The book cover says the book "provides the hope and clarity required to change the world." Well, he certainly
tries. He's got a plan of action that's
possible, but I didn't get the requisite hope necessary to be spurred to action. It's a bit of an overview of many ideas from different places, many of which are already in action somewhere in the world, and it left me with a solid book list to peruse, but it also left me with a sinking feeling that this will never work. We're never going to get our shit together enough to do
any of this. But I've been wrong before.
The first part is a mix of Charles Taylor's notion of
social imaginaries, Naomi Klein's
Shock Doctrine, Robert Reich's
Inequality for All, and Noam Chomsky's
talks on solidarity. Then he gets into specifics about our ideas around our communities, environment, economics, and democracy.
He starts with the idea that we need a new story to guide us. Our cultural mythologies (or social imaginaries) give us the range of behaviours that seem reasonable. Monbiot describes it as "narrative fidelity":
