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the social order. They've torn apart our public services, they've torn apart our regulations, they've torn apart our tax base, they've torn apart society itself. But the hero or heroes, the working classes, the middle class, We will come together. around new ideas, new ideas based on a far more equitable distribution both of economic resources and of power. We will fight those powerful and nefarious forces of neoliberalism and oligarchy. We will overthrow them and restore harmony to the land.
I'm Jason Pack, and this is Disorder, a show where we try to look behind the curtain and uncover the structural forces that shape our mad, mad, mad, mad world. And there's no doubt that since the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal reforms that entirely reshaped the global economy, we've seen income inequality balloon, and private individuals and multinational corporations have come to develop capacities that previously only major governments possessed.
And simultaneously, the regulatory tax extraction capacity and mega project capacity of major Western states has cratered. Western democratic states have simply been hollowed out. In the 1960s, only the US government could get to the moon. Only the US government could make a market for the nascent computer chip. While today, only the private sector can invent AI. Only the private sector can build the cutting-edge drones needed to fund...
So today we're going to investigate the cause of these disorderly transformations by delving deeply into the book Invisible Doctrine, The Secret History of Neoliberalism by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson. It's my tremendous honor to be joined by George Monbiol himself. George is an investigative journalist, acclaimed author and environmental and political activist. George, why can't governments do the things that they used to?
Well, they've lost it through design. There's been a concerted program really starting in the late 1970s, early 1980s to dismantle many of the functions of government and to roll back. government involvement in our lives and government's attempts to transform society for the better. And this comes under the aegis of a doctrine called neoliberalism, which was formulated some 30 or 40 years before. It was first formalized really in two books by Friedrich Hayek.
called the road to serfdom and ludwig von mises called bureaucracy and they became the basis of this ideological revolution supported by some of the richest people and corporations on earth. And isn't there a great irony here, which is that Rather than liberal capitalism where the government can provide health care and build roads, being the road to serfdom, it's actually the neoliberalism which has made us all serfs.
to billionaires desires to aggrandize their power and wealth. That's exactly right. This is precisely what's happened. I'm not saying that Hayek and von Mises in the first instance were acting in bad faith. They genuinely believed. any state involvement in our lives, the welfare state, any degree of collectivism, public services, the rest of it, would lead inexorably towards totalitarianism.
It was a classic slippery slope fallacy. If we do a little bit of this, we're going to end up with Stalin or end up with Hitler because we destroy individualism, we destroy the personal will and we subsume it into the public will. But the irony is, as you so rightly say, we've ended up with this situation of private oligarchy, of autocrat. in government but completely surrounded by private money, put there by private money, the complete corruption of government by corporations and oligarchs.
leading to new forms of autocracy, which could very soon lead to new forms of tyranny and totalitarianism. Well, you're preaching to the converted because here on the DisorderPod, we've been terrified that... this alignment of New forms of oligarchy. And neopopulism has led to disorderers who want to break down the administrative state just so nothing functions anymore and they can get away with their agenda. But let me back up a sec and kind of humanize you more to our listeners.
You and I share a few interesting things in common that might affect how we see the world. from our time at Oxford to time studying biology and zoology for undergrad. to having an entrepreneurial pro-business father who might have exposed or reiterated certain capitalist myth-making that then contextualized how we react against it.
Maybe you and I see a lot of trends in causation and global economics similarly, but use slightly different terminology. I think where we might disagree is that I'm a proud believer in market. I just want a strong state to regulate these markets. And I want robust antitrust regulations and a massive public sector that can build things and regulate.
And to me, that's what capitalism is. Because I see Adam Smith saying that whenever it's goods for the common, like building bridges, you need government under capitalism to do that. In your book, Invisible Doctrine, The Secret History of Neoliberalism, which you co-wrote with Peter Hutchinson, You say that capitalism is essentially on the same trajectory as what I would now call this neoliberalism.
Could you kind of have that debate with me? Sure, of course. So you see, it just comes down to terminology, because what you're talking about, when you talk about markets and you talk about the things which markets can do, you're talking about commerce. Now, commerce is something that's been happening for thousands of years, buying and selling. It's quite a fundamental aspect of what human beings do. And I'm not against commerce. You can have entirely benign forms of commerce.
