we need to bring together to achieve this victory story that Liam talks about. Next is the decline and collapse concerned majority; the people who sit around The dinner table and go, yes, everything's going off the edge of the cliff. And no, there's nothing we can do about it. And there's too many people. And it's all a population problem and a tech problem and a business problem and a political problem. And they know everything's falling apart. But they too don't have the story of how we could all pull together to make things different. What if they did? What if we could give them optimism about the future? Then things would change.
Manda: Then there's The Depolarising majority. These are people who really don't want to be locked in exhausting tribal conflict, but don't know how to step out of it. This too, we can change. And Liam talks about how. And finally, amongst the six groups that Liam identified in the report, is The intrinsic values majority; people who understand that continually rabbiting on about rising GDP is not, in fact, going to make anyone in any of their communities of place, of purpose or of passion any happier, any more secure, any more confident in the future. These people, in fact, prioritise family, community and well-being over everything else. But they are told continually that they are not being realistic, that realism needs the economy to grow. And Liam started off as an economist, so yes, we do unpick this quite a bit.
Manda: So the bottom line is when concern remains unspoken, it appears weaker than it is. And when people feel alone in their worries, silence becomes the apparently safest choice. But it does not have to be like this. What if we were able to speak up in our communities of place and purpose and passion, and let everybody else know that they are not alone? That we are in fact a huge, huge majority. What if we were able to seed exciting, inspiring, motivating, grounded ideas out into the conversations that are happening on and offline so that we all acknowledge that the system is not fit for purpose, and we all have good, workable ideas of how to fix it that we can get on with right now. What if, in fact, we embodied the victory stories of this time and transformed our future? It's all to play for now. And here's someone with the ideas at his fingertips. So people of the podcast, please do welcome Doctor Liam Kavanagh of the Climate Majority Project.
Manda: Liam Kavanagh of the Climate Majority Project, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this hot, sunny day. Tell us what temperature it is where you are.
Liam: 33 degrees in Italy, a bit north of Rome. It's a dry 33. So I grew up in Chicago, where we have brutal summers and lived for quite a long time in Tanzania. They've even more brutal weather. It doesn't really affect me as much as many UK viewers, so I'm not doing that badly, I'll be honest, but okay.
Manda: And it is much closer to midday for you than it is for us because our difference. All right, well, we'll try and keep things cool. And you have written Mobilising Silent Majorities for the Climate Majority Project. And just for viewers, absolutely everybody listening, I will put this in the show notes; download it and read it, or even just read the executive summary. This is one of the most inspiring documents I've come across in a long time. And the opening paragraph says: This report argues that people don't need to be convinced that climate chaos and wider societal breakdown pose a serious threat. They need to be convinced that we can do something about it. The majorities who feel threatened by climate and systemic breakdown provide solid grounding for such conviction'. So let's unpick this. Because my kind of executive tiny summary is most people, genuinely most people, realise we're right at the edge of the cliff, but they all think they're alone. And what we haven't got is the vast numbers. I was talking to somebody yesterday. This is a slight aside, but there was a not terribly bright senator in Rome. This is, as in ancient Rome. And not terribly bright, is setting quite a low bar, because when Caligula said he was going to make his horse a senator, I'm pretty certain that what he was doing was pointing out to them that his horse was smarter than most of them. And they all went, oh, Caligula's mad! I think no, Caligula was actually quite smart. But one of them decided that it would be a fun idea to make all of the slaves wear armbands. And someone slightly smarter asked him, how many slaves have you got? And the answer was, oh, I don't know, 500, 600.
Manda: He went, yes, and I've got 500 or 600, and he's got 500 or 600. We all have 500 or 600. Do you really want them to know that? Oh good point. No. And so the slaves were not made to wear armbands because there would have been a slave revolution the afternoon of the day that you asked all the slaves to wear armbands, and they look around and see that there's a sea of armbands and very few people without and just wearing the togas. So we want that sea of people. We want the people to realise how many of us are losing sleep over the climate and the meta crisis or the poly crisis. And I was introduced to the fact at the weekend that these might be slightly different, and I have been using them as coterminous. We might get to that. And somebody on blue Sky this morning said 'I have listened to people arguing, screaming that we should be spending millions, if not billions, on defence. And the concept of Russian boots down the streets is a fantasy. It is not going to happen. And the climate emergency is happening around us, why are we not screaming for the billions to be spent on that?' And the answer is we don't think there's enough of us. So talk to us. How did you come to write this report, and how did you dive into and drill into the data to get the numbers that you've got?
Liam: Yeah, thanks for that intro. And well, basically I started writing this report because I really wanted to know whether I was using my time well, helping to run the Climate Majority project. So I helped to start this organisation with Rupert Reid in 2022. And we started with this idea that there's a majority of people, it's in the name, right, who care about climate. And so the idea of puncturing pluralistic ignorance, is when the majority of people don't know they're a majority. Part of our message from the beginning, what I found was that statistics which we like to quote, and which people increasingly like to quote after we started off like 89% of people care about climate change, but people don't talk about it, were encouraging but not game changing. You know, there's a bit of a movement in the scene; oh I didn't know that. But not kind of really leaning in. And I generally tend to think people are more reasonable than we tend to give them credit for. And it always got me thinking, well, why should I be a little bit more sceptical? And then you start thinking about, well, majorities want lots of things for a very long time. How many people want corruption out of politics? How many people don't want somebody like Keir Starmer as their best choice, right?
Manda: Yes.
Liam: I mean, elections have been decided between two candidates, neither of which a majority likes, for a very long time. So then the question becomes, well, but can we actually believe that that majority can become a political force? And so then start asking other questions like, do people actually want change badly enough that they might undergo that change? How would they come to feel like a real majority? And how would they come to feel they can actually do something, right? Because that's really a big part of the problem. You know, as you said at the beginning, they need to be convinced they can do something about it. And being part of a majority that want something alone isn't necessarily enough. But if you then kind of broaden out this inquiry about silent majorities; majorities that are not really seen. A silent majority is just a majority that we don't really know exists because most of the members aren't that open about their opinions. And pluralistic ignorance; if you look at many subjects, you might see a larger political body that might be capable of doing something. Or you might not. And so I really started looking at that.
Manda: Right. This is science. We don't know the answer and it might not be the thing that we think, but we're going to find out.
Liam: Yeah. Am I wasting my time or not? Basically. I'm happy to say I don't think I am.
Manda: Good. Yeah, because we would all be wasting our time; listeners and both of us. And we're not. So how long did it take you to write this? Because the detail is impressive.
Liam: It was a year.
Manda: Okay. So the executive summary says: Across the UK and much of the world, a vast majority of people feel threatened by climate chaos", which we already know. "Yet only a small minority expresses this concern publicly". And so you identified six broad categories of different silent majorities and obviously there's lots of overlap in different places. Talk us through those six and how you came to identify those as groups worth drilling down into.
Liam: Yes. So it's probably useful to start with kind of the surge, which is starting from climate concern and saying, well, what do we really need to know whether this is a movement that could go somewhere? So it's public climate concern, but then who's concerned, the majorities that could open their mouth and basically change the public conversation by doing so. And opinions that mean something about our ability to actually mount a meaningful ecological movement. So the majorities that I settled on eventually are: The climate concerned public; climate concern writ large. Climate concern among business people. What scientists say about climate and what they know, the difference between those. And then a quite broad category of collapse and poly crisis concern, which has a whole slew of disaffection with society as it currently stands within it. Then there's depolarisation. So are majorities really polarised? Or are they not really polarised and we don't see the not Polarised people. Finally, the majority with different priorities, the majority with values that actually don't really fit with the society that they see in front of them. And if you look at those things, it's well we're concerned about climate and are we concerned about ecological catastrophe enough to do something about it? And does that dovetail with a number of other concerns, which also point for systemic change?
