George Monbiot

Over the past few years, there's been a fascinating convergence of findings in several different sciences, in psychology, in anthropology, in neuroscience, in evolutionary biology, and they all tell us something pretty amazing, that human beings have got this massive capacity for altruism.

Sure, we all have a bit of selfishness and greed inside us, but in most people, those are not our dominant values.

And we also turn out to be the supreme cooperators.

We survived the African savannas, despite being weaker and slower than our predators and most of our prey, by an amazing ability to engage in mutual aid.

and that urge to cooperate has been hardwired into our minds through natural selection.

These are the central, crucial facts about humankind, our amazing altruism and cooperation.

But something has gone horribly wrong.

Disorder afflicts the land.

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.

But it doesn't have to be like this.

It really doesn't, because we have this incredible capacity for togetherness and belonging.

And by invoking that capacity, we can recover those amazing components of our humanity, our altruism and cooperation.

Where there is atomization, we can build a thriving civic life with a rich participatory culture.

where we find ourselves crushed between market and state, we can build an economics that respects both people and planet.