But Peter and I see capitalism as an entirely different force. It's an economic system, and it's become tangled up in commerce, but you can have capitalism without commerce, and you can have commerce without capitalism. And we see capitalism as a very distinctive new economic system which kicked off at about 1450. using Karl Polanyi's definition of capitalism as involving the commodification of land, labour and money.
and following the work of the great geographer Jason Moore, we think there's a very powerful argument for locating the first capitalism on the island of Madeira in about 1450. And what we saw there was the instant development of a very different form of economic organization. which led to extremely rapid boom in the sugar trade as it was then. Madeira very quickly became the world's foremost exporter of sugar, despite being such a small island.
but then an equally rapid bust that peaked and then collapsed because they exhausted the resources, in this case the Madeira, the timber, which was required to stoke the boilers which refined the sugar. And so they then did something which has become peculiar to capitalism. Instead of saying, oh gosh, what else could we do here? They cleared off. They quit and they moved to San Tomé and they did exactly the same. This is a Portuguese colony.
They then moved across the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil, did the same there, moved up the coast of Brazil, destroying everything they came across, destroying cultures, societies. ecosystems. It's a very compelling story, George, that you start the book with. This oft-told tale of the despoiling of Madeira. I just don't find it a tale of capitalism. The burning down of virgin forests, overfishing, mining, extraction of minerals. I see these as failures of market. when you have market capture.
I don't consider that mature capitalism. That could be laissez-faire, it could be pillage, it could be colonialism. Isn't it true that if you have an accurate functioning of market loggers or oil firms or miners would husband
their resources, because they want to make profits in the future, whereas what you're talking about is actually market failure. Well, this is why I say you can have commerce without capitalism. You can have a totally functioning market, properly regulated, all the rest of it. without the core capitalist features of looting. So what capitalism does is to perennially create and destroy its own frontier.
It's always rolling across the planet, or now indeed into space, looking for new places, new people, new means of exploitation. It burns through those with tremendous speed. It then abandons them, dumps the cost. and moves on to the next frontier. Commerce, by comparison, when it's not corrupted by capitalism, not poisoned by capitalism,
can be sustained, it can be integrated into community life, it can be part of society. When you think of a market, what do you think of? The picture which comes to mind is a street market, right? With little stalls with stripey awnings. Everybody's more or less equal in that space.
The trader selling you stuff and you buying it, you're on roughly the same socio-economic level. You've got genuine choice. You can move up and down the stalls saying I have my apples from here and not from there. This is totally different. to how capitalism operates. Capitalism is about power. It's about seizure. It's about turning common resources into private resources with the threat or the use of violence.
That's very very different to your street market model. Now it could be the upstream of the street market. in the production of those apples. There can be capitalist relations going on, but again, you can produce apples without the need for the looting, the grabbing, the exploitation, the destruction of society and the rest of it.
is this very peculiar and parasitic economic force and it's about power. What you are talking about Commerce, a well-regulated market, is in some ways the antithesis of capitalism. Okay, I find that a very compelling explanation. I will agree to disagree. To me, when the average punter who hasn't studied economics thinks of capitalism, they think of Adam Smith.
and Adam Smith is very clear that in what he understands capitalism to be, there is a role for government both in regulation and the production of common goods, and I'm going to stick to my understanding of the distinction between... these more predatory neoliberal practices as opposed to what I might call capitalism or you might call commerce. But we digress. So back to your analysis of how did we get from a place that in the 1950s...
The Eisenhower administration considered itself running a capitalist society, but yet it taxed the wealthiest a 90% marginal income tax rate. It built hundreds of thousands, if not millions of miles of world-leading asphalt road. And now the U.S. government can't even build roads. It subcontracts them out to private entities that... it then overpays for the building of those roads, and it has to pay sometimes 10 times as much as you would have to pay in France.
or Spain where there are more worker protections and you would end up with better roads how did we get from there to here okay so the first thing to recognize is that neoliberalism itself is not an economic system it's a political philosophy and its purpose is to facilitate this economic system I call capitalism and you might call something else. Capitalism's biggest problem For the past 150 years or so, there's been something called democracy. Well, we call it democracy, really. It's just...
