WEBVTT

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Do you feel trapped

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in a broken economic model?

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A model that's trashing the living world

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and threatens the lives
of our descendants?

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A model that excludes billions of people

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while making a handful unimaginably rich?

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That sorts us into winners and losers,

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and then blames the losers
for their misfortune?

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Welcome to neoliberalism,

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the zombie doctrine
that never seems to die,

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however comprehensively it is discredited.

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Now you might have imagined
that the financial crisis of 2008

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would have led to the collapse
of neoliberalism.

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After all, it exposed
its central features,

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which were deregulating
business and finance,

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tearing down public protections,

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throwing us into extreme
competition with each other,

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as, well, just a little bit flawed.

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And intellectually, it did collapse.

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But still, it dominates our lives.

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Why?

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Well, I believe the answer
is that we have not yet produced

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a new story with which to replace it.

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Stories are the means
by which we navigate the world.

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They allow us to interpret
its complex and contradictory signals.

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When we want to make sense of something,

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the sense we seek is not scientific sense

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but narrative fidelity.

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Does what we are hearing reflect the way

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that we expect humans
and the world to behave?

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Does it hang together?

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Does it progress

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as a story should progress?

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Now, we are creatures of narrative,

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and a string of facts and figures,
however important facts and figures are --

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and, you know, I'm an empiricist,
I believe in facts and figures --

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but those facts and figures have no power
to displace a persuasive story.

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The only thing that can replace a story

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is a story.

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You cannot take away someone's story

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without giving them a new one.

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And it's not just stories in general
that we are attuned to,

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but particular narrative structures.

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

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and in politics there is one basic plot

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which turns out to be
tremendously powerful,

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and I call this "the restoration story."

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It goes as follows.

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Disorder afflicts the land,

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caused by powerful and nefarious forces

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working against the interests of humanity.

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But the hero will revolt
against this disorder,

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fight those powerful forces,

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against the odds overthrow them

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and restore harmony to the land.

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You've heard this story before.

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It's the Bible story.

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It's the "Harry Potter" story.

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It's the "Lord of the Rings" story.

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It's the "Narnia" story.

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But it's also the story

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that has accompanied almost every
political and religious transformation

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going back millennia.

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In fact, we could go as far as to say

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that without a powerful
new restoration story,

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a political and religious transformation

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might not be able to happen.

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It's that important.

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After laissez-faire economics
triggered the Great Depression,

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John Maynard Keynes
sat down to write a new economics,

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and what he did was to tell
a restoration story,

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and it went something like this.

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Disorder afflicts the land!

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(Laughter)

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Caused by the powerful and nefarious
forces of the economic elite,

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which have captured the world's wealth.

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But the hero of the story,

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the enabling state, supported
by working class and middle class people,

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will contest that disorder,

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will fight those powerful forces
by redistributing wealth,

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and through spending
public money on public goods

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will generate income and jobs,

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restoring harmony to the land.

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Now like all good restoration stories,

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this one resonated
across the political spectrum.

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Democrats and Republicans,
labor and conservatives,

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left and right all became,
broadly, Keynesian.

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Then, when Keynesianism ran into trouble

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in the 1970s,

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the neoliberals, people like
Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman,

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came forward with
their new restoration story,

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and it went something like this.

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You'll never guess what's coming.

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(Laughter)

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Disorder afflicts the land!

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Caused by the powerful
and nefarious forces

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of the overmighty state,

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whose collectivizing tendencies
crush freedom and individualism

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and opportunity.

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But the hero of the story,
the entrepreneur,

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will fight those powerful forces,

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roll back the state,

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and through creating
wealth and opportunity,

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restore harmony to the land.

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And that story also resonated
across the political spectrum.

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Republicans and Democrats,
conservatives and labor,

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they all became, broadly, neoliberal.

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Opposite stories

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with an identical narrative structure.

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Then, in 2008,

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the neoliberal story fell apart,

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and its opponents came forward with ...

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nothing.

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No new restoration story!

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The best they had to offer
was a watered-down neoliberalism

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or a microwaved Keynesianism.

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And that is why we're stuck.

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Without that new story,

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we are stuck with the old failed story

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that keeps on failing.

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Despair is the state we fall into

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when our imagination fails.

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When we have no story
that explains the present

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and describes the future,

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hope evaporates.

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Political failure is at heart

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a failure of imagination.

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Without a restoration story

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that can tell us where we need to go,

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nothing is going to change,

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but with such a restoration story,

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almost everything can change.

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The story we need to tell

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is a story which will appeal
to as wide a range of people as possible,

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crossing political fault lines.

