CONTINUING WITH

THE NEW RESTORATION STORY

ITS TIME TO RESTORE THE COMMONS

“We need to recover the commons, as noted. A common can’t be sold, it can’t be given away, and its benefits are shared equally among the members of the community. Where we have been ignored and exploited, we can revive our politics. We can recover democracy from the people who have captured it. 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. If something can be decided locally, it shouldn’t be determined nationally. This is called the politics of belonging. 

This has got the potential to appeal across quite a wide range of people, and the reason for this is that among the very few values that both left and right share are belonging and community. And we might mean slightly different things by them, but at least we start with some language in common. In fact, you can see a lot of politics as being a search for belonging.

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“What we need to create is a community based on bridging networks, not bonding networks. Now a bonding network brings together people from a homogenous group, whereas a bridging network brings together people from different groups. If we create sufficiently rich and vibrant bridging communities, we can thwart the urge for people to burrow into the security of a homogenous bonding community defending themselves against the other. So in summary, the new story could go something like this. 

“Disorder afflicts the land….Caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of people who say there’s no such thing as society, who tell us that our highest purpose in life is to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin. But the heroes of the story, us, we’ll revolt against this disorder. We will fight those nefarious forces by building rich, engaging, inclusive and generous communities, and, in doing so, we will restore harmony to the land. 

“Now whether or not you feel this is the right story, you’ll agree that we need one. We need a new restoration story, which is going to guide us out of the mess we’re in. And that story, if we tell it right, will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum.