Whisper transcription from audio of Roger Hallam "So, Trump won. What's next?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKWCHAcS7E
Hello everybody. We're all thinking about Trump winning the US election. It's easy, isn't it, to go into panic mode. It's all terrible. It all feels so hopeless. What I want to suggest in this talk is that all of this is very far from being true. In fact, Trump winning the election again could well be the trigger for people to finally get their act together and create the new world we all want.
Of course, there's no guarantees. I could be talking rubbish. It could well be terrible and hopeless. But what I'm saying is, is at the same time, there is a massive potential for it to do the opposite. As ever, it's up to us, us on this call, and especially our willingness to work together on what works best and to act according to the spirit of being the humans that we are.
So what's the plan? The first thing we need to get our heads around is that the whole way we see how the world has to change, has to change itself. There are no shortcuts here. This is crucial. The reason we are panicking is because we've learned to see the world in a zero-sum way, in an "us and them" political way. There is only power, and now they've just got lots of it. And so we're done for. It's fight-and-flight stuff, and it simply isn't true. The way we're taught to think about politics is itself an insidious ideology that there is only power, me versus you.
As some of you know, for a while now, I've been pointing out that the foundational human need is love, not power. When I say this, I am absolutely not saying something soppy or sentimental, some wishful thinking thing. By love, I mean it in a classical or biblical way. It is an act, not a feeling. The act of enhancing the well-being of the other. To give and receive love, love is attention, recognition. You basically cannot psychologically survive without each other, without love. We need love when we are born, and we're helpless. We die without it. And when we're approaching death, we need the love of others to care for us. During the decades in between, we need it too, from a partner, from friends, from work colleagues. You see what I mean? The more you think about it, there's nothing idealist about this point of view. It's pretty obvious. And as I say, there's nothing sentimental here, because the desire to give and receive love is actually a raging desire. If we are denied it, we become destructive to others or to ourselves, and very often both.
We need to start here, because this enables us to reframe self-interest, as the phrase goes, the desire for power. Not as the foundational need, but simply as one strategy to get our foundational need fulfilled, the need for love. In other words, love comes first. The power strategy is a deficient way to get it. It does not work, or at the very least, it is radically suboptimal. Let's put it like that. And of course, like any foundational scheme, this idea about love cannot be conclusively proved. It has a mythical element, a feeling for what it is that we are. But at the very least, it is a more attractive view of humanity than all this 'us and them' stuff.
Now as I will show, there is a wealth of empirical evidence for how it works. Some of you may know some of these examples. So, sorry if I am repeating them again, but I think they get to the core of how we construct an effective strategy for dealing with fascism. We all know that a climate crisis, in practice, in how it is going to affect us, is most likely not directly via storms or floods. What is going to happen, what is going to do us in, are the secondary, all-pervasive effects, meaning political disruption, social breakdown, and the default taking of power by fascist forces. What we have just seen with Trump then is just an initial reminder of how this is going to happen. But it only happens because the progressive forces have not got their act together, because they don't get how humans tick and then fail to organize on the basis of that knowledge. We all know there is nothing more important than this, fascism and power. We all know where that leads.
So, let's look at some examples of how things can happen that support the love frame on human action. Let's start with something that is slightly funny. Why do fascist men stop being fascists? Yeah, you got it, when they get a girlfriend. I can't remember whether this is the main reason, but it's definitely a main reason. When people receive love, attention, recognition, they stop being fascist. In fact, there are a whole host of studies where people have consciously gone into far-right spaces, listened to people, befriended them, and then these people very often leave that space. Again, why? Because they're getting attention and recognition.
So, another question. What was the main learning from the recent English riots? It was when a young Muslim woman and her friends came out of a mosque with plates of snacks and gave them to the angry demonstrators. Within minutes, they were having good chats. Let's face it, you can't resist a good Samosa.
I use this approach over and over again myself in the 200 odd public talks I've done on the crisis. Conspiracy theory right-wing people show up and try and disrupt my speech. I'll do a deal with them to fully listen to them in the discussion afterwards. Afterwards then, I would get them in a circle and just listen and summarise their questions, and then they would just carry on. They would be often away. I remember probably the UK's top conspiracy guy turning up, and after sitting with him and his 10 followers for say 20 minutes, he got up and shook my hand.
And then there is the story of me being late for a wedding. Yes, I took a taxi. The driver found out that I was a climate campaigner. He started ranting on about heat spots and everything. I affirmed everything he said, listening to all his points. Then when I got out at the end of the journey, he stuck his head out of the window and said, "Look, if I could afford it, I'd buy an electric car tomorrow." So this last story is not exactly scientifically significant. I didn't do 100 taxi conversations, but there are people who have done this over and over again, and it works. And you can understand why it works if you situate your perspective within the love paradigm instead of the power ideology paradigm.
The vast majority of people believe things not because they are true in themselves, but because the belief is a means to get what they really want, which is attention and recognition. To be listened to, they want love. And if someone or some operation comes along and does that really well, then they will believe what you believe instead.
This is why social media opinion forming is super shallow. People will change their opinion if they sit down with a nice person who listens to them and sees things differently in a matter of minutes. I mean, who gets a shit about social media? It just can't compete with the real thing, a human conversation. I'm not being naive here. As with any social group, there is a power law curve, meaning, for instance, 80% of Trump supporters will change their view if they're listened to consistently. Maybe 19% are going to be resistant and need a good few conversations for them to at least have doubts. And 1% are, frankly, psychopathic, and they're never going to change, or hardly ever.