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It should resonate
with deep needs and desires.

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It should be simple and intelligible,

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and it should be grounded in reality.

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Now, I admit that all of this sounds
like a bit of a tall order.

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But I believe that in Western nations,

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there is actually a story like this

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waiting to be told.

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Over the past few years,

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there's been a fascinating
convergence of findings

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in several different sciences,

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in psychology and anthropology
and neuroscience and evolutionary biology,

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and they all tell us
something pretty amazing:

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that human beings have got
this massive capacity for altruism.

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Sure, we all have a bit of selfishness
and greed inside us,

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but in most people,
those are not our dominant values.

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And we also turn out to be
the supreme cooperators.

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We survived the African savannas,

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despite being weaker and slower
than our predators and most of our prey,

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by an amazing ability
to engage in mutual aid,

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and that urge to cooperate
has been hardwired into our minds

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through natural selection.

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These are the central,
crucial facts about humankind:

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our amazing altruism and cooperation.

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But something has gone horribly wrong.

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Disorder afflicts the land.

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(Laughter)

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Our good nature has been thwarted
by several forces,

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but I think the most powerful of them
is the dominant political narrative

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of our times,

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which tells us that we should live
in extreme individualism

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and competition with each other.

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It pushes us to fight each other,
to fear and mistrust each other.

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It atomizes society.

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It weakens the social bonds
that make our lives worth living.

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And into that vacuum

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grow these violent, intolerant forces.

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We are a society of altruists,

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but we are governed by psychopaths.

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(Applause)

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But it doesn't have to be like this.

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It really doesn't,

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because we have this incredible capacity
for togetherness and belonging,

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and by invoking that capacity,

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we can recover those amazing
components of our humanity:

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our altruism and cooperation.

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Where there is atomization,
we can build a thriving civic life

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with a rich participatory culture.

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Where we find ourselves crushed
between market and state,

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we can build an economics
that respects both people and planet.

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And we can create this economics
around that great neglected sphere,

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the commons.

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The commons is neither market nor state,
capitalism nor communism,

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but it consists of three main elements:

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a particular resource;

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a particular community
that manages that resource;

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and the rules and negotiations
the community develops to manage it.

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Think of community broadband
or community energy cooperatives

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or the shared land
for growing fruit and vegetables

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that in Britain we call allotments.

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A common can't be sold,
it can't be given away,

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and its benefits are shared equally
among the members of the community.

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Where we have been ignored and exploited,

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we can revive our politics.

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We can recover democracy
from the people who have captured it.

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We can use new rules
and methods of elections

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to ensure that financial power
never trumps democratic power again.

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(Applause)

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Representative democracy should
be tempered by participatory democracy

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so that we can refine
our political choices,

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and that choice should be exercised
as much as possible at the local level.

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If something can be decided locally,
it shouldn't be determined nationally.

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And I call all this
the politics of belonging.

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Now, I think this has got
the potential to appeal

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across quite a wide range of people,

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and the reason for this
is that among the very few values

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that both left and right share

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are belonging and community.

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And we might mean
slightly different things by them,

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but at least we start
with some language in common.

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In fact, you can see a lot of politics
as being a search for belonging.

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Even fascists seek community,

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albeit a frighteningly
homogenous community

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where everyone looks the same
and wears the same uniform

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and chants the same slogans.

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What we need to create
is a community based on bridging networks,

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not bonding networks.

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Now a bonding network brings together
people from a homogenous group,

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whereas a bridging network brings together
people from different groups.

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And my belief is that if we create

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sufficiently rich and vibrant
bridging communities,

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we can thwart the urge
for people to burrow into the security

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of a homogenous bonding community

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defending themselves against the other.

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So in summary,

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our new story could go
something like this.

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Disorder afflicts the land!

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(Laughter)

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Caused by the powerful
and nefarious forces

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of people who say
there's no such thing as society,

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who tell us that
our highest purpose in life

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is to fight like stray dogs
over a dustbin.

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But the heroes of the story, us,

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we'll revolt against this disorder.

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We will fight those nefarious forces
by building rich, engaging,

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inclusive and generous communities,

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and, in doing so,

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we will restore harmony to the land.

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(Applause)

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Now whether or not
you feel this is the right story,

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I hope you'll agree that we need one.

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We need a new restoration story,

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which is going to guide us
out of the mess we're in,

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which tells us why we're in the mess
and tells us how to get out of that mess.

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And that story, if we tell it right,

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will infect the minds of people
across the political spectrum.

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Our task is to tell the story
that lights the path to a better world.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)