To get out of the mess we're in, we need a new story that explains the

present and guides the future, says author George Monbiot. Drawing on
findings from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, he
offers a new vision for society built around our fundamental capacity for
altruism and cooperation.
The world of neoliberalism is strange, the zombie doctrine that never
seems to die, however comprehensively it is discredited.
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.
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 ...
Then, when Keynesianism ran into trouble in the 1970s, the neoliberals,
people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, came forward with
their new restoration story ...
Over the past few years, there's been a fascinating convergence of
findings in several different sciences, in psychology and anthropology
and neuroscience and evolutionary biology, and they all tell us
something pretty amazing: that human beings have got this massive
capacity for altruism.
We survived the African savannas, despite being weaker and slower
than our predators and most of our prey, by an amazing ability to
engage in mutual aid, and that urge to cooperate has been hardwired
into our minds through natural selection.
Where there is atomization, we can build a thriving civic life with a rich
participatory culture.
Where we find ourselves crushed between market and state, we can
build an economics that respects both people and planet. And we can
create this economics around that great neglected sphere, the
commons.
We can use new rules and methods of elections to ensure that financial
power never trumps democratic power again. ... Representative
democracy should be tempered by participatory democracy so that we
can refine our political choices, and that choice should be exercised as
much as possible at the local level.