George Monbiot

Do you feel trapped in a broken economic model, a model that's trashing the living world and threatens the lives of our descendants, a model that excludes billions of people while making a handful unimaginably rich, that sorts us into winners and losers and then blames the losers for their misfortune?

Welcome to neoliberalism,

the zombie doctrine that never seems to die, however comprehensively it is discredited.

Now, you might have imagined that the financial crisis of 2008 would have led to the collapse of neoliberalism.

After all, it exposed its central features, which were deregulating business and finance, tearing down public protections, throwing us into extreme competition with each other, as, well, just a little bit flawed.

And intellectually, it did collapse.

But still, it dominates our lives.

Why?

Well, I believe the answer is that we have not yet produced a new story with which to replace it.

Stories are the means by which we navigate the world.

They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals.

When we want to make sense of something, the sense we seek is not scientific sense, but narrative fidelity.

Does what we are hearing reflect the way that we expect humans and the world to behave?

Does it hang together?

Does it progress as a story should progress?

Now, we are creatures of narrative, and a string of facts and figures, however important facts and figures are, and I'm an empiricist, I believe in facts and figures, but those facts and figures have no power to displace a persuasive story.

The only thing that can replace a story is a story.

You cannot take away someone's story without giving them a new one.

And it's not just stories in general that we are attuned to, but particular narrative structures.

There are a number of basic plots that we use again and again.