Most adults having the vote. Democracy is something far more sophisticated than that, which none of us have yet experienced. However, most adults having the vote is a major threat. to capitalist enterprises. Because when people have the vote, they want outrageous things like shorter working hours and better wages and not having their arms ripped off by machinery and oh the weekend and rivers which haven't been poisoned and air you can actually breathe and all these things which
capitalist enterprises absolutely do not want to give us. And so they've used various tools over the years to try to suppress the effect of voting. to try to prevent those political decisions from being felt in such a way that they interfere with capitalism's profit. And one very effective means of doing that was something we call fascism and Nazism. And these were tremendously effective ways of crushing the power of votes, crushing democracy as far as it goes.
and allowing capitalism, the oligarchs and the corporations to triumph over the people. But by 1945, Fascism and Nazism had run into a certain degree of trouble. Not only had they been militarily defeated, but they were also slightly discredited, and so they were casting around. for something else which could rescue them from this awful thing of people having the vote. And they very quickly latched on to these ideas proposed by Hayek.
on Mises, later by Milton Friedman and others, which basically said the state should get out of the way. We shouldn't try to solve our problems politically. We should solve them in what they call the market and what I call the capitalist system.
through economic power, through the power of money, buying and selling, which will create a sort of natural order. You'll see who the good guys are, because they'll be the ones with the money, and the bad people, they're the ones without the money, that's how you know they're bad. and anything which interferes in the discovery of that natural order such as regulations, such as taxation, such as public spending, such as trade unions, such as protesters, in fact, such as politics itself.
should be swept out of the way to allow these so-called market values, in reality, in my view, capitalist values, to triumph over politics. The professor Will Davis at Goldsmiths College has got a very neat, crisp definition of neoliberalism, which is the disenchantment of politics by economics. It would seem then that you think that outsourcing is a natural part of capitalism to return to the way I kicked off this episode.
that today's space exploration and satellite production and things that would seem to be core government functions are now done by private companies. Most people may not realize that the intelligence that the US and UK governments consume about Syria and Iraq. is not really produced anymore by the US and UK governments. There are private contractors who produce intelligence, and that American embassies from Baghdad to Tripoli are not secured by American soldiers.
Yes, they may have some marine security guards, but private companies, be it Guarda World or some mercenaries, they get a private contract to protect the embassy. I think that this is a travesty. You know, my friend Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in Benghazi, and there were Libyan militias who were paid, in theory, to be the outsourced people guarding him, rather than... actual US Army people doing the securing of our personnel. And I just want to get at your mind of
Okay, great. Everything you've said about capitalism is great, but why is it that we have seen since Reagan and Thatcher gradual outsourcing of Government functionality that now under the Doge and Elon Musk Seems there's a fire sale to outsource the ability of government to do the most basic things that government is supposed to do. Because this is the result of years and years of lobbying. This is the power of money.
backed by this tremendously powerful ideology of neoliberalism which creates a sort of ideological framework which says no we're not just greedy people trying to seize as much for ourselves we're doing the Lord's work here by sweeping government out of the way and creating an enterprise society but as you rightly say this enterprise society becomes a private monopolistic society with extremely oppressive characteristics of its own.
Now, I mean, you're absolutely right, the privatisation of security and military functions, the rest of it. I don't want us to create the impression that in what the French call the Tron Glorieuse 1945-1975 The state, the military and security state was a benign force. It was anything but. It had its own highly oppressive characteristics. We outsourced violence to many other countries. And again, we can agree to disagree because here on the disorder program...
I'm interested in order for order's sake. It was more ordered. It was more ordered. I'm not so concerned, George, about the virtue or lack thereof. To me, order is the virtue. I have a Habsian worldview. so it is merely the outsourcing, which is the evil. In other words, if it's done by the Leviathan, that's fine by me. I'm not so concerned about the niceties or lack thereof.
of how colonial power might be administered, and that's not what we're discussing. What I'm concerned about is why is it that government can't regulate cryptocurrency today? Why is it that government, for example... might have tons of citizens who suffer a forest fire in Southern California, but not be able to regulate CO2 emissions.
because what neoliberalism has very effectively told us through the creation of this massive propaganda system, through the newspapers, through think tanks, through government departments themselves. is that the state is basically evil and wrong, and private enterprise, as they call it, is good and will deliver all the good things far more efficiently than government will do. It's a lie. That's not how it works.