Liam: Do we want to come together rather than being divided? Is there a group of people who's actually legitimately interested in depolarisation? And do people want fundamentally different lives which are actually compatible with transition? Those would be the important categories for knowing whether or not I'm wasting my time. So I was very interested in figuring out where people stood on those.
Manda: Sure. And before we go into where you got the data from, I'm interested in the categories that you perhaps dropped. Because I'm thinking there's within the media, which almost uniformly seems to be going for climate bad but business as usual. Climate bad and here's the cruise you could go on. You know, the Guardian. Anyway. Never mind. Let me not rant about the Guardian. So there's the media, there's politicians, I could think of half a dozen other subcategories. What was it led you to these ones? Was it that there was data available or was it that in the end, they were ones that you could relatively easily bring together as a group?
Liam: We do cover politicians slightly in the business section, but it's a combination of having the data and then what are the most important, you know, a bit of a judgement call on which are the most important opinions out there. Because you can write a 300 page book about these opinions. Like a thing I may write next is live minorities are growing minorities, right? So we all know that once an opinion gets above 25%, that matters. And there's other groups that have moved into that territory. People are sceptical towards the economic system has gone above that number. You know, not a majority yet but it's quite a solid majority; real scepticism towards the economic system's above 25% where it wasn't.
Manda: Yeah. And a few people like Gary Stevenson of Gary's Economics saying tax wealth not work to a large enough forum, that he begins to get on to the television that ordinary people watch. And it makes a big difference. And it seems to me that one of the keys there, slightly, not necessarily with Gary, but with some of the other people, maybe Mamdani or Zack Polanski is they are offering alternatives. And that for me, one of the things that's really important for thrutopian narratives is not just do we offer a vision of a different future that feels grounded and plausible and works, but we offer the steps to get there. So that people are not just, you know, X is bad, but Y is an alternative. And I think for a long time, within particularly our economic narrative, we've bounced around within a terribly narrow bandwidth of options. You know, do you tax a little bit or do you tax a little bit less, is not the conversation we need to be having about how does our entire value system work? Let's park that one, because I could rant on about economics for far too long, and the podcast listeners are used to it.
Liam: Well, there might be one really important thing there. Right?
Manda: Okay.
Liam: And so I actually was an economist, a quite left leaning economist in my 20s. That's what I was doing in Tanzania, was working as an applied economist.
Manda: Oh, interesting.
Liam: And one thing that I've noticed, right, and part of what I'm concerned with here is that if you actually look at points where there was real innovation economic theory, or real discussions about alternative systems, the Overton window is thrown open, and then there's intense conversation for a very short period of time, and then a system takes hold and it stops. And so part of what you want to do here is you have to build the sense that something is possible. And historically, a lot of innovation and very intense discussion happens right after people start believing that. Like post World War Two era, the Polanyi's, you know, Karl and Michael Polanyi are brilliant. This is where everything seemed to be in play after World War Two. The second wave, Cyberneticist Allende's advisers, people like that in the 70s. These people, during that radical era I worked in Tanzania with a lot of people who had been advisors to Julius Nyerere, who was the first kind of African socialist. There was economic advisors, right? So they were kind of like the last living left economists at that point. There were these periods where you would see all this really interesting stuff and then you would see nothing. And so the point is if you demographically can build the sense that something is possible, then you can see real innovation. But historically romantic political economy doesn't really happen until people have that sense.
Manda: Right. Okay. The podcast is now taking a whole different shape than I thought, but this is really interesting. So clearly I haven't been to Tanzania and I haven't had the experience that you have had, but I watch, for instance, modern heterodox economists Jason Hickel And Kate Raworth being obvious ones. And a lot of the modern monetary theorists. And I watched the systematic shutdown that happened because of the IMF and because American hegemony is fundamentally based on the hegemony of the dollar as a fiat currency, as the fiat currency. They're shifting now to stablecoin, but that's a whole other conversation. And a particular worldview that must be maintained. And they have very effectively captured most of the current legacy media superstructure to maintain that narrative hegemony. And it's very hard if you're in Tanzania and the World Trade Organisation and the IMF are not going to give you any funding if you don't do what they say. This is Yanis Varoufakis and Adults in the room and Greece going, we need to do this. And then, no, you can't do that, because we need to maintain the fiction that governments function within a debt ceiling. Which is not true, but the vigilante bond markets can make it true. There is a parallel here, it seems to me, and we're racing ahead to where I thought we were going at the end of the podcast. But we're here and it's alive. We believe there is a climate majority. You have demonstrated that there is a majority of people within each of these six categories that wants the world to be different. It may not have, we may not have offered a coherent narrative of how the world could be different and how we could get there, but if we were able to, and if people got to know. If everybody wore the yellow armbands or whatever that said: I am really concerned and realise how many of them there were. If the hashtags took off on social media, which would be the current way of doing that, the narrative would shift very quickly. I have a concept of this in my head, which is before 2010, leaving the EU was 16th in the UK on people's level of salience in political stuff. And 16th is like fantastically below potholes. It's below cuddling bunnies and making kittens in baskets. And a media that wants us to move to the right shifted that Overton window till that was right at the top of quite a lot of people's voting needs. And it was a limbic shift of my tribe says this and my tribe must win or the world falls apart. Let's head back to the report. We've got our six categories. I would like to unpick a little bit of each one. First of all, how did you identify the data that you're presenting? Because, for instance, the percentage of people who think their country should act to tackle climate change, and you've got a lot of data, and I'm really interested that Egypt, for instance, is right low down, whereas Morocco is really high up. And why? Why? And presumably it's to do with if you're busy trying to survive against a not very intelligently run government, then stuff like climate is not your most salient point. But where did you find your data and how reliable do you believe it to be?
Liam: Well, I mean, you find the data from the most reliable polling agencies with the best reputation. I mean, Ipsos generally has a good reputation and Gallup, these types of groups. And most of the data is from one of those types of agencies. Like Ifop is where the collapse data we'll get to comes from. That's one of France's major pollsters who does election polls in France, which is probably the reason why, you know, I'm comfortable leaning on it.
Manda: Because in this country we've got YouGov, obviously. But YouGov seems to me a push polling system that's designed to, if you knew that candidate X was burning kittens alive, would you still vote for them? Yes or no? Is the kind of push polling of wait, what? He's doing what? And YouGov is just laden with that. But then it's run by a former minister for the Tory party, so of course it's going to do that.
Liam: Polls generally, I think, recently because there's been some polling that's just been off in the United States. And there's a few really disreputable polling firms. But it's hard to have a good reputation if you're too hacky as a polling firm. And so there are some ones which I don't pay a lot of attention to, but there's relatively few of those.
Manda: Okay.
Liam: I think it's one of these things, a bit like getting a peer review in science. So there's not a lot of really peer reviewed science that's just straight up garbage. It may be really bad arguments, but made up of data for long periods of time. It can happen, but it tends to get found out. It tends to be more like making really motivated arguments with your data. But polling is basically asking a question, you can look at the poll, you can look at whether the other polls in the same area are saying the same thing, or if you're getting fundamentally different.
Manda: Massively different answers.
