There are now significant and worsening threats to the very survival of human civilisation. But governments are not solving them and some are barely discussed. What can be done?
Introduction
The list of risks will not surprise: widening conflict, nuclear weapons, climate, AI, political fragmentation and polarisation. Some are less well known or, at least, less well noted: the bubble in world stock markets, and the increasing vulnerability of banks and, as a result, the financial system to a 2008-style meltdown1. Another is social breakdown.
Many continue to assume that ‘governments’ or simply ‘they’ will sort these problems out. The evidence demonstrates, unfortunately, the very opposite. In general, governments are making these problems worse, because of how governments, as currently constituted, actually are, their very nature.
There is no good reason why these perils should end human civilisation. These are solvable problems. But if we cannot rely on governments to fix it, what might?
The answer may lie in the systems, and beliefs, that underpin our political, economic and indeed social structures. And with the necessary (and now urgent) restructuring, there may, in fact, be an extraordinary opportunity to build a much better world.
A brief list of the problems, and the failure of governments’ response:
Climate breakdown - evidence suggests that heating is happening much faster that than even the most pessimistic of earlier predictions. Carbon emissions globally continue to rise, not fall.
Governments’ response: the 1.5C target of the 2016 Paris agreement has, more or less, already been missed. The current pace of decarbonisation suggests that carbon neutrality by 2050 (‘net zero’ - another Paris target) is impossible - and may not be achieved for many decades. The UN climate ‘process’ has become a silo-ed make-work project for thousands of diplomats and delegates to squabble over texts that no one reads and have no impact in the real world, except to create the misleading impression that something is being done.
Conflict - the Ukraine conflict is spreading. Russia has mounted drone and parcel bomb attacks against aircraft, railways and other sites in Poland. In one incident, about 19 drones entered Polish airspace, requiring NATO to scramble fighter aircraft in response. Russia’s missiles have ‘accidentally’ struck Moldova, the Baltic states and Romania. One recent attack, safely attributable to Russia, was intended to down an airliner flying to London. North Korea contributes infantry and artillery shells to Russia’s war; China, other weapons. Russia mounts a continuous bombardment of cyber attacks against NATO and others it regards as enemies (and they doubtless respond in kind), leading some to claim that we are already in a state of ‘low level’ war with Russia.
In the Middle East, US/Iran agreement on Iran’s nuclear program remains far off, and thus sporadic bombing and missile/drone strikes will continue; a resumption of major hostilities is becoming more likely. Iran has recently threatened to attack the UK and others that host US bases, a threat that is becoming more credible as Iran develops longer range missiles (against which the UK has no defence). According to yesterday’s FT, Iran is now considering retaliatory attacks against targets across Europe. I did a short video about this yesterday.
In response to US unreliability and the spectre of lasting regional conflict, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have in recent days agreed a defence pact. Pakistan’s earlier security agreement with Saudi Arabia included a secret provision for Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent to cover Saudi Arabia (and now Turkey, presumably), as a senior Pakistani officer has publicly admitted. In another knock-on effect of the war, access to the Red Sea, an essential maritime trade route, is also under threat, this time from the Houthis, who appear just as willing to endure US attack as the Iranians.
In south east Asia, the US has withdrawn strategic defence systems, such as anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems, from South Korea and has slowed delivery of other defensive systems to its allies, defences which they - Taiwan, Japan, South Korea - consider essential to deter Chinese or North Korean attack. Trump has openly questioned US support for Taiwan and South Korea (and yesterday North Korea fired ten ballistic missiles to mark Trump’s cancellation of joint exercises with the South). Both steps increase the appeal of surprise attack for North Korea or China. China has increased the frequency and intensity of its threatening military ‘exercises’ around Taiwan; its fighters now routinely breach Taiwanese airspace.
You don’t need to be a geopolitical expert to see that these now-separate conflicts overlap, all involve the US, Russia and China, and have the potential to merge into one big war.
Governments’ response - the diplomatic efforts to end these conflicts are paltry and inadequate. Trump’s negotiators are no match for experienced Iranians, especially in issues as complicated as nuclear weapons manufacture. Trump has eviscerated America’s diplomatic capacity and expertise. Despite this, the rest of the world seems content to let America take the diplomatic lead, despite its manifest failings and incompetence, as I have seen in Syria. ‘The Europeans’ seem to have given up actually doing hard diplomacy, perhaps unsurprising given their preoccupying domestic concerns.
