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 loser,
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, you know, 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,
and in politics there is one basic plot
which turns out to be tremendously powerful,
and I call this "the restoration story."
It goes as follows.
Disorder afflicts the land,
caused by powerful and nefarious forces
working against the interests of humanity.
but the hero will revolt against this disorder,
fight those powerful forces,
against the odds overthrow them,
and restore harmony to the land.
You've heard this story before.
It's the Bible story.
It's the Harry Potter story.
It's the Lord of the Rings story.
It's the Narnia story.
But it's also the story
that has accompanied almost every political and religious transformation
going back millennia.
In fact, we could go as far as to say
that without a powerful new restoration story,
a political and religious transformation
might not be able to happen.
It's that important.
After laissez-faire economics triggered the Great Depression,
John Maynard Keynes sat down to write a new economics,
and what he did was to tell a restoration story,
and it went something like this.
Disorder afflicts the land!
(Laughter)
Caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the economic elite,
which have captured the world's wealth.
But the hero of the story,
the enabling state, supported by working class and middle class people,
will contest that disorder,
will fight those powerful forces by redistributing wealth,
and through spending public money on public goods
will generate income and jobs,
restoring harmony to the land.
Now, like all good restoration stories,
this one resonated across the political spectrum.
Democrats and Republicans, labor and conservatives,
left and right all became, broadly, Keynesian.
Then, when Keynesian ran intro trouble
in the 1970s,
the neoliberals, people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman
came forward with their new restoration story,
and it went something like this.
You'll never guess what's coming.
(Laughter)
Disorder afflicts the land!
Caused by the powerful and nefarious forces
of the over-mighty state,
whose collectivizing tendencies crush freedom and individiualism
and opportunity.
But the hero of the story, the entrepreneur,
will fight those powerful forces,
roll back the state,
and through creating wealth and opportunity,
restore harmony to the land.
And that story also resonated across the political spectrum.
Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and labor,
they all became, broadly, neoliberal.
Opposite stories
with an identical narrative structure.
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.
Now, I admit that all of this sounds like a bit of a tall order.
But 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,