Long live the Queen (he/his)

The red queen is well knwon, and drives our current economic thinking (too much). I’ve already mentioned the fact of a long history of this theory of ‘Red Queen’ among evolutionary disciplines. There are alternatives, like ‘niche construct’ or ‘White Queen’ , more related to ideas like “commons“, based on ‘survival of the fittest’, in stead of ‘.. of the fastest’

With recent evolutions o the Queen becoming a he/his in the UK, I have been tempted by some ideas of GEORGE MONBIOT – (On Trying To Be Less Wrong).

Gearge has a wide span of ideas, and borad view, like e.g There Is More Than One Kind Of Intelligence, or:

With regards to the Queen and British colonial history there is a short video he presents on the British historical ‘standards’, ” “The Dark Side of British History You Weren’t Taught in School.“. As it is a very short story, full of information, I let you enjoy.
One of his recent key presentations on the political order and challenges of our time is the Ted talk on The new political story that could change everything

Some lines are:

Then, in 2008, the neoliberal story fell apart, and its opponents came forward with … nothing. No new restoration story! The best they had to offer was a watered-down neoliberalism or a microwaved Keynesianism. 
And that is why we’re stuck. Without that new story, we are stuck with the old failed story that keeps on failing. 
Despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails. When we have no story that explains the present and describes the future, hope evaporates. 
Political failure is at heart a failure of imagination. Without a restoration story that can tell us where we need to go, nothing is going to change, but with such a restoration story, almost everything can change. 
The story we need to tell is a story which will appeal to as wide a range of people as possible, crossing political fault lines. It should resonate with deep needs and desires. It should be simple and intelligible, and it should be grounded in reality.

[…] I believe that in Western nations, there is actually a story like this waiting to be told. Over the past few years, there’s been a fascinating convergence of findings in several different sciences, in psychology and anthropology and neuroscience and 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.

[…]  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. And we can create this economics around that great neglected sphere, the commons.

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 need a new restoration story, which is going to guide us out of the mess we’re in, which tells us why we’re in the mess and tells us how to get out of that mess. And that story, if we tell it right, will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum.

Some additional lectures worth spending some attention are e.g.