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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 intro 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)
Natsuhiko Mizutani
at 4:59 :
"labor and conservatives" may be "Labour and Conservatives", refering to two political parties in UK.