The context behind this article is the climate crisis and the dangers of outcomes which put our civilisation at grave risk. Since any reader who has read past that sentence is quite likely to accept the existence of such risks and not blithely try to debate the science, it would be a good point here to highlight how we humans at least in the western world still have great subconscious faith in the society and culture that we see around us every day. The latest discoveries in evolutionary psychology and modern neuroscience explain a lot about the predicament humanity finds itself in.
Before analysing it too deeply, our economy seems so resilient, so robust and so unlikely to collapse. We have faith in it and choose everyday how to earn money, spend money and live our lives. Then comes the cognitive dissonance with the rational recognition that actually, some forecasts are very bad and we need to change our approach fast to avoid those scenarios. Of course changing our approach means doing things we really don’t want to. So we are stuck on this runaway train, driven by our subconscious beliefs that were instilled by the current cultural narrative.
However we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves. We are in good company. Sir David Attenborough, the UK’s harbinger of doom, Mr Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General who warns of Global Boiling, Prof. Johan Rockström, the Dr Doom of climatology, and Prof. Steve Keen, the Dr Doom of economics are all stuck with the same cultural narrative, and suffer the same cognitive dissonance.
Belief Systems and Cultural Narratives
Regardless of religion, our personal belief systems are complex but above all, here in the west, we believe in our society so much that we keep doing what we know we shouldn’t. For 60 millennia, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Nature moulded us for survival in the wild. We moved out from the savannas of Africa, conquered the world and become an intensely linguistic, strategic, imaginative, social species with a gift for story-telling.
This story-telling wasn’t just for camp fire entertainment, it helped us come to terms with being intelligent beings in an incomprehensible world. It became a key mechanism to bind our social groups. We have the Bible stories, the Dreamtime myths of aboriginal Australians, the nationalist myths of modern states and many others. We create stories, pass them from generation to generation, embed them in our emotions, and they trump most rational considerations in our decision-making.
While we as individuals are able to sit down, read, absorb and judge the climate crisis, to imagine strategies to deal with it and wonderful futures beyond, we are at a loss when it comes to translating these thoughts into the social change that will make it happen. The stories we subconsciously believe won’t allow it. The rules of the mind dictate what is happening here. These stories make up a dauntingly powerful cultural narrative.
We all know how this works. We reach a logical conclusion, about the climate crisis, or alcohol, or smoking, but our resolve to do what is necessary crumbles when it comes to the decisive step if it runs contrary to our culture, our economic narrative, our “social contract” or perceived social mores – simply put, what family, friends and everyone else is doing.
The 20% of our thinking mind which is so remarkable (the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex) is unfortunately weak and slow in comparison with the 80% that keeps us alive. Much of this 80% of strong, fast, survival-honed thinking is in many ways seriously inappropriate in the modern world[1]Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s work on this topic is documented in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. As the entomologist Karl von Frisch said when talking about societies: “The ant is a collectively intelligent and individually stupid animal; man is the opposite.”
In the last 10,000 years, we delivered the agricultural, the industrial and then the digital revolution, plunging ourselves into a brave new world without giving ourselves the chance to adapt psychologically or culturally to the fact that we are now able to utterly destroy ourselves and our civilisation. We urgently need to create a story for surviving this new era, and it must be one which everyone wants to listen to.
The new story – a new cultural narrative – needs to revolve around how society can get out of this crisis, to replace the stories that aren’t working, that don’t help us escape our situation. We can deliberately create these stories, in fact we do all the time: the populist narratives of the recent conservative UK government, Doomerism, Stubborn Optimism, to name a few nascent stories that jostle for dominance and widespread belief.
The Economic Narrative for the Climate Crisis
The stories that are important in the climate crisis are the ones that describe how our society, politics and economy function. It really doesn’t matter what our creation myths are, or our philosophies, or our histories. What is important is what influences the way we live our everyday lives and do our everyday business, because this all adds up to the global impact we have on the physical world. These are the economic stories we believe in, and we believe in them even if we have no clue about economics or think we believe the opposite. They are our society’s cultural and economic myths, stories that colour our everyday decisions, whether we are aware of it or not.
Even when we disagree politically with the overarching narrative, it still defines how we think and reach decisions, limiting how far from the norm we are prepared to go, reining in many options as radical or counter-cultural if the idea lies too far from the “middle ground” as defined by the narrative. This is the “Overton Window”.
Looking back over the last 100 years reveals the dominant economic stories that have been culturally accepted, and show how we arrived where we are today. These stories enjoy or enjoyed overwhelming public acceptance in their prime. Their followers enjoy media confirmation, academic consensus and a democratic majority.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
The disorder of the Great Crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression and the demise of the Roaring Twenties, ushered in a whole new cultural narrative. In the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes told his story of how governments should play an active role in their countries’ economies, instead of just letting the free market reign. The story gained full-blown adoption and served well in World War Two and the post-war construction period.
After 50 years, Keynesian economics hit problems in the 1970s with the Oil Crisis as the post-war boom faded, and inflation and unemployment increased. The disorder created fertile ground for economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman’s free-market or neoliberal economics, which criticised the collectivising tendency of the powerful state and how it crushed freedom, individualism and opportunity. So government was rolled back, free enterprise unleashed and the cultural narrative swung from active government to free-market fundamentalism.
Since 1979, profit has been the arbiter of all logic, price the only indicator of value, and markets the only diviner of price. Individualism and competition ruled. It has been adopted now in the UK across the political spectrum. If it started off as a right-wing idea, it is now accepted by the mainstream left.