Liam: So I did check everything to see if there was some other poll that was telling a massively different story, right.
Manda: Okay. And then the bar graphs that you created of, when asked the question, how concerned are you? There are some people that say 'don't know', which is just always 'what? You what? Do you actually live on Mars?' And then the tiny amount that are not at all concerned. And then the ones who are not very concerned, I suspect are the people who are just having to choose between heating the house and feeding the kids. It's just they haven't got the bandwidth. And then there's the fairly concerned and the very concerned. And it's just very graphically obvious when you when you lay it out. Alrighty. So let's move from that general population. And we could spend an hour talking about how did we decide who's general population and what's the weighting? But let's not. Let's move to business because business is really interesting, because the thing about business is it moves very fast, if it needs to. Tell me what business people thought and then tell me how can we help to shift their understanding of who's in the majority?
Liam: So if you pull business people, you know, people who have executive level positions or CEOs, you get very similar numbers; above 80% saying climate is a serious problem, we need to do something about it. And very importantly, we need new laws. That the only way that we're actually going to meet any of these sustainability targets is by having new laws. And I could say my first job outside of university was actually working at the conference board, which was basically fortune 500 companies organised an organisation which ran conferences for them. So I got to go to oligopoly conferences and see it from the inside.
Manda: Wow.
Liam: A young, socially interested researcher I would talk to CEOs and at that point, they already knew this in the early 2000. You just talk to leading smart business people, the head of the conference board was also head of the Harvard Business School at some point, the dean would say, of course, the only way we're ever going to meet any of these targets is new laws. So that's been a majority opinion and increasing majority opinion in the business community for a really long time. You know, business people are I think a lot like everybody else, where they see the need to do something, they don't particularly see a way of changing things. And there's a very strong ideology. I call it business cancel culture. Like we talk about cancel culture in universities, it's a real thing. Is it as bad as business cancel culture, where if you even said the name Noam Chomsky or name Marx, then you know, you're basically suspect for...
Manda: You're going to lose your job.
Liam: Yeah, if you put that on hobbies, reading Marx, you wouldn't get...
Manda: Right. I mean, it's bad enough that if you put voting Democrat in the US, you'd probably be quite suspect there. And okay, so this is the thing. I have a friend who works in one of the big name hedge fund companies as the sustainability officer and has been under real assault. Not by the people who are running the hedge funds, but by the PR department. Because you can say things to the people running the hedge funds who go, yes, of course, and you cannot say it to the people who are still trying to promote business as usual, as a glorious thing, because, of course, their jobs depend on business as usual being a glorious thing, and you can't undermine the concept of that. How do we bring the the majority of people within business to the point where that narrative tipping point is reached?
Liam: Yeah. I mean, I think the most productive route as to where people have gone wrong is by trying to get companies to speak as companies. Getting companies to speak as companies is probably the wrong move. Getting business people to speak as business people is a much better one. So getting large groups of people together to speak privately about their concerns and then speak in mass about what they think openly would be a lot more productive. So like the huge software unions, right? Google employees. You notice that they take much more adventurous positions, you know, and that's a little bit more pragmatism, because there's a big distinction between being concerned about climate and then being willing to take a risk. One that breaks the taboo and talks about what we really need to do to make a difference. So there's very few people like Andrew Forrest, who's one of Australia's richest persons, who said business will kill your children if you let it. Not saying he's against business or even against markets, he's not against either, but he does say it needs regulation. Like if we're not going to regulate business, I need help to to create the type of business I actually want to create. I need laws that force my competitors to do the same thing, or I can't do what I want to do. Right?
Manda: But they would have to be international laws because if Australia and the UK, for instance, had some kind of political epiphany and created those laws, the businesses will move offshore. I know they say they will when we offer to tax. And Mamdani has demonstrated that, you know, you shift the taxes and they don't leave New York because they like being in New York. But if we did the shifts that we actually need, we would lose them. So this would require international cooperation at a point when the Trump administration, for instance, is just taking an axe or a superannuated chainsaw to all of the regulation. So everyone goes okay, we'll go to the states and we'll pollute the (expletive deleted) out of everything there, because we can. Have you seen a route through to global cooperation?
Liam: Well, yeah. I mean, the majorities exists and then there's strategy, right? So one of the strategies, of course, is coalitions of the willing. So you can have climate clubs where essentially the countries that are actually willing to commit to the types of regulations that are necessary have preferential trade agreements. That would be very important. The other thing, of course, is winning elections. So of course, businesses are not going to change with Trump in charge, but the minute, of course, that Trump is gone, then they're going to come out of the woodwork. Because they're not in the business of just taking damage for no reason. But the concern hasn't gone anywhere. And this is part of what's in the report, and what's really important is remembering that it's going to get worse before it gets better, right? And we have control of when that getting better is, but the getting worse drives people into the camp.
Manda: Into the getting better. Okay.
Liam: Right. Because the business case for change is growing every year. There's losses on the book, expected losses on the book. And if you look at what those losses are, they could be as much as 80% of the economy in the 2070s.
Manda: There won't be an economy in the 2070s. I mean, this is the bonkers bit. This is like the guy who got the Nobel Prize for saying that global warming was only going to create a 3% dip in GDP, because he measured the difference between Florida and Massachusetts. And Florida was that much hotter than Massachusetts and only had a 3% GDP loss. And it's like, guys, you don't get what happens when we have total ecosystem collapse. If we haven't turned around, done a really quite tyres screaming u turn, there won't even be an economy. How do we get the bandwidth shift and the understanding? I mean, this is when we get to the scientists. I think maybe we need to talk about that first, because it seems to me when I talk to business people, they are talking about minor incremental change in everything that they do. Like, you know, Coke creating recycled bottles and maybe harvesting water better. It's like, no, Coke needs to stop selling carbonated sugar water. I mean, they all do.
Liam: And that's the silence, right? So the question is, is that what they really think is needed or is that what they're willing to say publicly? Right and right. The evidence suggests that there's a huge gap between what people say in polls, then what businesses say publicly, those are two different things. I mean, anecdotally, there's a major innovation conference in the UK, and I've talked to people, it's a green tech conference. And once you start talking to people, what do you think about De-growth? And do you think we really can afford to grow? And you start having these conversations about Jason Hickel and stuff. They're not going to get on stage and talk about that, but privately they're taking it really seriously. So it's important to look at the wider social history. The labour movement looked like a bunch of people who knew that they were being exploited, who knew that it wasn't going to get any better, but who were not saying anything about it publicly for a very long time. And workers would crowd into overcrowded factories, they would get exploited. They would go home, they would grumble about it, maybe write a song, but they wouldn't identify publicly with a change movement for a really long time. Because it hurts to believe in things that you don't think will happen and there's consequences. And this is what communism looked like, the fall of communism, you know, public acceptance but private grievance, private disaffection, private despair for quite some time.
Manda: Are we talking about the Soviet Union, the fall of the Soviet Union? Yeah. Okay. It wasn't really communist anyway.
Liam: Yeah, exactly. Vaclav Havel, the power of the powerless, was precisely to stop being part of the illusion. If we remember that public letter, it's really saying 'well, look, you don't have to be part of the illusion. Stop saying that you agree with all of this'. And that's reliably what big societal changes look like. So if you're thinking like, are we inside of a system which is failing? Like people say it's failing, right, You know, it was never fair. People always knew what was fair. They were told, kind of believed maybe, it's the best of all possible worlds.
Manda: Yeah. Churchill. Yes. You know, democracy.