At a more structural (and indeed psychic) level, the post-war body of international law to prohibit illegal conflict and atrocities in wartime is collapsing, in the face of the brazen illegality of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the illegality of the US/Israel attack on Iran and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which almost all European states, self-proclaimed defenders of the ‘rules-based order’, only meekly criticised and in many cases actively fuelled through the supply of weapons, training and intelligence. The UN Security Council has become irrelevant, as Russia, China and the US cannot agree anything about Ukraine, Israel or a host of other conflicts; no one pays attention to the UN Secretary-General. The US has placed sanctions on the judges and staff of the International Criminal Court, threatening its existence. Some say the ‘rules-based order’ is under threat. It’s not, it’s over (Palestinians and many others would say it never existed).
Nuclear weapons - As I wrote in detail earlier, the main nuclear powers are ‘modernising’ (i.e. expanding) their arsenals rapidly and in competition with one another: a new nuclear arms race. China has said it is aiming for ‘strategic parity’ with the US and Russia, which suggests tripling the number of its ballistic missiles and warheads. Driven by the experience of the war in Ukraine and Israel’s multiple conflicts, countries are rapidly building up anti-missile defences. In turn, the diversity of launch systems will increase, for instance to include hypersonic missiles, which no existing ABM system can counter, space-based weapons and even nuclear-tipped torpedoes. With each new weapons system, the risk rises. Meanwhile, the UK has quietly purchased 12 F-35 bombers exclusively for nuclear weapons delivery. The ‘tactical’ (in fact, Hiroshima-scale) nuclear bombs these and other NATO aircraft will carry have been modernised and more widely stationed across Europe, including in the UK.
Putin has announced an official nuclear doctrine which significantly lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons - the bar is now formally set at a level that one (such as Putin) could argue has already been surpassed2. In the last few days, Russia has said the UK will ‘face consequences’ for supplying drones for Ukraine to attack Russia3. The recent dramatic increase in Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia must also be tempting Putin to respond with overwhelming force.
Another likely flashpoint for nuclear exchange remains India/Pakistan where Modi is ever more nationalist and extremist - including in India’s violent repression of the inhabitants of Kashmir, the primary locus of India-Pakistan antagonism, where there are precisely zero international diplomatic efforts to resolve the longstanding dispute. Pakistan is hardly a model of political stability either: a military dictatorship relying on political repression to survive, several regional conflicts, including against organised armed groups in Balochistan and the Northwest, including Pakistani offshoots of the Taliban and, as a result, spasmodic but intense conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Governments’ response: as I discussed in my post, international agreements to reduce or limit nuclear weapons, whether strategic or intermediate range, are disintegrating. There is no perceptible effort, by any state, to revive them. Some non-nuclear states are pushing an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons but, if ever adopted, it will be ignored by the nuclear powers and will have zero effect on their intention to possess nuclear weapons; those seeking to develop their own deterrents (which even Germany and Japan are now apparently considering), will look at the growing geopolitical chaos, and particularly the unreliability of Trump’s America, not bits of paper endorsed by the General Assembly.
Social disintegration - London is not a quagmire of crime and violence, as some pretend. But in the UK, violent attacks on shop workers, nurses, doctors, teachers and bus drivers - and among school children - have all significantly increased. Meanwhile, reported levels of mental illness are rising, especially among young people. Racist violence, mostly against Muslims and Jews, has increased. Such social disintegration is also evident in the US, France and other western countries. In all these countries, couples are having fewer children, some choosing to have none, such is their dread of the future: birth rates have fallen well below ‘replacement rate’. Surveys point to growing despair and alarm about the future among the young; poignantly, they are having less sex.
Government response: the primary response of governments has been to ‘crack down’ on ‘anti-social behaviour’ by increasing police powers and intrusive surveillance. Face-recognition systems are being rolled out across Britain; they are already widely used in shops. Military-design drones hover over an unwitting population. Monitoring of electronic communication has dramatically accelerated with AI, such that, thanks to the likes of Palantir, all government-collected data can now be aggregated and AI-analysed to produce risk ‘profiles’ and target alleged criminals or ‘terrorists’.