It does indeed, as you suggest, create disorder. I mean, I'm against certain forms of order as well, but we can put that aside for this discussion. But basically, we are all subject to... this very effective propaganda system. Now every single society in every age has had a dominant, hegemonic propaganda system. It is what Antonia Gramsci talked about with cultural hegemony, that you'll have a system of thought.
which is very hard to deviate from. It becomes a frame which everything gets pushed into. And to get out of that frame, you have to be quite brave. You have to unlearn. And then you could be the heretic because that frame of order could be the Catholic Church. Exactly. It could be the monarchy. And if you criticize that, there's less majest laws and you get attacked. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. By one means or another. And so the dominant set of ideas becomes the sort of status quo hegemonic.
そう which a great majority of people subscribe to. And now, between 1945 and 1975, in what we call the Keynesian era, that social democratic view became the dominant, really hegemonic view. Even Richard Nixon is alleged to have said, we're all Keynesians now. But when that ran into trouble in the late 1970s and the neoliberals who had spent 30, 40 years incubating their ideas swept in and said, here's our alternative, here's a different story, it very quickly captured the mind.
not just of the Republicans and the Conservatives, but also the Democrats and Labour, right across the political spectrum until we are all neoliberals now. You can't really think outside that box. without breaking your head against it quite painfully. And I want to signal our agreement here because we love to criticize Blair and Clinton. And Obama on this pod, not only for, for example, appeasing the Russians, not enforcing the Syria red line.
but the neoliberal reforms of the Clinton and Blairite years, which paved the way for where we are now. So we see that similarly. What I want to grasp, though, in your frame of mind... Do you think that the people who parrot this need for outsourcing, for weakening the government's ability to, say, do a Manhattan project for public health or AI? Do they believe this?
Or are they following some kind of Koch brothers influence campaign because that's the part that I'm trying to unpack Because how is it that the Blair and Clinton and Obama's for example after the financial crisis didn't put more people in jail how come they didn't cultivate the ability to have a regulatory body to deal with antitrust law. Talk me through how you see that. So I think human beings have a tremendous capacity to convince themselves of anything at all.
Black is white, night is day. If that's what you need to believe, that's what you end up believing. And so for people like Blair or Clinton or Obama, they were faced with a very simple choice. You can have an easy ride into power, into the White House, into Number 10 Downing Street, if you appease existing power.
If you appease Rupert Murdoch, if you appease the oligarchs, the corporations, they're not going to give you too hard a time. They'll still prefer the Republicans or the Conservatives, but they'll allow you. to operate. They'll allow you to get into government and they'll allow you to work within a certain set of constraints. A little bit of political choice, but really not very much at all. And that's the sort of devil's bargain.
such people have to make and in making it they have to convince themselves they're doing the right thing Sure, I'm tacking a bit, I'm compromising a bit, but it's for the greater good, because otherwise it'll be the Republicans, it'll be the Conservatives, and that way disaster lies. And so we have a situation where we're endlessly...
getting locked back into this neoliberal mindset, including by the very people we might look to to rescue us from it. And they, yes, they become true believers in this. because otherwise they would fall into cognitive dissonance. which is a very painful state for the human mind. If you're doing one thing while believing another thing, you tear yourself in two.
But if you believe in the thing that you're doing, and we have this ability to convince ourselves always that what we're doing is right, whatever it may be, then you can avoid cognitive dissonance and have a quiet life. What's that great quote? It is nearly impossible to convince a man of something when his
bread and butter or his livelihood depends on his believing the opposite. Now, I want to talk about how this politics has evolved from, say, shall we call it the soft-core neoliberalism of Clinton and Blair to the hard-core neoliberalism of Musk and Sunak and Liz Truss I love the term and the definition that you talk about of killer clowns. And those are the outrageous and absurd exhibitionists
that started with Berlusconi as a gateway drug, and then led through Orban to Trump and Boris. On the disorder program, and in my book, I call them neopopulist. But I think killer clowns may actually be a better term. So if imitation is the best form of flattery, allow me to use it once in a while, George. You wrote in this really fantastic book that I think all the mega-orderers should get, Invisible Doctrine, The Secret History of Neoliberalism, and I quote,
These mavericks are distinguished by buffoonery, shamelessness, and a flaunting disregard for justice due process, dot dot dot. They come to power by stoking outrage. No such person comes to power without the consent of capital. So the obvious question is why? Why are the ultra-rich now funding this three-ring circus? End quote. And I want to ask you, if they were able to have softcore neoliberalism,
How did we get to this situation of this three-ring circus? So I think what we've seen here is the outcome of a civil war within capitalism. It's not the only outcome. Brexit was a classic example. And so you have on one side what we call the house trained capitalists who are often the blue chip companies, not exclusively. It doesn't exactly map this way, but a lot of these.