Speaker 4: Yeah and Dr.Pangloss. Let's not forget Dr.Pangloss.
Manda: Who?
Liam: Essentially in Candide, there's a character, I believe, Dr.Pangloss, who said 'All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds'. The argument against democracy was that we already lived in the best of all possible worlds.
Manda: Yes. And people believe this. I have lost count of the number of people who genuinely seem to think that capitalism delivered, I don't know, vaccines, and therefore capitalism is good. Without even the imaginative capacity to consider... We're not going into the vaccine argument. But let's say capitalism created modern transport, and modern transport is good because it's a slightly less toxic area. That other things might have created modern transport, or increased human health, or increased the survivability of our children. Without looking into the fact that, first of all, survivability was fine until we created the modern world, because we've got a whole bunch of narratives about that that are untrue as well. And there might have been other ways of doing that. It's a very interesting sleight of hand. So I'm staring at the time and thinking, we haven't even got to number three, which is the scientists. But business is a really good point, because as we said, if one individual. We saw this with the guy who was the head of shell, his kids really convinced him that shell was fundamentally evil. And he tried to change the trajectory. And he wasn't terribly effective at it, but he was making a minor nudge to the race to the maximal profit. And he is no longer the head of shell. Similarly with Unilever, you know, the person at the top was trying a little bit and they are no longer the person at the top. So if you if you put your head above the parapet, demonstrably, you are more likely to lose your head than change the nature of the parapet.
Liam: Right. And the important thing there, and this will get into the values section, is that if you look at that behaviour, then it's easy to conclude that nobody cares, right? But if you look at what happens to people who try to act on conscience within that system, you find it doesn't work out. So people doing the best they can within the system looks like people still profit maximising, but with as much kind of emissions reduction as they can manage while still being competitive. Right?
Manda: Right. Which is not going to solve anything. Partly it's not all about the climate, and it's certainly not all about the carbon. This is another point I want to get to, is that labour it took a very long time for people who were deeply disaffected to get to a point where they had enough sense of themselves as a mass movement to make a difference. They were not up against biophysical limits. We are up against very tight biophysical limits. I don't know how long you think we've got, but I'm looking at the end of this decade as a pretty hard deadline for we need to have made substantial systemic change by then. And the clock is running out fast. Could we have a look at the scientists? Because that strikes me as one of the most obvious places where change can happen. If you talk to any scientist who knows anything in private, they are losing sleep. And yet the general consensus, you know, people were talking about the recent heat wave in the UK and they were arguing about whether 1976 was actually hotter. And then the BBC comes out with stuff like, you know, people were enjoying the sunshine instead of run screaming for the hills people, this is the start of something irreversible and it's not going to be fun. And you need to be planting in your garden and please, can we renationalise the water NOW because we need to actually have a proper water system. All of those things. How can we help to shift the scientific consensus against the weight of a system that wants to crush it? And knowing that simply frightening people without giving them a behaviour change isn't necessarily that useful. You just get a lot of ulcers.
Liam: Mhm mhm. So yeah, there's a few things there. So just quickly cycling back to the last bit, right? If you want to believe that there could be a quicker change this time, I think looking at the fall of the Soviet Union and the Soviet system is instructive.
Manda: OK. Tipping points.
Liam: Yeah. Because the thing difference between that and Labour is that from a purely Machiavellian sense, the system was working for the people on top of it. So the workers were being exploited, but they were up against an upper class, a capitalist class for whom, at least in the narrow Machiavellian sense, the system was more morally degrading everybody, but...
Manda: But they were still making money, so they're okay.
Liam: But whereas the Soviets, it was failing for everybody. Which is why it doesn't take very long at all. And this is part of, I think, one of the most underappreciated things about climate we talk about, it's a privileged person's concern. Like, yeah, that's great. Guess what? Like privileged people have power. And if you want sudden changes in systems, the point about systemic failure, which says nobody's exempt, that says actually nobody's going to be very well off if this keeps on running like it is, is precisely the argument that allows you to believe quick change is actually possible. Which is why it's important that business people care. Are they saying anything about it? No. Are they saying what they believe? No. But are they concerned enough to act if they feel there's an opening? Quite possibly. And scientists can help with that because scientists really do have a kind of a fan base, right. There are people who do listen to scientists. And who listens to scientists the most? Elites.
Manda: Okay. All right. Because some of them can understand. I'm quite frightened by their incapacity to actually read basic science, and understand methodology and critique it. But. Okay. Yes.
Liam: Well, the thing is that scientists come from the same culture, right? So the thing about it is that people basically believe each other. So I became a cognitive scientist later. So what I really spent the last 20 years doing is emotional cognitive science. So emotion and cognition, how they interact. If you look at who believes whom? What determines that?
Manda: It's tribal.
Liam: It's tribal. Right. And scientists and the people who run the country come from very similar tribes.
Manda: Okay.Yes. Yes.
Liam: And so the impact of scientific consensus on elites is much higher. In elite discourse, you still have to justify based on science. You don't have to do that in society writ large. But among parliamentarians, especially the conservative or the uniparty parliamentarians, does does it matter? And the Greens, yes, it does matter. So scientific openness. The fact that you can go and talk to people who are clearly part of the liberal elite, and they don't realise anywhere near how far we are down the wrong track, is really, really important. And part of what we're missing as a movement is that we actually do need to worry about elites. The way that social movements oftentimes get built is a few people get highly motivated because they see themselves as capable of organising something. And so there's two things here; some people will say, yes, you know what? I feel like I can help to build something which can be an answer to this. And those people will not be overwhelmed. A lot of people listening to this are going to, no matter what class they started in, some people make the choice to be motivated by a really negative situation. And those people are oftentimes willing to build the institutions and the movements that make other people feel like they can be part of something large enough to make a difference.
Manda: This is what the Climate Majority project is doing. That's the motivation for your existence and you checking that you're not wasting your time.
Liam: Right. I'm not saying that dwelling on all the most negative things is is always the greatest idea. But when we say a negative messaging doesn't work in climate, the counterargument is like, well, if you actually talk to the most motivated people, what got them the most motivated? And a lot of people's answer is something like reading The Uninhabitable Earth. James Hansen or something else.
Manda: Jem Bendel. Yes, yes. Absolutely.
Liam: And who builds the organisations that then make everybody else feel like they're part of something is oftentimes a small group of people who start telling a victory narrative that slowly grows in resonance, so that it becomes believed by a larger number of people and that's where the change comes from.
Manda: Yes. This is the thrutopian thinking. We need the motivation, the agency, the direction, and the empowerment. We need a MADE future. And it's that victory narrative. So I really do want to come and look at the other three and your list of six, but where do you sense that people are getting their, what you just called a victory narrative? That there is an alternative future that we would all actually enjoy much better than the chaos of the present. We were not all born to pay bills and die. All of those things. Because my sense of agency arises because I spend a lot of time sitting on the hill talking to all the shamanic stuff. And my belief system tells me, first of all, this is what I'm here for, and second, that it is still possible. Absent that shared spiritual ground, where are people getting their victory narrative from?