Rather than addressing the broader social crisis, political debate, and thus government response, instead dwells on ‘culture war’ issues whipped up by the right, like DEI, ‘two tier’ justice (the breathtaking claim that white people are treated worse by the courts and police than people of colour) or trans rights. The elements of disintegration listed above are in general treated as discrete issues rather than as symptoms of systemic breakdown.
Political extremism - Trump, of course, but also hitherto more moderate countries like Germany, France and the UK. In all three countries, the far right parties are the most popular in opinion polls (though Reform in Britain seems to have lost a little in recent weeks, thanks to financial scandal). In France, the next president looks likely to be from Marine le Pen’s RN, the former National Front. In all three major European countries, the political ‘agenda’ has been pushed rightwards to increase attention on and hostility towards asylum-seekers and immigrants in general. The US government now openly backs far right political parties, in Hungary, France or Latin America. Connections and networks between national far right parties are deepening internationally. Elon Musk openly declares his support for the British racist and criminal, Tommy Robinson. Far right violence, whether anti-immigrant riots in northern England or Dublin, or single assailant attacks on synagogues and mosques in the US, has significantly increased.
Governments’ response: with some noble exceptions, governments are showing themselves far more willing to adopt - and thus affirm - the ‘agenda’ of the far right - primarily immigration, rather than fight back with values-based argument (of human compassion and responsibility, or celebration of diversity) or even a more utilitarian economic argument (of the economic contribution of immigrants), despite the reality that mass migration is inevitable, not least thanks to temperature rise that will render huge areas of the Earth unliveable. The political frame has been set for mounting hostility and increasingly violent ‘debate’.
Inequality - the ‘cost of living’ crisis tops the political agenda in many countries. This term can also more accurately be read as ‘inequality’: more and more people are unable to afford decent housing or basic necessities. Long term, the incomes and wealth of the large majority have been flatlining since the last century: most have no significant wealth at all. Meanwhile, in the US, the top 0.1% saw their wealth share climb from 9% to 14% since the turn of the century — the only bracket besides the top 1% to grow at all. Statistics are similar in other western countries: in the UK, the 50 richest families in the UK hold more wealth than the bottom half of the entire UK population combined — roughly 34.1 million people.
This of course is not just about economics, it’s also about power. Musk alone can put USAID ‘into the wood-chipper’ (as he put it) while Bezos takes over Venice for his wedding. The tech bros resist meaningful constraints on AI (on which see below) or social media, including across the globe, as Trump threatens sanctions on those countries (like the EU) that dare to take on the tech giants. The declared philosophies of leading tech owners, such as Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel, are often extreme, anti-democratic (in some cases, fascistic) and libertarian. Mentions of our obligations to others, morality or celebration of community are notable by their absence. Some Silicon Valley ‘thinkers’ openly talk about genocide - this time of the poor.
Governments’ response: Political leaders say they will focus laser-like on the ‘cost of living’ but the structures of capitalism and technological development mean that any impact of their policies will be at best temporary (there will never be a global wealth tax, one of Piketty’s proposals, and national wealth taxes in general have not worked as the lawyers and accountants advising the wealthy are very skilled at moving or hiding their money). The politicians don’t talk about the deeper motors of inequality (for instance, the profoundly unequal ownership of wealth and capital, dating back generations). Rent control won’t solve the housing crisis (arguably, it will make it worse), nor will targets for building new homes. Culturally, there is growing disquiet at the emerging political and economic domination of unaccountable tech moguls and companies but of consequent political action, there is little sign.
AI - I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. Short version: the characteristics of AI suggest that restraints or controls, whether self-imposed by private AI companies or legislated by government, are not going to work. The genie is already out of the bottle: yesterday (!), it was reported that an AI has learned how to fake that it is aligning with imposed ethical constraints. Other AI models have jumped out of the testing ‘sandbox’ to hack other companies’ systems, even when explicitly engineered not to. The regulatory systems proposed by the more responsible and expert AI leaders, such as DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, will not work. Hassabis, who has devoted his life to reaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) states that AGI is now ‘very close’ - human-equivalent AI that is also, increasingly, self-improving without human intervention.