So long-established, quite quote-unquote respectable companies with long-term plans, which are planning five years, ten years ahead, they want political stability. They want predictability. They want security. And on the other hand, you have these, what we call warlord capital. these very disruptive people, often in fintech or in IT.
So the sort of digital and financial overlords, which often have a very different view of how to achieve enormous wealth. And that's by smashing everything up and by grabbing what they can from the ruins. And it can be extremely effective. as an economic strategy because you're basically asset stripping. But it's negative sum. It may increase what you have, but it doesn't grow the pie for everyone. No, no, no. It's like stamping around in the pie, but in doing so, you might find a few plums.
which you can pick out for yourself. And these are two very different economic strategies pursued by different actors. and creating this sort of civil war, this, well, at least a tug of war within capitalism. Now, the House-trained capitalists who were ascendant until a few years ago, what they wanted was very boring politics. who are just going to deliver that stability not too much political choice not too much democracy but just
stability where they could plan ahead, they could predict what was coming, they could guarantee profits for their shareholders for the next five years or more. That suited them just great. And then you have these stompers, these people like Elon Musk, moving in and smashing everything up because they can pick up some really juicy morsels from the ruins of the economic system. And what they want in power is a very different kind of politician.
They want these flamboyant people who are extremely good at distraction. They can distract the population from what's going on, from the outrageous behavior of these billionaires, of the oligarchs. who are a more powerful force in some ways than the corporation. and they can just keep people focused on culture wars, on the outrageous, shocking things that they do. They are very good at... scapegoating, diverting blame
onto whoever it might be. It might be Jews one year, Muslims the next. It's always immigrants, constantly immigrants. It might be women, it might be trans people, it might be people with disabilities. It could be anyone. They become the scapegoat. And that's what the killer clowns are really effective at doing.
I find that a very compelling argument, and when we look at how we've moved from relative order to relative disorder to peak disorder, I think it is because the House-trained capitalists... let the disorder capitalists in the gates. Do you know what I mean? They were Visigoth.
at the edge of the Roman Empire, and they're like, well, you're kind of capitalist, why don't you defend this outpost on the Rhineland? And then they were inside the gates of Rome, and now we see a situation... where the disorder capitalists have more leverage over the housebroken capitalists. But I want to ask you, essentially,
Has this profounder change ever happened before? Because order has usually been, as you rightly said, the luxury of the ruling class. And if I look from Sumeria to Rome to Imperial Britain, to America, to France and the Tronc Glorieux. It's generally the ruling class who wants order. Can you think of a situation where the top ruling class
has ever wanted this degree of disorder? Is this new? I think it might be. It's a really good question. The disorder's always come from outside, hasn't it? It's come from the Visigoths, like you say. It's come from the Assyrians storming down into the Sumerian Empire, but... it doesn't come from the centre itself, it doesn't come from the top. I mean, obviously there have been some bad kings who have done some bad things and have, to an extent, ripped up their kingdoms.
There are one or two Roman emperors who have done that, but not deliberately to this extent, not actually trying to work it down. And I would argue not with the systemic backing of... The power centers ideological movement. And I love that this is resonating with you because my contention in my most recent book and in the Disorder Podcast is that this is new in world history. and that it has to do with profound technological and social change.
And it was not possible before that now we are in a new era. which makes this kind of cannibalism of its own possible. I want to give another quote from your book which may help elucidate this paradox that we've encountered. You write, the chaos caused by Brexit has become its own justification. Times are tough, so we must slash regulations and liberate business to make us rich again. This new fire front has burned through the government that sought to implement it.