Liam: Well, I mean, there's a lot of different sources of victory narrative. But I think for the purpose of the report, that's part of it, the purpose of the report is to give people better building blocks for narratives. If you listen to Churchill's first speech after World War Two, what he starts talking about is solid ground; building solid blocks on solid ground. It's like he starts grabbing for what are the things that we can actually build a hopeful narrative out of? And these demographic trends are for me, some of those building blocks. We actually have the numbers. We've got trends as well. These trends are getting worse, right? We've got people who are increasingly basically replacing growth with security as their leading concern, right? Security is the new growth. Focus groups who are asked about growth say things like, well, growth for whom? You know, they've been hearing about growth for 40 years. An important part of a victory narrative, is that 40 years ago, growth was a really great way of avoiding difficult conversations. Everybody wins. Corporate profits goes up. Supposedly people get better. When I as a politician talk about growth, the corporations hear profits, the rest of the people hear higher living standards. Everybody has something good to make of it. But we've been talking about growth for 40 years.
Manda: And people's life expectancy has dropped and their sense of wellness has dropped, and their sense that their kids are going to have better world has fallen off the edge of a cliff.
Liam: Being able to own a house, which is a basic form of security, right? Young college graduates don't think they're going to do it. After 40 years of growth, the solution is more growth? I think people are actually already organically reacting to that. And that's important. That's something that victory narrative needs. You can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all the time. As Lincoln is supposed to have said. And, you know, it's showing, so that's a big part.
Manda: Okay. All right. So we're nearly at an hour, but we we'll have some cuts, we'll get it down a bit. But if you're happy to go on? So we have the decline and collapse concern majority, which we kind of talked about. For people who've read Jem Bendell or whatever else and have become motivated by that. Let's have a look at the Depolarising majority, because that feels like a really big part. I am remembering when Trump had just been elected for the second time, or at least, let's say Trump had managed to steal a second election. And I was talking to members of our extended family who were very happy by this. And I was very sad. And we could either scream at each other, or I could try and self-regulate a little bit. And I said, so what is it that you actually want now that your guy is in? And without any sense of irony at all, they looked me in the eye and they said, we just want people to be nicer to each other. And I restrain myself every time I meet now from going 'and how is that going for you?'. Because they listen to a completely different set of realities and it may be that they think this is going fine. And yet what they want is for people to be nicer to each other. They want depolarisation. They want everyone to think like they think. But then I want everyone to think like I think. How do we give the majority of people who are exhausted by the culture wars a sense of a common narrative? And what is that common narrative?
Liam: Mm. Well, the thing about it as well is process. I would also say it's like building a common process and pointing out what we all agree on. Like the uniparty. People basically believe that they're run by a single elite, which doesn't really work. They're stuck in a broken failing unfair system. So the always unfair system is now breaking and no one seems to have much of a plan. They're not really being offered. I mean, essentially you can say there's a radical centre you know, Tony Blaire's term. We won't go into that. Of course, he's not actually talking about a real radical centre.
Manda: No, no, he was the heart of the uniparty. But anyway, but he had a good sense of what people really wanted.
Liam: What they want to hear, right. And there is a radical centre that wants wealth taxes, which wants AI regulation, which wants climate action, which wants real change. And it doesn't see anything in front of it that it buys completely. And so getting that centre together, having more and more conversations, the local democracy movements that we see sprouting across the UK. I mean, it's an organic response to that. The number of people who are getting facilitation training over the last ten years to be able to hold conversations where people don't end up shouting at each other skyrocketed. There's organic trends of creating spaces. We've helped to create an organisation called ICRA with lottery funding. The Climate Majority Project, Climate Psychology Alliance and Mindfulness Initiative are helping to create spaces for that type of conversation as well, and working with people in conflict resolution. What we really need is the sense of a process that has legitimacy, that is capable of coming to answers. People believe in process, they believe in democracy. And what we really need to do is have actual faith in it. And I don't think it's as easy as a citizens assembly.
Manda: Right. Thank you.
Liam: But getting the motion behind that is really important. That's where the majority can come in, is look, there are majorities that want this type of thing. They want serious, substantive conversations. If we put our backs into creating those and people are already doing it, then we can actually get somewhere. So I think that's the important thing. And it's also building on what's happening locally.
Liam: Right. So the type of thing that Matt Golding talks about almost exclusively. 'Screw this, let's try something else'. Local groups which are getting together with an ambition. It's almost like this is my part of changing the world. And doing something really impressive on a local level, like the civic squares of the world. There's a great initiative called People's Kitchen in Wales, which is basically like a democratic redesign of the food system. And we could go into adaptation initiatives; there are loads of things going on, where people are doing things really powerful at the local level. And the more that we see that happening, that's the silent majority becoming visible. It's the people who are saying, right, my security is not taken care of. We need to take this into our own hands. And then demanding change or making change happen really at the local level, that's what the silent majority turning into a viable unit looks like, right? And the more that you see that happening, the more that people see each other, the more they realise we could do something together. So it's this combination of reviving the 90s 'think global, act local' which was an idea that was there before its time. It was a great slogan. We were in the middle of the end of history era and it didn't really go anywhere.
Manda: Yeah, neoliberalism was such a big concept that we were just thinking local within how do we sell our houses for more? And now we're looking at how do we build a house for our kids? Or how do we build a reality for our kids? I would like to just drill a bit more deeply into, because you said, I don't think it's as simple as a climate assembly. And so often I have people sitting exactly where you're sitting going climate assembly, climate assembly, and I think garbage in, garbage out. Climate assemblies have done good things in Ireland. And the one that was in the UK, run by the parliament, but not the government, produced a really weak set of proposals on climate because they didn't, for instance, have Jem Bendell in, because the civil servants were controlling the input. It had a very well defined Overton window, and so the people quite reasonably produced an answer within that Overton window. So we've already said let's create a hypothetical space. There's one in Hull where they bought up a street of houses eventually and actually insulated them properly so that people were not having to choose between feeding their kids and heating their house in the winter, and then you can start having the conversations. And it seems to me, how do we move from that hyper local, one person at a time, sorting their life, against the tide of a system that is fundamentally designed to destroy all of us? How do we move from that to something that does work at a national and international level? Because we've got to the point where we need to create national and international laws at the same time as we're working hyper locally. I am trying to write a novel at the moment. How do I bridge between that? You are now doing my research for me. How do I get from this works in six streets in Hull to this works across the UK?
Liam: Yeah. I mean, I think the big part of that is that there's no identity for this majority. I mean, if you just think about it, we've been rebels forever, right? Like Rebel Without a Cause was a long time ago. The antiheroes that we have in our fiction.
Manda: Count Binface as we speak in Clacton. I mean, what happens if he wins? Could we have a whole Count Binface group. That would be amazing, wouldn't it? Sorry. Go on.
Liam: Well, so we're basically living in an anti-hero society, right? Okay, so this is going to be like a culture thought, but okay, do you know when the first anti-hero wave was as a writer?
Manda: I don't know. Boudica? Probably sometime about the Odyssey, actually, probably a long time before that, but we don't have it written down. Go on. What are you going to say?
Liam: Well, I think at least in the modern era, the ones that get pointed to is basically late Tsarist Russia. So like Eugene Onegin is one of the most recent, the advent of the contemporary anti-hero. And in Russian literature, like Dostoyevsky's characters. Crime and punishment is an anti-hero book. And who were these people reading anti-hero books? They were a class of people who had actually been educated on life and ideals, and didn't see any chance to act on them in their own societies. Which basically describes everybody who went to school in the modern world. And so that group of people doesn't have a collective identity really as a political unit, self-aware that they live in a society which is a huge disappointment.
Manda: Right. Okay. And they want the value led society that they were told they had got and that they've realised is a myth.
Liam: Yeah.
Manda: Okay. And this then takes us quite neatly to the intrinsic values majority, which is your final of the six. Talk to us about intrinsic versus extrinsic values, the whole shift of those, and then that. Because that feels like it's one of those intercepts that touches all of the others.