Government response: there is no sign that any government is meaningfully pursuing global - for it must be global - agreement to control AI. At the national level, governments seem to have given up the fight, while the strategic leaders in AI (China, US) have decided that winning the AI race and thus achieving geopolitical dominance (or not being dominated by the other) is more important. There is precisely nil chance that tech companies will agree to meaningful self-restraint. Their record (for instance, of Meta) in responding to the harms caused by their social media platforms (such as child suicide) has been of aggressive resistance against regulation, in the courts and with lawmakers.
The Myth of Government
As we can see, the crises are profound, existential and…getting worse4. Humanity seems to be careening heedlessly towards the cliff edge of self-destruction and catastrophe. This is not overstating matters; I wish it were.
Governments are failing to address these crises. In many ways, they are making them worse. Dominated by the likes of Putin and Trump, the current cohort of ‘world leaders’ only adds to the instability. As a class, political leaders - not all, but most - perpetuate the collective state of denial, pretending that, like Canute, they can command the tide to recede.
Remarkably, this terrifying list of problems is barely mentioned, and certainly not as a whole (some commentators use the term ‘polycrisis’, but there is no fixed definition of this pretentious term). The nuclear danger, a potential destroyer of global civilisation, is never discussed, except in the case of Iran, which doesn’t actually have a nuclear weapon. Britain’s recent purchase of dedicated nuclear bombers never made it onto the ‘political agenda’; likewise the renewed storage of nuclear bombs at US bases in England.
There was a recent attempt at the UN - i.e. governments - to address a lot of these problems, but not all of them, in one package, the ‘Pact for the Future’, at the UN Summit of the Future in 2024. I worked with various countries and NGOs on that negotiation. It was grinding work. The result? A document that compiles lots of earlier agreements and commitments into one long and badly drafted hodge-podge that attracted minimal media attention. No state alone has the diplomatic capacity to deal with all these issues. No state has the courage, some call it ‘political will’, or frankly the time, to recruit the necessary coalition to do so.
States, governments and the political class who run them are, as a whole, deeply incentivised to sustain the lie that that ‘they’ can and will deal with these problems. This is what they and governments say, whether in policy announcements or speeches. Whenever I wrote speeches for the foreign secretary (two of them), not once did I write that ‘we’ did not know the answer, regardless of the problem at hand, whether ‘the Middle East peace process’ (as it was then called), the future of Africa, or the global debt crisis. This wasn’t dissimulation: in all our arrogance, ‘we’ honestly did believe that if only the world did as we said, it would be fixed. Governments pretend to know all, and how to fix all. That’s what governments do, and indeed that is the level of debate - and collective stupidity - to which all of us have reduced the discourse of ‘politics’.
Governments make the empty claims. The rest of us choose either to believe them or, increasingly, descend into despairing apathy. Meanwhile, the usual soporifics of capitalist culture do their work, including the insidious propagation of the lie that the status quo is somehow, grotesquely, our natural order, the best we can hope for or, at a minimum, immutable. But in one telling sign of the times, our ‘democratic’ representatives are elected by fewer and fewer voters, rendering elections and resulting ‘democracy’ less and less legitimate. In the recent Makerfield parliamentary by-election, Andy Burnham received 25,000 votes of an eligible electorate of 77,000 - less than a third - a victory nonetheless described by the press as ‘decisive’, even ‘overwhelming’. He was then elected party leader and thus Prime Minister in a secret ballot by Labour MPs who themselves were elected into government in 2024 by 20% of the population eligible to vote (yes, you read that right - 20%).
These figures reflect what ‘ordinary people’ think about ‘politics’, as they will tell you when you canvass for their votes come election time. They hate the whole system. They intuitively know what politicians are required never to admit - that government as currently constituted will not, because it cannot, get us out of this disastrous mess. The evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Pay attention not to the claims, the rhetoric or the policies, but to the hard, empirical data of the outputs: the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, global temperature records, the number and type of nuclear weapons, the casualty count in conflict, the statistics of wealth inequality or violence. The story these numbers tell is very clear.
So once we have discarded the comforting fallacy that ‘they’ will fix it, then what do we do?
One answer is to turn to systems.
The current state of the world is not an inevitable consequence of the supposedly ‘inherent’ human tendency to violence, domination or competition. In fact, when freed of authority, and left to themselves, humans demonstrate the opposite characteristics - cooperation, community, compassion. Somehow (well, I can tell you how), we have allowed the very worst of humanity to control our world, claiming the worst of human characteristics as their justification, exploiting false theories and manipulating ideas to legitimise their power and grotesque behaviour.