Brexit backers have sought to tear down environmental, labor, human rights and consumer protection. This is a paradox, right? Getting at the same thing of the Visigoths being within the gates. Yes, yes. And the extraordinary thing is because the Visigoths are also the Empire, are also the central power, they destroy the bases for their own power. And what we've seen in the UK, you know, I talked about sort of burning through prime ministers after Brexit.
Tory prime ministers just went down one after another. It was spectacular. It was Theresa May, it was Boris Johnson, it was Liz Truss, it was Rishi Sunak. None of them could stay in office for long because of the chaos that they themselves had created. And so the thing about chaos is that you think you can plan it, you think you can game it, and you're going to be the one who comes out on top, standing on the ruins, the lords of the desert. That's how these people see themselves.
But the thing about chaos is you just can't predict how it's going to unspool. And so you end up being Ozymandias rather than the guy standing on the ruin. Why can't the center respond and expose and defeat this outrage? I mean, we've gotten to a point, and it's not just since Trump's election, but even in the lead up. where it was incredibly clear, not just what a Trump election would mean for Ukraine, but what it would mean for...
tariffs, what it would mean for the stability of the global economy, what it would mean for things that people care about in their health care. I'm a little confused looking back. why the center, center-left, call it the global orderers, were not really able to say, don't you see that that's just the politics of distraction? I mean, come on, we have to get ourselves together.
I struggle to understand that failure. How do you understand it? Well, the failure is ongoing. It doesn't seem to matter how many times this lesson... is taught, it still doesn't get learnt. So, for instance, here in the UK, you've got Keir Starmer desperately trying to steal Nigel Farage's clothes. They've actually even produced advertisements in reform colours to say, we're going to be tough on immigrants. confusing people as to whether it's the Labour Party or the Reform Party.
Because that's worked so well for centrist parties right across Europe, hasn't it? Scapegoating people. It's worked so tremendously well in the Netherlands, in Italy, in Austria, in the Czech Republic, in Hungary. Time and time again, centrism fails when it fails to stand up. to the forces of disorder and chaos. But they don't seem to learn this and it is quite mystifying. I wish I had an answer for you. I don't. It's math.
It is mad. It's a mad mad world out there. After the break, George and I are going to talk about the rise of oligarchic power. Let's talk a little bit about free trade. I love free and fair trade and I want more of it. But what I don't get... is why is it that oligarchic power, which clearly exists, doesn't want to Safeguard the future value of assets. So if you look at a cartel like De Beers or some of these oil cartels, they don't release all the diamonds immediately.
pillage all the oil resources because they want their grandkids to make money. I don't get where did this switch? That this oligarchic power became all about now now now and not about the fact that if you are really vested in a system, and you're the billionaire Koch brothers, shouldn't you want to... Safeguard the future value of your asset rather than just pillaging it immediately? Another very good question.
And I think the explanation goes beyond economics. It might even go beyond politics and into psychology. I mean, some of these people do. see themselves as deities of a kind. And I'm thinking of Musk, I'm thinking of Bezos, I'm thinking of Zuckerberg, to give just three examples, who can transcend human survival and can transcend the collapse of everything that lies around them and in Musk's case and Bezos' case, bugger off into space and start again.
That seems to be, at least in part of their minds, a desirable outcome. It's what they actually seem to want. Musk is very clear about it. He's going to set up a colony on Mars. There should be the most effectively policed prison camp in the history of humanity, where he will have total control of what happens there because a technician can switch something off and you're all dead. It's power beyond anything that he can achieve on this planet.
I do sometimes wonder if going through his mind is, I have to destroy life on Earth before I'll be able to set up my Mars colonies because that will provide the justification for it. There is something psychological going on here. In my substack I talked about Musk's romantic life where he has this seemingly Genghis Khan impulse. Genghis Khan was a destroyer but he also loved the idea that
he was going to give rise to 1,000 grandchildren and 10,000 great-grandchildren. And Musk seems to have this within himself, this desire to destroy and procreate. I want to get back if maybe this paradox here has to do with what you write and I quote In your analysis of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, you say that, quote-unquote, this marks the transition from an honest of extreme philosophy to a sophisticated con. I do think something has changed here.