Liam: Yeah. So basically if you infer this is a long term trend, if you actually ask people what's important, they'll answer in the way they think they should, which is, well, the simple things are important. It's about friends, family, security, time and community, the good life and things which are inherently meaningful. And then of course, they place that above status and money for the most part. But that's been true for a long time. What's been changing a bit, there was a trend towards intrinsic values, that kind of froze around 2008. Why? Well, because economic insecurity went up and so people started being more concerned about extrinsic things again. But the other thing is that they're really concerned about security. So there's two things. And we have an inner growth take off; an interest in all things inner in the last 15 years. So we've got long term belief that there's more important things. We have increased interest in security specifically and increased, you can say, spirituality. And why are these things taboo? Well, we live in a secular society. And people again judge based on behaviour. Just like the business people, you look at the life choices people make. The choices they make off of the menu that they're choosing from. And you conclude that they like material things, their main priority. But it's like living in a town where there's only pizza and thinking well, people really like pizza here. Like there's no one in the town likes Chinese food.
Manda: There isn't the option.
Liam: There's a law against Chinese restaurants. We would then make a wrong conclusion. And it's a little bit more complicated than that, but our society, I think viewers can understand, is set up to create materially rewarding options, but not to create options which are meaningful. Good, solid jobs around friends and family that give you lots of free time and feel meaningful, is not what the system is set up to supply, even if there's demand, right? So that's what economists would call market failure. And generally governments are supposed to correct market failures, but there's a system wide market failure providing the type of job people actually want. So you would then make the wrong conclusion that people are materialist. Well are they risk averse about changing the whole economic system? Yes. That's really like the pain point, is that they're risk averse about changing the entire economic system, because people have tried that before. It didn't go very well. And some of the cases where it did, not to say that it couldn't be done well, but people are understandably risk averse about changing the entire economy. They're risk averse about getting rid of markets specifically.
Liam: There's a difference between capitalism and markets. Markets are people taking stuff that exists, putting it together different ways and then selling it to other people, as a basis of how they get paid, making decisions. And capitalism is essentially like rule of the entire society by capital or structuring of society around profit and accumulation. What laws will most allow the profit? And that's how society is structured, right? And there's quite a lot of confusion on that, which plays a part there. So people are generally positive on markets. And the polling on whether they believe in capitalism is really bad. So there's not a lot of polling which makes that distinction or a public conversation that makes that distinction.
Liam: And we know that in many cases, like even the Republican Party and JD Vance starts to make movements in the opposite direction. And Steve Bannon and all the rest of these people, right, they're actually gaining political capital by talking about moving society in a way that protects workers, right? Not profits. So that's always been popular. People want governments to make them more secure. And so that's what the average person right now is starting to look at.
Manda: Okay. So we're way over time, but that doesn't matter, because this is so interesting. You have a background in economics and you're interested in cognitive neuroscience. And I hear what you're saying about capitalism and markets, but it does seem to me that markets increasingly 'the market' has actually no bearing in anything that anybody ever made. There's not that many widgets in the proportion of the market. There's a lot of the market is now super inflated by fantasy things. We're betting up cryptocurrencies. We're betting up the betting up of the betting up. Which will collapse. It can't not collapse. But what we have is an economic system, which is I think it boils down to the commodification of suffering, but Polanyi said commodification of land, labour and capital. We need to shift to something that is not the commodification. That's the capitalism is commodifying stuff. We need to shift to something where value flows, where our economy is a storing, accounting for and distribution of value. But that's done in a way that is seen to be equitable. And whether we're looking at markets or capitalism, this is not the case at the moment.
Manda: And people are risk averse because they're told that communism failed, whereas communism has never actually been tried in ways that you and I would understand. And even then, I've read some really interesting reports by a woman whose name I consistently forget, that for women in East Germany, the system was much, much better than the capital system because of guaranteed childcare, guaranteed income. All of the men, everybody was paid the same. So if you wanted to be with a bloke, you were with the bloke who was good, not the one who earned the most, because the person who swept the streets earned the same as the bank manager or the surgeon. And if the bank manager and the surgeon were complete bastards you could get rid of them, and it was fine. And the day capitalism reasserted, that ceased to be the case. Leaving all of that aside, because we need not to have an extractive system that's not based on the commodification of suffering. It also isn't based on the annihilation of the ecosphere. Can you create a narrative of shift from where we are to where we need to be that would not frighten people? In, say, the next ten minutes, Liam, because hey! Or is that a separate podcast?
Liam: Uh, well. We'll see, you know.
Manda: If you've got the time, I've got the time.
Liam: Yeah. Let's go for it. The place I would start with is that I basically think we need a Department of Romantic Political Economy. And part of the problem that we have is like, oh, well, but there's this really big problem and what's the solution? I'm like, well, I don't really know and stop talking about it. Now think about what that would sound like if we take the problem we're talking about, we substitute a scientific problem. Oh, the theory of relativity is not actually nailing this data over here. Newtonian physics it really just keeps on failing, just doesn't capture this phenomenon at all. Well, what do you think about it? I don't know, yet. Well, then just stop talking.
Manda: Yeah. No, exactly. It's too hard. So we'll just go over and look at Fruitflies instead. No, let's sort the problem. Yes.
Liam: Well, there's no research program. I mean, if you think about the phenomenon that we're talking about and its difficulty and how central it should be, versus what it is actually like. They're totally out of proportion.
Manda: But we have people like Jason Hickel doing a lot of work and actually quite well funded by the EU to do a lot of work. I think if we brought Jason Hickel here and said, design the system, he'd design the system.
Liam: Well, he would give you a design. The question is whether people would agree with it.
Manda: Right, right. But there's a lot of people whose job depends on disagreeing with it, who still want to be employed. That's part of the issue, is it not? You know it's hard to get a man to hear something if his job depends upon him not hearing it.
Liam: It absolutely is. But I would also say that to have a really clear plan, if we really think about how much work it took to create enlightenment. So let's look at the history of what's called moral philosophy. Moral philosophy was funded essentially by business people, because moral philosophy accorded with their interests. So the kind of enlightenment philosophers were practising moral philosophy. The people who wrote the Declaration of Independence were very into moral philosophy. It had some improvements on the system of monarchy before it, and it favoured the interests of the merchant class. In the early kind of American republic, moral philosophy was the most important subject in university. And then the problem started arising that after socialists started being part of moral philosophy conversations, they became a lot more tendentious, and moral philosophy stopped being a subject on curriculum. In the late 1900s economics became hyper professionalised. It got turned into a kind of a special science.
Manda: A science instead of exactly a set of ideas.
Liam: Well, exactly. And a science that's almost more systematically gravitated towards inaccessible. And this is part of the issue is that it actually is really difficult to think of how are we actually going to run a just society? The Nordic countries have done a better job than most at building just societies in our time. You know, it took a while. They had very live conversations, but they did actually do it. They were they were actually able to mount really serious conversations about how do we design a society. And they've done better than most, you know, like the only countries in Europe where most of the people trust politics are Nordic area. It's like Netherlands and Denmark and above their area. Everybody else is hovering in the 40s. Germany also doing sort of well. The rest of the democratic world, especially neoliberal worlds, plummeting. The US is like rock bottom. So the people who've departed from neoliberalism more than anybody else, and who've actually had live public conversations about how do we design things, have high political engagement, high political trust. The rest of us? Not so much. So I think there are people showing up to podcasts who are spending hours and hours and hours on podcasts where people talk about these things. And so this is a sign of what we need. But I would not pretend it's easy. The problem that we had was that there's too much political romance; that people had great ideas about collectivisation, but they didn't understand exchange rates.
