We are a world away from a post-WWII consensus of collaboration, solidarity and care. Our moral poles have flipped entirely. Wherever we might find ourselves, we seem to have sleepwalked into a world underwritten by codes of venal self-interest. We all know this is not who we are as people. After all, we teach toddlers to share and care for others, yet we stay silent as some make sacks of gold from selling cigarettes to children and missiles to psychopaths. 

This winning mindset from which only a small number of humans profit holds us captive by feeding us the mockeries of separation - as Audre Lorde perfectly named them. The fiction that we face life alone, as individual units in an atomised multitude of difference, is profitable for those who want to sell us lipstick. For those who want our aspirations to seek no other channel than finding the right kind of sneakers – and certainly not to question a way of organising society that keeps private greed and callousness untouchable.

Things have gone too far already, enabled by our silence. Re-becoming a collective, a whole, a body of people who know right from wrong, requires a rewiring of our individualised selves, a re-coding of our ideas about what is real.

Come along so we can make a start, with honesty, laughter (yes) and a hopeful conversation.

When capitalism stood victorious over communism and the end of history was declared, opening the doors to an era of selfishness did not feel embarrassing in Eastern Europe, even though it was the antithesis of the collective norms by which our societies had been organised. A new morality of choice, freedom and democratic consent gave the new order legitimacy. It was to be an enlightened free-for-all, not brutal pillage. So enlightened did it appear, that for the couple of decades up until 9/11, even its militarised interventionist manifestations seemed like they were probably justified. All shall have democracy and free trade, whether they like it or not.

35 years on, consent is no longer required, West as much as East. The moral veneer is gone. Cheap vilification of the vulnerable is a popular outlet for our justice appetites. Capital dismantles our societal architecture, chainsaw in hand, ably fusing the technological means of mass disinformation and the legitimate levers of the nation state. Rule of law is now for pussies, democracy is for chickens. Strong men are in. Those who want Greenland can claim it. Children can go ahead and die of preventable diseases. It’s time to cut disability benefits, but never, ever to tax wealth.

The terms of engagement belong unilaterally to those with power, to be imposed over those without. Capitalism without the promise of consent is hurtling towards fascism. The dynamics of domination are reshaping everything, from our politics to our tariffed shopping baskets, from our imaginations to our sex lives.

Violence cannot be our only possible trajectory. Join us for a hopeful discussion and imagine a future worthy of our best selves.

We know we are better than the news updates that read like dystopian sci-fi every morning. But what specifically are we?

Late capitalism is a church without god, without heaven and without penance. Its monstrous glass and concrete temples signal power, but no promise of absolution. No reward, no relief, no angels, no virgins. Earth burns. Millions toil but cannot escape the precariat, their promised repay not even a pension, let alone comfort. Righteous and rightful pitchforked rage is harvested greedily by callous heirs of blood emerald mines and property speculation.

Our reality is immoral, illogical and unhopeful.

Whether we like it or not, western liberalism is right now the emptiest of promise of all contemporary doctrines. Even bloodthirsty autocrats offer something greater than the self, as we obsess over pronouns while forgetting to utter the value system that sits behind them - one of dignity for all.

We can give each other the confidence to voice and shape what being better than this means. Join us for a hopeful conversation.

I have not really known what to say or write lately, as the good people around me commiserate the fast-as-a-Tesla Trumpian unravelling of the US state architecture – and with it our collectively held norms of decency, the multilateral system and international solidarity, as first round victims.

 

Even a dyed-in-the-red-wool leftie like me can only watch aghast as the corporate plunderers of our collective pantry rip up their diversity policies to fit in with the new Nazi saluting zeitgeist. Even the most misanthropic cynic must have read with some revulsion the instruction to the besieged people of Gaza that they find new homes abroad, while their homeland is redeveloped into a Middle Eastern Riviera under US ownership. Whoever took the official photo of the inauguration of the new Belgian government has an artist’s eye for the sombreness of these times.

