TED Talks Daily
(#5) Elise’s Top Ten: The new political story that could change everything | George Monbiot
20 Sep 2025
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. This contagiously optimistic talk will make you rethink the possibilities for our shared future.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
Hey, everyone, you're listening to TED Talks Daily, the show where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. Welcome back to my top 10 TED Talks, our first ever podcast playlist where we share a curated list of TED Talks from the archive on our feed all at once.
The first few talks on my top 10 list have asked us to look inward because the way we view and relate to ourselves affects who we are and how we act in the world. But now I want to look outward. So next up, I want to share journalist George Monbiot's talk from 2019 on the political stories that shape everything in our societies. It's a framing for understanding the modern world.
It feels like the world's in crisis and upheaval. And for me, this is a vital talk for the time we're living in. He explains why we're stuck in a system that just keeps failing us and offers a potential way out.
Do you feel trapped in a broken economic model, a model that's trashing the living world and threatens the lives of our descendants, a model that excludes billions of people while making a handful unimaginably rich, that sorts us into winners and losers and then blames the losers for their misfortune? Welcome to neoliberalism,
the zombie doctrine that never seems to die, however comprehensively it is discredited. Now, you might have imagined that the financial crisis of 2008 would have led to the collapse of neoliberalism.
After all, it exposed its central features, which were deregulating business and finance, tearing down public protections, throwing us into extreme competition with each other, as, well, just a little bit flawed. And intellectually, it did collapse. But still, it dominates our lives. Why? Well, I believe the answer is that we have not yet produced a new story with which to replace it.
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. Does what we are hearing reflect the way that we expect humans and the world to behave? Does it hang together? Does it progress as a story should progress?
Now, we are creatures of narrative, and a string of facts and figures, however important facts and figures are, and I'm an empiricist, I believe in facts and figures, but those facts and figures have no power to displace a persuasive story. The only thing that can replace a story is a story. You cannot take away someone's story without giving them a new one.
And it's not just stories in general that we are attuned to, but particular narrative structures. There are a number of basic plots that we use again and again. And in politics, there is one basic plot which turns out to be tremendously powerful. And I call this the restoration story. It goes as follows.
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