Manda: This is James Meadway's argument. Is it's okay, you can do it. You can't have Modern Monetary theory because you're required to buy in 80% of your food and the pound is going to fall through the floor if you accept that the government can make as much money as it needs. I mean, yes, I accept that. We're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction, and we're arguing about a system that's been around for a couple of hundred years. It'll be 100 million years til the next time something evolves to match what we have now, if it can at all, because we've taken all the easily accessible routes to get to where we are. Surely, surely we can all get together and agree that the current system is not fit for purpose and that we can design a better system, but we don't need to be hampered by exchange rates. I mean, I accept that's how the system works at the moment, but it only works because that's how we choose that it works.
Liam: Well, the thing is there are some facts that matter in politics and economics, but there's an infinity of possibilities, it's just a lesser infinity than what you can imagine. So it's about finding people who can actually help to define the substance, this infinity of actual possibilities, right? And then using the public imagination to figure out which among that infinite menu we actually want. But we also can't pretend that everything that you can imagine is actually possible. Because it's a bit like engineering. For me, a really good engineer is essentially an artist whose imagination has been trained to be bounded by the law of physics. They imagine only possible things, right?
Manda: Right.
Liam: And if you look at engineering that way, then social engineering doesn't sound evil. It's like, oh, right, we know what happens when people get together and we know how social markets work to some degree. We know that they can be useful, but we also know that we don't want everything to be governed by supply and demand. And that's not a given. It's not a given that supply and demand cover everything. And we can control that by intentionally changing things, changing culture, adopting new ideas. And I think we can get massively more sophisticated about that in a relatively short period of time. But it's about believing in collective capacity to make pivots, rather than necessarily having to have the plan mapped out. There is also this question of what can we do that we know we need to do? And how much does that sound like I feel a lot safer, because we can at least agree on that, right?
Manda: Like what? I mean, for instance, I would stop the dollar being the world hegemonic currency, because the day the dollar ceases to have any value is the day the billionaires cease to be billionaires. They just have a heap of useless digits on a computer. So that.
Liam: That. Uh, Europe needs to re-embrace greatness of a certain kind, which is just saving our own ass. We have a great challenge ahead of us. Therefore we're going to need to do something great. We don't need to save the world, we just need to basically figure out how to make our own system not implode along with in live conversation with everybody else. Many of whom know more than us about dealing with the challenges that we're facing. But at the same time, we have our own particular ones. And there's a lot of things like appealing to the American electorate's head, over the American elites head, to the electorate about foreign policy. Like, do Americans want the Iran war? No.
Manda: No, no. Does the current elite care about what the people want? Obviously not.
Liam: But they do have to to some degree. Because you see what's happening to Trump with Iran. Does the American public want a war with Iran?
Manda: No. Clearly not.
Liam: Do they think that they've been hoodwinked into a bunch of capitalist wars? Yes they do.
Manda: How do you give the American public the power? Because the Trump administration has been moving increasing numbers of troops into Washington. They've built a fortress around. They haven't got their ballroom, which was an underground 20 storey bunker. But they are planning for when they lose the midterms and they're not going to leave. It seems to me that we are in a very interesting race between the people of America going, you guys are not legitimate, we demand change. And the administration having essentially police surveillance drones, this is Peter Thiel's end point; they have said in public people, and I quote directly, 'behave much better when they're being surveyed 24-7'. Which is, of course, not true. The Epstein class will just find ways to get around it. And the whole of 1984 was predicated on that there's always a loophole. However, they're very close to having a police state that is openly a police state, rather than simply sending ICE in to the places they don't like and telling them to pick up anybody with impunity. How do we get to the point where the American people can displace this government?
Liam: I think part of the answer is the US is a bit behind politically. And that Europe should just stop looking to the US. I mean, essentially, if you're going to create a coherent 'Western civilisation needs to pivot this way' narrative, the place to do it is probably this side of the Atlantic. And then actively promoted across the other side.
Manda: Canada might come on board. Mark Carney seems to be not entirely insane. I mean, he's doing some weird things and he's still a neoliberal. But yes, it might.
Liam: Exactly. The US is having profound problems right now. But as Obama said, Americans can change. Obviously Trump has his 35%. But, you know, I think media can help silent majorities see themselves and I think that's the important thing here. When we're talking about how can we change things quickly, the most important interventions in media history are really ones that let majorities see themselves. And I think the more we point towards the existence of a true radical centre that wants something completely different than what they're seeing on offer right now, and start making changes politically. It's like one of these shot that's heard around the world thing. Like as soon as Polanski took off, that was worldwide news. And when Mamdani wins as mayor. It's like, oh, well, a Green Party person polling at around 20% and somebody winning a mayoral contest is immediately hopeful. And making people realise, well, actually there's a huge percentage of people like you. So there's an electorate out there waiting to be actively marketed to. Which is the same reason why Andy Burnham's in right now. Not to say that Andy Burnham is perfect.
Manda: Oh, no. But he's perceived as being better than Starmer. And he's got a small window in which to prove that that's the case.
Liam: Yes, exactly. This majority we've been talking about, I'm quite confident that's the group. When Burnham says, we've got this one last chance, what is he doing? He does have decent political instincts. He's talking about neoliberalism. He's breaking from Margaret Thatcher. He's explicitly putting public housing as a major plank. Public housing is something you can actually do because you build them and then you charge rent, but you outbid the richest people in society for Land and then use it in the public interest, which real estate developers won't do, right? It's like he's basically picking out a way to break from neoliberalism that's pragmatic. So what you need to do is basically grab people like that with both hands, and say we want you to win, but you need to do this. And put real pressure on people who want to create a pragmatic... Lots of people don't have time to listen to a lot of podcasts and read lots of books.
Manda: Sure.
Liam: They feel like there is a class of people in charge of the government who left them behind and let's be real, that happened.
Manda: For sure.
Liam: Yeah. And it's about people who are probably the types of people who view this type of podcast, sort of admitting we did a few things wrong. Like I'm from a working class area and when I went to university and looked at what people were talking about, I'm like, really? NAFTA? We're going to take that entirely seriously? And we talk about free migration for some people but then doctors don't face competition. In the United States and many other professions, you don't have free immigration of skilled trades, but you do have free immigration.
Manda: We used to anyway in the States. Yes.
Liam: Yeah. And the thing is that you have to take the whole of realism and speak to the silent majority. And be really honest about where the majority of people actually are. And if that group senses its own power, we can then build step by step towards something much better. You know, I absolutely think you can come up with pragmatic policies, but it's about things like public housing, which read in localisation, which Burnham is talking about. Like they do make sense, right? People would like more control of the lives they live. The most decentralised countries are the happiest. The Nordic countries are relatively federalised, right. The cities in Europe where you actually have available and reasonable housing.
Manda: Yeah. 15 minute cities where you can walk to everything that you need and come back again.
Liam: It's about winning trust. And so the story is finding, being honest about the problems that we have, being honest about we're all at fault, making the right choices that really show we have to basically do the things that show a realisation of how class interests have been shaping society and what it looks like to go against them. Talk about land reform, talk about wealth taxes, talk about the types of things that Gary Stephenson and then actually try to implement things which work. And I'm not saying all of them do work. You know, I will say it depends. There is a technical reality to politics, but you can find things which actually work and build trust relatively quickly.