Every outcome, every phenomenon, comes from a system. So what are the systems that produce what’s happening to us?
An economic system that elevates competition as the supreme value - the best way to achieve prosperity for all. In formal terms, this system encourages competition but also accumulation and, through state capture by the beneficiaries of this system and a thousand cultural signals, prohibits alternatives. A system that makes no account for what economists call ‘externalities’: the harms done by production and profit-seeking (the main engine of the economy) which include the degradation of human relationships and psychic health, humans reduced to spending most of their lives in dispiriting and boring, sometimes physically painful, work and, of course, now planetary destruction.
A system of states infused with the unquestioned belief that states must compete rather than cooperate, economically if not politically or, if necessary (and often even if not) militarily. A system of states sustained by the philosophy that states, and only states, are permitted to use violence (including now, with nuclear weapons, potentially civilisation-ending violence) to defend their ‘interests’, an entirely manufactured concept which invariably means the interests of those who control those states, whether formally (governments) or informally (corporations, the wealthy), and sometimes to use violence merely to affirm their claim that they, the state, alone can provide security to their populations (the ultimate if unadmitted motive of the Iraq War). A system of states built upon the grotesque notion that somehow we are so fundamentally different from one another, that ‘our’ lives are worth more than ‘theirs’, that when necessary we will kill other nationalities for our sakes, and such killing is glorified and celebrated. A system that is inherited - an accident of history - not inevitable, not unchangeable.
At the level of the nation state, a system where governments assert the unique right to control the population through rules and laws, enforced by the violence or threat of violence of police, justice system, prisons etc. and policed by the intrusion upon our privacy and peace by surveillance. Underpinning this prerogative lies what some call the ‘social contract’ i.e. that the populace gives up its liberties in exchange for security, a contract to which not a single one of us formally consented or had the opportunity to reject or renegotiate.
These are the formal, institutionalised systems. Then there are the more diffuse systems, of thought, ideas, symbols and representation, which reinforce and lie behind the formal systems.
Culture, with some exceptions (though protest culture is almost always quickly appropriated by the dominant system), affirms and reinforces these beliefs through multiple means, overt or subtle, from Star Wars to reality shows about the rich, or the demonstrable exclusion of dissident voices from ‘mainstream’ media. The dominant engines of culture (TV, newspapers, social media) are owned by those already wealthy and powerful and are inevitably used to perpetuate that dominance. In turn, these media are managed by the educated professional class (‘upper middle’ class it might once have been called) whose relatively fragile wealth and social status are protected by the current system and who thus fight particularly hard to perpetuate it, often while pretending to do the opposite. One insidious method of cultural reinforcement is the pretence that the structural status quo - of states, supposed ‘democracy’ and capitalism, and indeed hierarchy and domination - is somehow ‘normal’, a pretence daily sustained by those who choose the ‘news agenda’.
Then there are the beliefs about humans themselves that infuse and help sustain these systems. Economically, we are told that humans are, above all, self-seeking, ‘utility’ maximising individuals (this is literally what I was taught at school and university). That what matters most to us is material consumption and the acquisition of wealth. That we will descend into anarchic states of ‘war of all against all’ without coercive authority to control us. These beliefs are deliberate bastardisations and over-simplifications of science, for instance the manipulation of Darwinism into ‘survival of the fittest’ (a manipulation known as ‘social darwinism’), or the constantly reaffirmed myths of the human propensity for conflict and violence, starting with Hobbes and leading all the way to zombie films, and the deliberate side-lining of evidence (such as that gathered by Rutger Bregman or Rebecca Solnit, or indeed our own eyes) that humans prefer cooperation to competition.
These are the systems, both concrete and psychological, that lie behind the crises I’ve listed above. And without changing the systems, we will not resolve the crises.
But how?
I believe, though I don’t know for sure, that only ideas embodied as action will change anything, including beliefs themselves: the existing orthodoxy is too firmly entrenched, too often repeated and, where necessary, enforced. On the other hand, the right is successfully waging a ‘battle of ideas’ on social and other media. So, perhaps, both strategies are necessary. (Violence as a primary strategy won’t work, because the state uses such violence as a way to re-legitimise itself and reinforce its necessity. Better, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed, to provoke the state itself to commit violence, thereby demonstrating its illegitimacy.)
