• When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. 

  We couldn’t ask for starker, clearer cut times. The people who hold the reins of our commons are turning out to be morally bankrupt, intellectually mediocre and unsettlingly cocksure in their relationship with the amorphous masses (that’s us). Their swagger is terrifying.

  The imagery of this new era is insane.

• A five-year-old with a blue bunny hat being ushered towards an immigration detention centre.
• A tech giant contemplating slipping antibiotics to his unsuspecting wife, to treat an STD acquired from raping trafficked children.
• A billionaire paying USD 75 million to produce a puff piece “documentary” on the US president’s vapid wife - whilst simultaneously firing hundreds of journalists from the paper he bought only to neuter and weaponise.
• A banker turner prime minister stating the obvious and offering no vision, lauded as some sort of saviour of the rules-based international order.
• Perpetrators of genocide invited to sit on a “Board of Peace”.
• The European Commission surreptitiously doing away with democratic checks and balances in aid of big money interests, from Europe and elsewhere.

All of this in plain sight. On our screens, in front of our noses. A fetid swamp of cruelty, theft, aggression, grab them by the pussy. We watch this like it’s happening to other people, sedated by decades of stability and relative prosperity. But it’s an overt and hostile takeover of our commons. 

None of it is new, but it helps to see it in such horrifying detail.

Our democracies, our state structures have for a long time been deployed in service of the wealthiest in our society, most overtly since the neoliberal turn in the late 1970s. Under the veneer of progress, we have allowed unjust accumulation of wealth, immoral distribution of resources, destruction of the natural world and an exploitative, extractive global order. It’s been overt, not covert, for quite a while. In 2008, we bailed out the smart arses who pissed our money up the wall and passed the bill over to the most vulnerable in society, who paid for it with two decades of austerity. Look at Oxfam’s inequality reports to see how the distribution of wealth has progressed over the last decade.

This transfer of resources to a small number of very wealthy, unaccountable people who have control over every lever of power in the community is mediaeval.

Even more mediaeval when you realise they are so entitled that they expect sexual access to hareems of children.

We need to understand that the job of building a new societal project, a dream that our fellow humans can align themselves with is for us, and for no one else. There are no other grown-ups in the room. Only our feudal overlords.

A societal project starts from the redefinition of what is right and what is wrong, and a clear statement of what society will deliver. Let me give you some examples:

• When communism collapsed, its collective project was redefined as a prison, totalitarianism, violence. The promise of the new society was freedom, freedom to express one’s individuality and freedom to prosper. That’s the dream that society realigned itself with.

• Budding contemporary fascism paints the invasion of the other as a threat. The other with his brown skin, backward religion. But also the woke other, with her anti-human values, her sanctimonious language and commitment to making all children gay. Its societal project is both purity and strength.

We don’t have a societal project. We are Mark Carney. We recognise that what we’ve known is broken but we have nothing to put in its place. We are stuck in a space between horror and delusional hope that things will somehow right themselves.

I saw a progressive funder recently suggest that AI might help us tackle polarisation and disinformation. That’s the same as saying Jesus could help us shore up our democracies. There are a lot of ifs.

If we accept this is our generational task, we can get further sooner

We really are better than this. We are more than capable of grappling with this generational task, reshaping society so that our kids don’t grow up in some shitty 90s sci fi dystopia, but a society that is actually with investing our strength and energy and dreams in.

We need to accept this is our job, even if it feels like quite a task. Watching the world unravel while we do nothing will be far worse.

If you had to choose a role for yourself in this societal reorganisation, what would it be? Would you be a priest, and organiser, a resource gatherer, the person with the large purse? Being nothing is a very poor option.