 

I have sympathy with those who look to our remaining system levers for countering this wave of harm – yet this is akin to pleading with the Romanian Communist Party hierarchy in the autumn of 1989. Our own apparatchiks are busy dining out on the scriptures of the last four decades, offering up a smorgasbord of regurgitated delusions of growth and deregulation for competitive advantage.

 

The way forward from here is closer to faith than it is to town planning. It’s no bureaucratic challenge, but a test of our essential character. If we are better than this, we ought to congregate and be counted. Name what we are and should be and do the hard work to make it happen. It’s a return to integrity. 

 

Join us for a fiercely hopeful conversation

In the Deep Thought series, Andreea offers opportunities to interrogate our ideas of what is normal and desirable in society. Together we walk towards the mindset shifts that are needed to protect our planet, make the world safe and ensure lives and dignity and meaning for all. Deep Thought is a space for courage and authenticity, with no stone left unturned. We build trust, encourage each other and take action together.

2025 starts with a caricatural crystallization of the value system that has made possible the dominance of capital over our societies in the last couple of centuries, and probably the feudalism that preceded it. The tyranny of self-interest. Invade whoever you like, pillage what pleases you, buy Greenland, extract rent, “grab them by the pussy”. Be free to say and do exactly as you like. Develop dystopian technology for your own profit, manipulate and lie for your self-advancement. Enslave, exploit, dupe, threaten – as long as you come out on top. Let the Earth go up in flames, you won’t be around long enough to fully face the consequences. “Externalities” are someone else’s problem - amen. 

Today’s moral reckoning means it makes sense to start disowning these selfish permits. We can be unlike Trump and Musk, unlike Putin, unlike De Wever, unlike Le Pen and also unlike each and every member of a tired and mediocre elite who can’t countenance a way of being that upsets our selfish moral code. 

Our complicity can be cured. Our systems can still tame the techno fiefdoms, they can legislate to protect us, and flick the “off” switch if they must. Care, respect, sharing, looking after our commons, looking after each other, ensuring no one has to face their vulnerability alone - this can be the moral code that fills our airwaves. This is the purpose of society. As the tech bros of disinformation and incitement profit from our disarray, nothing (but fear) stops us from dancing to a better moral tune.

Our problems are not failures of reason, they are failures of values. Putting this right starts with naming what should be, and there’s no time like the present. Join us for a hopeful exchange and flick the moral switch.

Social norms, including sexual norms, are socially constructed. They are our collective inventions and tacitly accepted conventions. There were times in European history, not so long ago, when the sight of bare ankles might have sent pulses racing. Today we are less easily impressed. 

Where the Church once held regulatory power over our bonking, modern appetites are rather more readily shaped by commercial strategy. Commercial determinants of human desire vary vastly, spanning from mass cultural products such as music, film and literature, to advertising and – not least, pornography. Power over our sex lives is advantageous for some and less so for others, as in other eras throughout history.

While it’s hardly a social taboo to talk about our sexual appetites, it’s nevertheless difficult to critique contemporary sexual norms without appearing puritanical. As women, we are no prudes. We discipline our bodies, starving our appetites and plucking out our body hair, in the name of sexual freedom. We feign delight at being choked and spat on, we push the boundaries of what our bodies deem tolerable. From time to time, we gasp in horror at stories of pensioners being raped by dozens of men while unconscious, without a single one questioning whether or not it was an acceptable thing to do.

If we were tasked with crafting the sorts of sexual norms we’d want our daughters and sons to grow up with, what would they be like? Is kinder sex still sexy? Who gets to decide? Join us for a hopeful, if slightly awkward conversation.

When future generations dig up the relics of our civilisation, they may marvel that we could be bothered to invent electric milk frothers and automated curtains - but couldn’t figure out how to live well, in harmony with nature. That we could fly sliced fruit in plastic trays from different continents on jumbo jets, but didn’t have any practical solutions to end hunger for everyone. They may ask themselves why we bowed our heads obediently to religions of greed, preaching progress and innovation while despoiling the common pantry - when we possessed the wisdom, the facts and the moral fibre to know better.