And could you tell our listeners what the con is? Because this is at the core of neoliberalism and the way in which it's deliberately disordering, and that the Muskians seem to have bought into this, where past... Business leaders believed in more what I would call capitalism, meaning... a Western Adam Smith positive sum sense that we need to husband resources because it's our own grandkids who are going to benefit from those resources.
So by the time Frederick Hayek had published The Constitution of Liberty in 1960, There'd been this thing which has been described as a neoliberal international, a vast network of think tanks, of journalists, of politicians, of political advisors, of academics. Around the world funded massively by extremely rich people and corporations And it had then developed its own momentum. It had gone far beyond the initial ideas proposed by Hayek, Von Wieses, Friedman and the rest.
to create what was basically a gigantic lobby group on behalf of extreme wealth. And the Constitution of Liberty, which Hayek then wrote, became a peon of praise to extreme wealth. a pretty well abandoned a lot of his former positions. He abandoned his belief in the free market, abandoned his opposition to monopoly, and it was just like... The rich are great. I love the rich. I want to kiss their arses. All of them. They're fantastic. They're beautiful people. Oh, I so love the rich.
Doesn't matter how they made their money, if they inherited it, if they stole it, whatever. They're just fantastic people. And they're like the societal pioneers. And where they go, wherever it might be, we should follow, even if it's off the edge of a cliff. And he called them the independents, people who are so rich. that they didn't have to make any concessions to anyone. They could just do whatever the hell they want.
And however gross and obscene and outrageous their behavior was, that's what creates the new society. But I want to interrupt. We've seen the rise of this uber-wealthy investor, independent class. But what I don't get is why wouldn't they want to promote a more sustainable economic ideology that would not exhaust so much of the Earth's resources?
Doesn't this class actually have even more stake in the future? Well, we've seen recently the revelations from the Murdoch family, after that interview that James Murdoch gave, where Rupert Murdoch is basically saying, You're all bastards, his own children. I'm going to shaft you. He actually makes succession look like a yoga retreat by comparison to what's really going on within the Murdoch family.
And it's like the picture you see is of this man who is just completely upset. He's what, 94 or something now, Rupert Murdoch? But all he can think about is his wealth and power. He doesn't give a shit about his own children, let alone other people, let alone the rest of the planet. He just wants to hold on to it.
by all means possible and to enhance it and to destroy anyone who stands in his way so maybe there's a psychological change here which is that as traditional religion has given way to new forms of thought the belief in a final reckoning or a need to husband resources is not as ingrained in people's psychology and that in the past when there were the von this and the Hohenzollerns and the whatever, they did feel that they would be judged by God and that that is
change with new ideas about the role of the individual. But try to order the disorder with me here, George. There are more of us, and I think that our side actually has greater intellectual firepower, the orderers. Why can't we do what Bernie did Bernie outraised not only Hillary, but even the Republicans?
through small donations. Bernie, I mean, I worked briefly for the campaign. It had some problems, particularly in foreign policy, so I'm not going to praise exactly their model. But the problem wasn't the ability to get people to donate. Why is it? that the anti-neoliberal, the pro, let's husband our resources, let's regulate the economy, let's plan for climate change and do antitrust, the Elizabeth Warren approach, why is it that we can't?
create the pressure groups that can disseminate into the media and the political discourse. a very compelling narrative. I don't get it. There's a fundamental paradox here, which is that the right endlessly talks about individualism. going your own way but they act as a body they're like a shoal of fish they all swim in the same direction doing exactly the same thing
The left is constantly talking about collectivism and about common purpose, but we fight like rats in a sack. We're all trying to do our own individualistic thing. We are just really, really bad. at demonstrating solidarity, at getting together behind some big ideas, putting the resources in, not tearing each other's throats out, and combining around them. I think we can do better. There have been many times in history when we have been better, but bizarrely the left has succumbed.
to atomization and individualism far more than the right has done and we have to fight that tendency within ourselves. That was brilliantly put because what I've seen on the right is that the Mitch McConnells are willing to go over to work with the Trump. Whereas some AOC supporters don't vote for Harris or the Bernie ones don't come over to work with Hillary. And this is crazy.
