'Disorder afflicts the land...' has been the most commanding narrative for all the Religious and Political Powers to spell their cast on their poor, helpless and vulnerable 'subjects', indeed and George makes a very strong point here by painting a picture of 'Restoration' that has been shown to us for centuries together. It's high time we wake up to all these false narratives of a Superhero as our savior and pretentious approaches with deceitful intents.
'These are the central, crucial facts about humankind: our amazing altruism and cooperation.' The much needed New Narrative could be built around the capacity of Humans to cooperate with their altruism rather than the heroics of an individual or a fallacious nexus wherein 'We' replace our imaginary savior Superhero.
'Our good nature has been thwarted by several forces, but I think the most powerful of them is the dominant political narrative of our times, which tells us that we should live in extreme individualism and competition with each other. It pushes us to fight each other, to fear and mistrust each other. It atomizes society. It weakens the social bonds that make our lives worth living. And into that vacuum grow these violent, intolerant forces. We are a society of altruists, but we are governed by psychopaths...' This is the story of this planet and not of any singular country or society that we must understand, analyze, interpret and react positively to!
'The commons is neither market nor state, capitalism nor communism, but it consists of three main elements: a particular resource; a particular community that manages that resource; and the rules and negotiations the community develops to manage it. Think of community broadband or community energy cooperatives or the shared land for growing fruit and vegetables that in Britain we call allotments. A common can't be sold, it can't be given away, and its benefits are shared equally among the members of the community. Where we have been ignored and exploited, we can revive our politics. We can recover democracy from the people who have captured it. We can use new rules and methods of elections to ensure that financial power never trumps democratic power again.' This could be a hypothesis for rest of the world, we Indians have models of this theory very much active and effective in forms of Mendha Lekha, Hiware Bazar and Ralegan Siddhi.
'Politics of Belonging' is the keyword of this new story of fighting those nefarious forces by building rich, engaging, inclusive and generous communities that would restore harmony to the land. We definitely need a new restoration story to guide us out of the political mess we're in, a story that tells us why we're in the mess and tells us how to get out of this mess. 'And that story, if we tell it right, will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum. Our task is to tell the story that lights the path to a better world...' This ray of hope full of optimism should be our New Age Mantra towards a cohesive and harmonious society that we deserve!
Way to go...!