All groups are like this. Think about prisoners. 80% of the guys in this prison I'm in should be let out tomorrow and just be given some proper support that consists in helping them. But 1% arguably should never be let out because they're super done in. In other words, we need a sectional analysis. We need to be sophisticated in what we're saying.
None of this is new. The most influential psychologist of the 20th century, Carl Rogers, as you may know, discovered scientifically in the 1950s that listening to people and giving unconditional positive regard was the best way of helping them to heal and grow. It was a revolution in understanding of the person and led to a massive change in how we look at psychological distress and the need for counselling.
So we need a similar revolution in what we call politics. It needs to be taken away from the economic paradigm that has dominated it for hundreds of years. All that self interest stuff and be given to psychology, politics as a branch of psychology, not economics. Politics is the need for attention in the context of social decisions. That's all it is.
So what's the equivalent of a counseling revolution for dealing with social and political distress? This is the exciting bit. It is the assembly revolution, meaning listening on a social scale. I will stick my head out here and say that we are 80% certain of being able to create a mass movement 10 times the size of extinction rebellion using this method, organizations that can compete with fascism, with power by dissolving that power through the same mechanisms Rogers discovered through listening.
At the moment I'm working with the team in Assemble in the UK and we've come up with micro designs and processes which, when repeated, should enable assemblies to grow exponentially to create political campaigns that can take over councils and governments. It's as big as that. I'm not going to go into all those details in this talk, obviously, but I am writing a book about it as it happened.
That said, let me be as clear as I can be on this. You should not focus on the big end game stuff, but rather on the here and now, you listening to me now. The most important moment by far in creating a social movement, and I've done it a few times now, so I sort of know what I'm talking about, is the first meeting. Remember, XR started with 15 people in a room. Last generation in Germany started with five miserable young people on a Zoom call. I remember it well. I've just read that Podemos, the most popular left party in Europe, started with a meeting of 28 people and how many people are on this call? Look around. Exactly. So it will all be fine.
So again, what's the plan? The plan is to make a start, a first step. It's a symbol that Robin is going to outline the creation of regional Rev21 groups around the world. From the few thousand people we have on our mailing list, where there are a lot of people, it will be based on a region or even a city. Where there are a few people, then the group might just cover a whole country. You will agree to meet four times together. And during that time, each person will agree to run a mini-assembly themselves with fellow activists, friends, family, people you know, online or offline, whatever works best. But really, just a few people is fine. Five to ten people.
The run of the mini-assembly is very straightforward, but it's crucial you stick to the format. You start by going around and each person listens to each other. They say what their background is, their life journey, or to this point of coming to the meet-up. The second thing you do is to go around and people say what is not going well in their city, their country or even the world. Again, everyone speaking and being listened to, followed by a bit of discussion on what people see similarly. Then, in the final go-round, each person gives three to four things that they want to see changed. Specific policies, ways of organising things, the big issues. You work with the group then to agree four to five things which are the main issues or demands you have in common.
And then the important bit. Everyone is invited to run a mini-assembly themselves, maybe working in pairs. Then those people in turn, to do the same and so on. A mini-assembly takes about one hour, one hour and a half max. So it's not a big deal. You might want to start with some food beforehand or afterwards to make it nice and social. But over several iterations then, if five more mini-assemblies come out of each mini-assembly, then we can involve literally tens of thousands of people over two to three months. You can do the maths. This then creates the momentum to create a series of offline assemblies in a local area to create alternative councils to make local demands. And/or to put up community candidates in elections.
So there is a concrete pathway to collective action, to power. So it's credible. Rallies, marches, sit-downs, not paying tax. And of course, don't forget the banquet, my personal favourite, I have to say. So there's a good 50 pages of detail here and there's still some polishing to be done, obviously. But Rep21 is an excellent place to get this going. And so it is. And of course, we will link up with existing projects in various countries.
So if you think all of this is a bit pie in the sky, let me remind you that in most western countries, there have been campaigns that have gone effectively from zero to major players in a matter of months. Think about the last decade or so, for instance. The Greek party, Tsaritsa, went from 4% to 40% in a year during the debt crisis there. But Deimos went from zero to 20% in the elections in Spain in a year. Macron won in France in six months by having his supporters listen to 50,000 people and what political changes they wanted to see. Jeremy Corbyn went from a nobody to winning the Labour Party leadership again in a matter of months. And yes, in the US, Bernie Sanders went from 2% name recognition to half a million volunteers for his campaign to become the Democratic candidate.
What the defeat of Harris shows about the US is this. People, like everywhere else, want a real alternative to business as usual. And if there is no authentic left option, people will vote for a fascist instead. It's happened again and again in history. All the campaigns I've just mentioned have had significant cultural and design problems, which is good because on the basis of learning from their half-successes, we can create something that will change the world, create the new civilisation. Not because we're being big-headed or hubristic, but because, unless we do this, unless we change the whole damn system, as we know, nothing is going to change. And the unimaginable is going to get locked in.
So, what a time to be alive, friends! At last point then, I'm pretty cheerful about the prospects, and I'm stuck in a prison cell. So, you have no excuse but to cheer up yourself and get on with the job. I always like saying that. But seriously, this will take a few months, quite possibly a few years. Or we can pretend we don't have a strategy that could work. So, we just need to do it. Okay, thanks very much everyone. Thanks for all your great work. Sending you all my love. Bye!