You don’t fundamentally change a power system by participating in it. Electing better politicians will not change the system that put them in charge. This is the Obama myth, that by voting for him - ‘Yes, we can! - he would change ‘the system’ - ‘Well, I may’. They may change a few policies, in some cases important ones (Obamacare), but will not change the system that ultimately creates and will continue to perpetuate the problems they claim to address.
What are the ideas that must now be embodied into action, as well as argued in the ‘public square’? Simply put, they are the converse of all of those that sustain the existing systems that are currently leading us to disaster.
At the level of the most fundamental assumptions, humans are not separate; we do not function as individuals. We only exist in relation to one another. This is why solitary confinement is an inhuman punishment. Until it encounters another, the baby has no idea that it has a ‘self’ at all, Lacan argued (and, some believe the separate ‘self’ is a modern and problematic construct in the first place).
Others make us. We are thus concerned with their fate. Race and nationality are both categories now taken as irreducible units of organisation and thought, but both were invented to rationalise a particular purpose - acquisition and domination, latterly known as imperialism, but mostly simply known as violent conquest. We are living out Victorian fantasies of racial supremacy. For almost the entirety of human history, there were no Russia’s, no Syria’s, no Britain’s (and certainly no America’s!); there was no Black or White. Ancient ruins show more signs of collective government and community (literally, spaces for meeting)5 than our own grandiose parliaments and executive offices, now invariably fortified behind high fences, CCTV and grim-faced sentries. These categories are all invented for the purposes of political domination and economic exploitation. They are not essential.
The demarcation of one from the rest, the ‘othering’ of another race, class or nationality was always absurd and manufactured, but also less and less resembles the reality of human heterogeneity of the 21st century, which is, in this age of migration, rapidly intensifying. My wife and children have three nationalities (each, not together). In my online work, I collaborate with Russians, Americans, Ukrainians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Kashmiris, Somalilanders, mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kongers, and that’s not all of them. Much of my work today is with Syrians who are also Kurds, and was for long while with (or rather, for) Marshallese or Saharawis, Sudanese, Rohingya, Tuareg, Kosovars and many others. It has been the privilege of my life to collaborate with these people; not a burden, not a strain, but a joy.
In working with countries and liberation movements in the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, I can safely say that they all - every one - want the same thing: to run their own affairs, freed of the control, violence and repression of others, whether foreign powers or dictators. They are not driven by ideas of ethnic supremacy or the desire to dominate others. They want to be free.
And so with the rest of us. Despite the badgering of self-help gurus or social media ‘influencers’ preaching the cult of being busy, endless ‘hustle’, ‘success’ and status, it’s pretty clear that most of us don’t like being made to do things we would not otherwise choose to do, which is why it’s called ‘work’ and we must be paid to do it. Most of us are well aware that work condemns us to relationships of domination and hierarchy, camouflaged by a culture of ‘casual’ clothing or using first names: we are still required to grovel and obey, at risk of losing our very livelihoods.
Almost none of us will become Elon Musk or Jamie Dimon. Instead, we will work for them (in Dimon’s case, this requires you to wear a ghastly corporate ‘uniform’, the dehumanisation of work made material, in this case, nylon; note that he does not wear this uniform). We will work for the large part of our lives while a tiny few become fantastically wealthy and float around in mega-yachts. Our own wages will remain stagnant, and are already as puny as our employer can get away with (justified in the morality of capitalism as ‘cost efficiency’), and the employee (i.e. us, people) is denoted as ‘disposable human capital’, as one corporate boss recently put it. For all of these characteristics are the nature of the machine. There is dignity in work, but not work packing parcels in warehouses, but work with dignity and agency, the facet that is fundamentally denied us in almost all realms of our existence: control over our own lives. The dying tell a very clear and remarkably consistent story of what life is ‘for’ and how they wished they’d spent theirs: not working, but being with the people they love.
Agency. It is this word that infuses and forms the systems that we must now build. Agency is a fundamental element of being human, an attribute so unfamiliar that we have forgotten what it feels like (unsurprising, since we’ve never had it). I have met a few people who approached true freedom, and it was a very few. One was a well-known and wealthy writer. He spoke openly, without restraint; his ideas were many, his mind fecund. He was witty and wise, a brilliant teller of tales. It was extraordinary to know him. He had no master, and no god. That is how we should all live.