As we hurtle towards somewhat darker prospects for our societal arrangements, the power of capital over policy, of technology over democracy, of greed over justice, appear hard to shake. Yet today’s normal can quickly become tomorrow’s absurdity. Not long ago, lobotomy was deemed an acceptable cure for women’s ‘hysteria’. One day we may yet look back on insistence that some must profit from the apocalypse with similar disbelief.

Who holds power in these strange times - and why? Please join us for a regenerative discussion on summoning our own power over our collective path.

In the Deep Thought series, Andreea offers opportunities to interrogate our ideas of what is normal and desirable in society. Deep Thought is a space for courage and authenticity, with no stone left unturned. We build trust, encourage each other and take action together.

Both capitalism and the patriarchy are systems of oppression, perpetuating inequality and injustice. Capitalism very ably appropriates marketised versions of feminism that sell women’s empowerment in the form of lipstick, that require women to quietly shoulder multiple burdens so they can “have it all”. The capitalist lexicon is so widely accepted and its mythology so ingrained in us, that  even feminist organisations talk about the gender dividend, as if our dignity was only worth pursuing when it leads to profit, productivity and growth.

Is it naive to pursue feminist goals in a system not designed for equality?

Shake off the summer cobwebs and join us for a hopeful and revitalising exploration.

A few weeks ago, I heard someone at a conference say that expecting peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians was akin to demanding peaceful coexistence between the rider and the horse. Since hearing it, I can’t unhear it. It seems to fit like a glove around so many aspects of reality.

A useful filter through which much pain and overboiling rage across society seem easier to understand.

All social orders (from the individual to the collective) are based on underlying ideas of justice. Capitalism on the idea that all can be rewarded according to merit, which we establish through competition. Multilateralism on the trust that decisions are made together by sovereign states, for the benefit of all. Marriage, among many things, on the understanding that what we sacrifice in freedom, we regain in comfort. When the balance of justice is altered, the social order becomes a breachable dam, at risk from torrents of anger and discontent, wholesale change inevitable.
The justice fiction (for it is always constructed) is the glue.

In a world where our justice myths are fading, where few own wealth and many pay rent, who is the rider and who is the horse? Whose compliance is expected, and what justice are they getting in return? Who gets to define the rules of engagement? Which among us actively signed up for dynamics of domination? Are better things possible?

A few days after an electoral exercise that brought together hundreds of millions across Europe, I find myself spluttering expletives into my coffee every time someone mentions relief. You might find me petulant. Childish. Harbouring apocalyptic fantasies. Yet what joy is there in Flanders still being a touch more bourgeois nationalist yellow than it is straightforward fascist brown? How low our ambitions when we rejoice in the “centre holding” in the European Parliament elections - by which we mean what used to constitute almost the entire political spectrum now amounting to a “blink and you’ll miss it” majority?

Like a frog in a heating pot of water, we reassure ourselves we still have a handle on things. A party balloon a few decades after the party, our political system is emptied of meaning, of promise, of hope - but hasn’t yet imploded. Another lucky escape. We can keep boiling.

What we accept as normal in 2024 would have seemed dystopian in 2019 and unimaginable in 2014. As thankful as we are for these small mercies, it’s within the reach of our collective courage and imagination to fill our public space with better things in the next five years. To do more than await our froggy fate.

In the Deep Thought series, Andreea offers opportunities to interrogate our ideas of what is normal and desirable in society. Together we walk towards the mindset shifts that are needed to protect our planet, make the world safe and ensure lives and dignity and meaning for all. Deep Thought is a space for courage and authenticity, with no stone left unturned. We build trust, encourage each other and take action together.

What happens to trust in a transactional world? What does a selfish society do for our happiness? What does meaningful work mean in an era of precarity, automation and uncertainty? What is society for? Join us for our monthly conversations.