Manda: And then become more radical because if we go within the constraints of the existing system, we're toast. I don't see that getting us where we need to go.
Liam: If you even say those things honestly, that gives you a lot more credibility to talk about other things. Like ecological collapse, most people kind of suspected anyways, right? So the more that you actually are honest about all of the different ways in which the liberal college educated class may not have done right by everybody else. You know, 30 years as a political party.
Manda: Yeah. Speaking as a member of the liberal educated college class. Yes, exactly. It's been a catastrophe.
Liam: Exactly. You know it wasn't like people were out in the streets against neoliberalism. And so if you're just honest about that, and propose things which are reasonable and then also really just talk about the reality of ecological crisis. Like what do we really need to do? The biggest thing the UK could do is national adaptation policy, because essentially that gets everybody into motion. And worldwide cameras turn on the United Kingdom and see like, oh, well, that media magnet of the United Kingdom is acting like food security is a real issue. Like there's an ecological emergency. What does preparing for an ecological emergency look like? It looks like adaptation, right?
Manda: Yeah. Those are synonymous. Yes.
Liam: Yeah. Right. You can't be serious about the fact that you believe in this and you're not preparing for it at the local level. That's what actually being able to talk about how you believe in an emergency as a government looks like, is doing local level stuff. And that's what gets the silent majority onside and visible. So what you want to do is promote policies like that. At the same time, you're completely blunt and honest about how totally the world effort is failing.
Liam: This is not working. The COP system is not working. It's symbolic policy, which is what governments predictably do.
Manda: It's greenwashing. Everybody knows it's greenwashing.
Liam: Yeah. It's what governments do when they can't actually solve a problem that they're supposed to solve. Like their mandate says, you have to solve it. We can't do it politically. We create an organisation that is for this, that can't solve this, but it maintains legitimacy.
Manda: That was the start of the ministry for the future, wasn't it, Kim Stanley Robinson, they set up this thing that was in name only and wasn't designed to do anything. And then a disaster happened, and suddenly this thing got teeth, and they were all really surprised that it could actually do something. We need that to happen. I think we should draw this to a close because otherwise we are definitely going into two podcast territory. Let's have one last question. People listening who are by definition activated, I sincerely hope are going to read your report. What can you give, a very tight, we've been talking for the last half hour about what they could do, but just actually positive things they could do. Anyone wherever they identify within your six subcategories, what is the most effective thing that someone could do at this moment now?
Liam: So generally for everybody, be more open and honest about what where you're at and be part of something local, probably, that's making a real difference. So find any local adaptation effort. If one doesn't exist then you can start one. For a business person, also be more open and honest, but also you can get your employer to support other things like depolarisation initiatives, which they might actually be willing to spend money on. You know, standing up for democracy and citizenship. Those things are what's threatening climate action as well. So getting them to actually spend money on things which are a little bit more like mom and apple pie, as we say in the States. Polarised, but still good, that's important. Thinking of it more in terms of system being just totally open about the fact that, look, individual emissions targets are good, but they're not going to solve this. They're never going to solve this.
Manda: The atmosphere doesn't know that you aren't China. Yes.
Liam: Exactly. Scientists realise that we need you. You can mobilise the elites. So scientists, the only reason not to speak about your beliefs is because you think people are going to be overwhelmed, and the reason why they're overwhelmed is because we don't think we can do anything. But if we don't think we can do anything, if we can't create a victory narrative, then we're toast anyways. So what you really need is attention on a victory narrative and scientists can help build that. And so at the very least, when you're targeting elites, elites need to know about this. The elites who actually listen to scientists the most need realism about where we're at. So scientists should be more open as well. People who fear collapse, you know, don't build a bunker. Again, it goes back to all of this insecurity is best handled by local and national and international adaptation initiatives. So absolutely support those. Again, be honest about it. Jem Bendell and Gutierrez are gifts. They're what people breaking silence look like. When people start to speak out and they still are around like Jem Bendell is, then it shows everybody else they can speak up without disappearing from public life.
Liam: So yeah, follow up, be that first follower. Just be open about what you think because it's not doing us any good not to be honest about this. Depolarisation like there are loads of places where you can get training to learn how to hold a conversation that doesn't go off the rails. There's a lot of training that people can do. Just being better at that is really important. And the different values; I would say again, it's about visibility. It's about saying I don't basically believe in this publicly. And I really think what we need is a collective media effort to help the majority see themselves. So, you know, media again, you mentioned media, so we can add them, right? Is that everybody is creating a public sense of like, look, we need a solution to this. I mean, a solution is obviously the wrong word; we need some type of collective response. There is a majority that wants something. We can create much more intentional efforts to create a public identity group. If we did have an identity for that group, if people could feel part of it, then it would be absolutely game changing.
Manda: Perfect. Game changing is what we're after. Thank you. Right, I think we'll break it at that. Liam, thank you so much first of all for writing this report, because it is beautifully written and really clear and full of hope, in a world where there's so much to look at that just spirals into horror. This, the numbers in this, and the consistency with which you brought them together and the clarity of your ideas is fantastic. So thank you very much. I really would like to talk to you again sometime about other stuff, because you clearly have a very wide range of ideas, but for now, this is us done. So Liam Kavanagh of the Climate Majority Project, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast.
Liam: Thank you.
Manda: So there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Liam for all that he is and does. For writing this genuinely motivating, inspiring report, for caring about whether we are all using our time to the best effect, and having genuinely intelligent ideas about how to check that. This report is brilliant. I really recommend it. It's there in the show notes. You can download it and have a proper read through all of the data and see where you get to. I'm never a great fan of conflict narratives, but I love the idea of victory stories. Partly, I just finished reading Nonsuch by Francis Spufford, which is billed as Philip Pullman meets the Blitz. And it's much, much better than that. It's brilliantly written. I will, at some point over the summer do a round up of books and podcasts that you really want to read in this half of the year. And that's absolutely, definitely at the top of the list. So I am completely infected with Blitz Spirit and hoping he's writing the sequel. So the victory stories really landed with me. I think we could call them winning stories and still get to the same place, but there is something about that blitz spirit that I feel we're going to need. As El Nino crashes in harder, as the Straits of Hormuz closure has more impact on our capacity to grow things. As the old order collapses around us. We know that when we have a unified sense of a way forward, we can all pull together. So building that story is our highest priority. And yes, we have been saying that in the podcast for many years now. But here's a report that shows us just how many people are open to something, if we can make it plausible and grounded and inspiring.
Manda: If we can offer motivation, agency, direction and empowerment (MADE) for a future that works. So let's get to it. And before we get to the credits, I want to apologise for the slight glitch in audio towards the end. Audacity fell over on me when the cat jumped off and hit the various bits of wiring. So we had some of the sound just from Zoom. I hope it was okay for your ears.
Manda: Right, that's it for this week. We will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios, welcome back Alan, for the production. To Lou Mayor, for the video and for managing all of the YouTube and for teaching me how to do clips. We might have some clips, that would be fun. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. And an enormous thanks to Faith Tilleray, as ever, for wrestling with the website and the tech and for all of the conversations that keep us moving forward. And if you're still here listening all the way through to the end, an enormous thanks to you for being there. And particularly if you're one of the people who's posted a review recently. I do read those. They do make my heart sing. I am enormously grateful. So thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. And if you know of anybody else who wants to know how many we are and how we can build the stories of a future that will shift the political dial, then please send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.