Freedom is life without authority. This ideal is self-government; government by the many, not the few. Some call it communalism - collective decision-making by those with most at stake, who know their real circumstances best and don’t need to be told it in reductive briefing papers or hysterical newspaper headlines, and thus who know best how to remedy their problems. Where, as studies have shown, people tend to cooperate rather than fight, and where the very encounter of human beings with one another deepens social ties, community and trust, and thus social peace (so-called ‘contact theory’). In turn, small gatherings of self-organisation can ‘scale up’ into larger confederations, legitimised by consent from the whole. The inverse of today’s structure where a very few take the decisions for the many.
At work, it is not ownership by the state or private capital. Both are, literally, inhuman. It is ownership by those who work there, who make the product, who drive the tractors or herd the sheep, who drive the trains, who treat the water, who tend to the sick or elderly or teach the children. Their interests at most at stake in any enterprise, therefore they should control it, and only by owning it can they control it.
You may see a pattern in these suggestions. It is humanisation. To make the systems that organise our affairs more human, so we can be more human; forms of organisation which maximise cooperation, mutuality, not antagonism. Systems that encourage things we do together, instead of systems that drive us apart, alienate us and damage our mental health, and the planet on which life depends. Systems that centre that which we most crave - being seen and acknowledged by others, and love itself.
How, you may be asking, would these forms of organisation fix the discomforting litany of problems which started this piece?
This is inevitably a long game. It took generations to imagine the ideologies then build the systems that today dominate and endanger us. It will take much less time to replace them, but it still won’t happen overnight. And it starts not at UN summits, parliaments or Number Ten, let alone the White House. It will not, and should not, be legislated or ordained from above. It starts at home. It starts with the energy and imagination of our own anxious psyches.
In a paragraph, here’s what might be done. I wrote about it a few months ago. It is action where we are and where, indeed, the system manifests itself. In the workplace, the hospital or school, in any place where our concerns dwell, we must propose and fight to replace hierarchy with the collective - for decision-making to be shared. At work, this might mean a strike. It might mean founding a cooperative. In your neighbourhood, it might start with collective meals, for anyone: anything that builds social connection and mutual respect, simply by making the space to hear each other’s truths.
In due course, that might birth a forum for discussion and, ultimately, decision making, a forum that would have far more real legitimacy, far more democracy because it has far more participation, than the formal authorities elected by a dwindling but also disillusioned minority. It might be triggered by disaster, a flood, a disease: when authority disappears, as Solnit has written in ‘A Paradise built in Hell’, when people rely on themselves to help each other - what Kropotkin was the first to call ‘mutual aid’, and which I saw spring up in real life after Hurricane Sandy in New York City (it was called ‘Occupy Sandy’).
I am very familiar with the typical objections to these ideas, including how decisions can be made ‘at scale’ - the solution has been demonstrated in Rojava, northeast Syria, theorised by Abdullah Ocalan in ‘Democratic Confederalism’, a pamphlet itself drawn from the work of Murray Bookchin. There are, in any case, remarkably few issues that need to be resolved at the scale of a country, unless it is very small like Liechtenstein, Iceland or the Marshall Islands.
One particularly obnoxious quibble is that ‘people cannot be trusted’ to run their own affairs. This claim is of course belied by substantial evidence (read Kropotkin, and many others: ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘The Walking Dead’ or ‘The Road’ are, should we need reminding, fiction). It is usually those who currently boss other people about that mention this concern, of course revealing their true worry - that they themselves might lose power and their fragile status.
I realise the risk that I am hitting the nail of every problem with my singular hammer. Beyond the reformation of democracy and the state itself, solutions to other crises on the list are more speculative. In a society where love and human relationships are centred, relentless growth and consumption would be de-emphasised, moving us towards the ‘de-growth’ that Jason Hickel and others have advocated for the richer economies (and not the poorer), where carbon emissions would fall at the pace demanded by the climate crisis. This is not a direct mechanism, but a systemic one - logical, since it is a particular economic system (growth and profit maximising) that gave rise to the climate crisis in the first place.