Then came the financial crisis and great recession of 2007 / 2008 resulting from neoliberal deregulation. We have obscene levels of waste, extreme levels of consumerism, the degradation of nature wherever people set foot, the loss of prime farmland soils, forests, fish stocks, clean air and water, and the arrival of the climate and biodiversity crisis. Our current narrative offers no solutions to the issues.
The fossil fuel industry plans more growth, the carbon markets are not fit for purpose, new technology is too little, too late and governments and citizens see no clear routes to halting the crisis. Science has advanced to the point where the damage and the dangers can be quantified, but the free-market economists still see only an ‘externality’ and no new story comes close to threatening their rationale.
If we want to come to grips with the destruction of our “Goldilocks” climate[2]The “Goldilocks” climate is a climate that’s not too hot, not too cold, and “just right” for life. Global warming is disrupting humanity’s ‘Goldilocks zone’ on … Continue reading and the natural world, we have to tell a new story about the economy, and accelerate its adoption.
A new cultural narrative can change everything, if it appeals to a wide range of people across the political spectrum, if it appeals to people’s needs and desires, if it is simple and grounded in reality. The old story of free-market capitalism is ready to fall, like a dead tree that hasn’t been blown over yet. There is nothing holding it up except the weight of its own lifeless trunk.
Changing the Mechanics of Money
One of the big sub-plots of the old cultural narrative of neoliberalism is the Tragedy of the Commons. We can create a new story in which the commons are not a tragedy. Small and well-delineated commons, e.g. resources like land, energy or fresh water, can be owned by the local community, and larger global commons can be managed by transparent and fair economic mechanisms, such as the carbon accounts mechanism that EcoCore advocates for.
The most effective economic and legal mechanisms operate at a deep level in the system with a high level of control. Robust mechanisms for full ecological footprint management and social standards in business will work far better than vulnerable regulations and voluntary involvement and they do not have to be complex.
Laws defining the fundamental institutions of capitalism must be redefined to create a less damaging capitalist system that doesn’t drive corporations to pursue unlimited economic growth. Stock dividends were initially invented to finance risky medieval explorations, but now the law demands that even the largest, most stable corporations maximise shareholder value in priority over anything else. A simple law enforcing the conversion of stock into bonds after a certain period would work wonders.
Simple laws can prevent the worst ways that money and finance continually find to socialise the costs and privatise the profits. A government could create a money-tight legal system, in the same way that a shipbuilder must construct a water-tight hull. Whether the government can lead or whether the cultural narrative must lead the government is a good question, but however impossible the change seems, it seems no less necessary.
The law can also be used to criminalise socially or environmentally destructive business models. Social media algorithms, for instance, generate advertising revenue by invisibly boosting the worst information. This is exploited by populist and disinformation campaigns and causes nothing but damage across society. Such business models must be thrown out with the old ultra-capitalist narrative. Ironically, the challenge will be to exploit such platforms to promote the new story.

A New Economic Story
A broad majority has to like the new story or it won’t succeed, especially in the time available to dodge the major planetary risks that our treatment of the climate has created. There are other stories out there already, and their adherents must be persuaded about the new story just as much as the people on the Right.
The world could swing back from market fundamentalism to Keynesianism, but there is a substantial proportion of the population who wouldn’t accept that. There could be a full-blown revolution where capitalism with all of its excesses is banned. Even fewer would accept that, and can we move fast enough to create a whole new solution from the ground up that is good enough to meet all of our challenges?
As Noam Chomsky emphasises, we don’t have time[3]Prof Noam Chomsky, 2020. Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin Interviewed by David Roberts about their new book, “Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal”. We need to end neoliberalism, but we only need to rein in capitalism. It still offers too much that is useful. The trick will be to win acceptance for the story from the Right, without losing the Left. In the current state of polarised politics, they might prefer to fight each other to the death than agree to any compromise.
We are already creating new economic mechanisms that allow the “externalities” of free-market economics to be internalised. We can start with CO2 pollution and then expand to deal with more challenges, like rare earth metals, fresh water, or forests. Put that alongside new laws such as ecocide, new legal definitions for capitalist institutions, and a new definition of the three-way relationship between government, business and citizens, and we have created a new story.
We have to put the ideas out there where people will hear them, where they will coalesce into a movement. Those on the alert for something new will find it. Cognitive dissonance that the old narrative invokes will compel others to shift across. Then as the new story supplants the old in our cultural headspace, everybody will start to choose differently everyday how to earn money, spend money and live our lives. Our subconscious compulsion to follow the cultural narrative will push us more and more onto the new path.
But despite that, there is no underestimating how entrenched the story of free-market capitalism has become and the struggle that we have to overcome the enemy within: our market fundamentalist compatriots who insist on keeping the story the same, because they think they have more to lose and have little concern about or perception of the damage it is causing now and the shocking risks of carnage on a planetary scale.
With the onslaught of the climate crisis, the old free-market capitalist narrative is losing its grip as the gatekeeper of our thoughts, and it’s the new narrative that must define what we believe is radical, acceptable or necessary, personally, in business and in government. This is key to what we do now, and it needs a huge campaign to speed it up.
So EcoCore is looking to accelerate and spread the message through fundraising and collaborations. If you can help us rise to the challenge, please get in touch at fundraising@ecocore.org or go straight to our donations page at Patreon. Whatever you do, stay in touch by subscribing to our newsletter.
References
↑1 | Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s work on this topic is documented in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow |
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↑2 | The “Goldilocks” climate is a climate that’s not too hot, not too cold, and “just right” for life. Global warming is disrupting humanity’s ‘Goldilocks zone’ on Earth |
↑3 | Prof Noam Chomsky, 2020. Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin Interviewed by David Roberts about their new book, “Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal” |