So I get to how do we fix this? You argue in your brilliant book, Invisible Doctrine, The Secret History of Neoliberalism, that us centrist orderers need a new story. You write, and I quote, Our inability to respond to our current crises as the U.S. did more than 80 years ago is a stark illustration of a general rule. Political failure at heart is a failure of imagination. We need a new story. Tell us that new story. So the land has been thrown into disorder.
by powerful and nefarious forces of neoliberalism and the oligarchs and the corporations that support them, which have torn apart. the social order. They've torn apart our public services, they've torn apart our regulations, they've torn apart our tax base, they've torn apart society itself. But the hero or heroes, the working classes, the middle class, We will come together. around new ideas, new ideas based on a far more equitable distribution both
of economic resources and of power. We will fight those powerful and nefarious forces of neoliberalism and oligarchy. We will overthrow them and restore harmony to the land. Brilliant. Why did Kamala not tell this story, and why has Stormer not been able to govern according to it? exactly the questions we should be asking. Why are they so fucking useless? And it's fair again. They're afraid of their funders. It's a great corrupting effect of money in politics.
If I say this, so-and-so might be offended. So-and-so might not give me any money. I might get a hard time in the media through Musk or Murdoch or one of the media barons. I'll get ripped by them. It's that lack of political courage and conviction to push past those corrupting influences and say, this is who we are, this is what we stand for. So I have told listeners about the really spiritual experience I had at the Super Bowl last month.
And I was amazed at the genuine American patriotism and people who want to love other Americans, even if they support another sports team or have a different politics or are from a different state. I really think that there is an anti-plutocratic center, and that this story could emerge in a bottom-up fashion. I just have to believe that there is a way to forge new solidarity, to channel popular energy.
If you could, in the last moments here, give two concrete suggestions, one for labor in the UK and one for the Democrats in the US as they're trying to rebuild. what technical suggestions would you give them? Sure. So I think we have to revitalize local politics and we have to allow local people to start to make their own decisions in a much more day-to-day way.
than democracy allows at the moment participatory deliberative democracy building up from the local level towards the national level if they can show people that they're invested in that, then I think they can start to win back trust. It's a centralization, this extreme control from a distant center, which people have really learned to miss.
And then building on that to create what Peter and I call a politics of belonging. Belonging is a one shared value right across the political spectrum. We all want something to belong. and building on that this idea of saying we're going to create a nice home for you here a nice political home a nice place where you feel you are part of this you're part of this project and at the moment they've been really really bad at doing that we sketch out some ways in which they could become good at it
Brilliant. I believe that belonging is something that we've gotten to hear on this podcast. We heard from Harvey Whitehouse in 2024 about how... There are seven core values shared by all human societies and the need to belong to a community and the desire to... Sacrifice for that community and receive from that community is actually shared from Preliterate tribes all the way to every monotheistic religion, and it's shared between right and left. So you heard it here first.
The way to conquer disorder is to tap into community, to tell a new story. and to enlist the genuine desire of people to do things that will benefit their future citizens. George, it's been a real thrill to have you on the Disorder Podcast. I hope we can do this again sometime soon. That'll be lovely, Jason. I've massively enjoyed it and fantastic. really interesting
I hope you've enjoyed this episode with George Monbiot. Many fascinating ideas about how the global economy works and doesn't work. If you're particularly interested in corruption, sanctions, and just the unfairnesses of our neoliberal order. I think you're going to love the event that we have at the Frontline Club on March 21st at 7pm with Sir Bill Browder and Stephanie Baker. We're going to be talking about Russia, neoliberalism, sanctions,
and the injustices at the root of the global economy that make a war like the Russia-Ukraine war possible. Please follow the link in the show notes to find out how you can get tickets and join us there. Our executive producer has been Neil Fern. Our producer is the one, the only, the George McDonough. And here on Disorder, we tell you a new story.
I hope that you will allow me to make it my mantra on the pod. What George Monbiot has written on page 141. Allow us to tell a new tale. Shir Hadashah. Disorder afflicts the land. It is caused by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interest of humanities. But the hero or heroes will rise up and revolt against the disorder. They will do battle with those powerful forces and against all odds and emerge victorious to restore harmony to the land.
You, the Mega Orderers, can be part of the telling of this story. Particularly if you subscribe to the paid version of the Substack. That will order the disorder.