As for conflict between states, the direct, in fact real, democracy envisaged above would ultimately lead to the gradual abolition - from within - of formal states like the United Kingdom, France or the US. They would become confederations, perhaps forming up as one for self-defence, with identities that are heterogeneous, not singular, reflecting what they are already becoming: a glorious mixture of races and beliefs, ever more intertwined. Such entities would not lend themselves to the ‘chess board’ mentality of ‘statecraft’ and states, the obsolete (at least, obsolescent) unit that unfortunately still organises - not ‘orders’ (because its product is not order) - and denotes the world today
Conclusion
One reason the current orthodoxy has endured - of capitalism enforced by the state, legitimised by what passes for ‘democracy’ - is that it offers a comprehensive, interlocking package of ideas, with a coherent, well-tested rebuttal to every objection (which is often justified with some manipulation of ‘social science’, or the collected fallacy of neo-classical economics). This ideological fortress might also be described as the dominant paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn theorised in ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, the set of ideas and beliefs treated as primary and universal. As Kuhn described, the academic and scientific rewards go to those who affirm and thus perpetuate the paradigm.
But eventually, Kuhn saw, evidence emerges that undermines the paradigm. And this is what’s happening now. More and more people are seeing that the orthodoxy is not working for people or planet, and that it is founded upon presumptions, for instance about human nature, which are not true. Thus, a new paradigm begins to form that better accounts for the evidence, better accounts for what’s true. In my book, I call this a Gestalt - a collection of ideas where the whole is greater than its parts.
Right now, shorter term measures may be necessary to address the immediate crises facing humanity (for instance, there should be urgent consideration of atmospheric geo-engineering; grown-ups need to start doing proper diplomacy etc.). Longer term, it is only by changing the systems that produced these crises will we solve them and prevent them, changes that promise a society that, in modernity, we have never before experienced or, rather, never before enjoyed.
You can read about my journey from representing the state to these ideas in my new book, ‘There we are human again: a diplomat’s journey to anarchism’ (Perspectiva Press, 2026). The book also explains the ideas in more detail.
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There isn’t time or space to explain this in this article but in summary the regulatory restraints on banks imposed after 2008, such as the requirement for them to hold more good-quality (so called ‘Tier 1’) capital as security against their lending, have slowly been eroded, both in the US and Europe, thanks, perhaps needless to say, to relentless lobbying by the banks who claim that such obligations undermine their ‘competitiveness’ (in reality, profits). Thus another financial crash has become more likely though of course no one knows when such a crisis might hit or what might trigger it (my guess would be something that suddenly shows that the gigantic - and often highly leveraged - spending on AI infrastructure is unnecessary, such as a far more efficient AI, not an implausible possibility).
The recently-declared ‘official’ threshold for nuclear weapons use is an attack on Russia with the backing of nuclear-armed allies which, of course, is already happening.
Though this was the ‘blowhard’ Russian ambassador to the UK, known for his blustering threats and antagonism.
I reject the term ‘polycrisis’ mainly because no one agrees on what it consists of, and almost no one understands the term anyway.
See Graeber and Wengrow’s ‘The Dawn of Everything’
Hi Carne,
You bluntly say "Electing better politicians will not change the system that put them in charge." This is much like "Don't vote. It will only encourage them." It's how the US ended up with Trump.
The free people freely associating you advocate -- yes we need far more of that. But wresting our governments away from fascists isn't presently required? The progressives who've been winning primaries and offices here in the US are not Obama types. Most look back to FDR for precedent and inspiration. Can you dismiss his example blithely too?
The techno-fascists also want to see the state wither. Yes, they're corrupting the state. But can we stop them from imposing their own order in place of states without our using state power to constrain these sociopaths?
A fewobservations,
Climate breakdown, it seems to me scientists never take into account
Dialectics, things don't just evolve pressure builds like a kettle then change isexplosive.
One particularly obnoxious quibble is that ‘people cannot be trusted’ to run their own affairs.
And are the rich doing a great job?
urgent consideration of atmospheric geo-engineering?
Are you suggesting we blow up some volcanoes 😆
I agree with your position I used to believe in revolution but that leads to state repression or corruption, I believe only mass organized resistance will take the carpet from under them, push for delegate democracy and participatory structures. I feel your pain at the greed and ignorance of the elites find time to switch off or perpetual sadness will overtake you. You have a brilliant mind and a good soul.