The movement we need now might be a massive national play with a cast of seventy million - this is an idea still forming in my mind.

Such a movement – in an era of climate calamity – is an “everything movement” that leads to real democracy. It's a movement for self-rule.

The original version of this article was published at Clare Farrell's newsletter.

A movement for self-rule is in fact what I think we’ve been working on for many years - collectively, across many different regions, organisations and groups. 

Ecosystemic

The existing neoliberal paradigm does not work for us in the basic sense of maintaining our life support systems. These include the food system, the water system, the climate system.

The logical response to these failures is an everything movement.

At some points in our collective history, the ability to govern ourselves has been ripped from us and concentrated in the hands of kings and aristocrats, then governments, and now, it seems, tech bros, private equity, and banks too big to fail. 

You could call the failing system World 1. These bad actors are driving us to our deaths. So we have to take rule back into our own hands. We have to lead the way to World 2. We have to act as if we really are in charge, and are already building this new future.

To do this, I have reset my strategic orientation from a single-movement or single-organisational view, towards a diverse and complex ecosystemic approach.

Rebuilding

This goes beyond a narrow cause-and-effect logic that can give you great tactics but does not provide a system-changing strategy. 

This movement for self-rule is more clearly about work that can actually change the system. From World 1 to World 2.

We are moving towards an absolute clusterfuck situation, where systems break. Thatcher’s famous defence of neoliberalism - that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) - has left us divided, weak, alone, and afraid, with a grave lack of agency. 

Now is the inflection point. Because only at the point of total belief that no one is coming to save us, will people invest everything they have in moving from World 1 to World 2. 

The work remains both about hearts and about minds. You do need the right information in front of you to understand how utterly and systemically broken everything is, so that you will turn your life's work into the constructive rebuilding of absolutely everything. 

Alternative

Once you see the cascading systems collapse in the data, you will know that clinging to a collapsing s****show is miserable and that the future is more fun if you are swept up in the thrill of making a new world.

The sooner we start, the more we have that we can work with.

It has to be fun, enjoyable, challenging, and collective. Which is why it has to be culturally-led, to allow people to dream, imagine, take up a role, act, rehearse without fear, and get performing. 

That’s why I think the movement for self-rule we need is a play.

The problem we face is that a majority of people have come to inhabit the story of TINA and really do believe there is no alternative.

Self-organised

Friends call this belief a deep disposition that guides people’s lives and habits, their attitudes and behaviours.

We need to overcome this neoliberal paradigm, which has trapped people in self-destruct cycles because they believe there is no alternative. 

Our job is to help people believe there is an alternative. We have to get to people deep down, not just at the level of everyday thoughts, but into what we often don’t even realise is a deeply held disposition or belief. 

Playing together boosts trust, confidence and relationships. My friend Charlie has said “the nation that plays together stays together”. I think playing a role and inhabiting that role with others can help do this.  

One of the main reasons why I have been celebrating the National Emergency Briefing on the climate crisis is that they have self-organised something which is statesperson-like. 

Self-rule

But more specifically, for me, they have taken the lead where the government is missing in action, and they're acting as if they're in charge. 

You will notice if you pay attention that many people in politics succeed simply by acting as if they are in charge, when really they're not in charge of anything. 

Others wrestle with reality and say, ‘Well, I can affect that, but I can't affect this, and I'm going to be honest with you, this is difficult, or that can happen and that can't happen’. 

But the people who inhabit a confident narrative, where they assume a lead position in pulling everybody forwards into a story that they dominate, seem to build themselves up an enormous amount of power, and often remarkably quickly. 

Our story is this. We are not just capable of self-rule, we are already doing self-rule.

Communities

If we could assume this work in that mode of inhabiting this story, with confidence, with the suspension of disbelief I think we could make strides extremely quickly. 

In my version, the roles in the play that we would inhabit: are very specific; serve different relational needs; often reflect what people are already doing, but help people reinhabit the larger story - and come with outfits.

If you were playing out our new World 2, what job would you do? 

You could choose to be statesman-like, as with the people behind the National Emergency Briefing. 

Or you could be a healer of communities, a story wallah, a process nerd, a power broker or a diplomat, a social entrepreneur, a therapist, an artist. 

Regenerative

Are you holding and hospicing pain or running ahead with bright eyes and naive hope?

We might not feel ready for the opening night, but we’ve got to get on with it. It won't all have to be perfect, and we don't have to have every job ticked off.

What's going to be important is that whatever is built has an ecological view, where we are put back in our place as humans, as part of the living world, not the supreme people in charge of the universe. 

That's Elon Musk's job, and I'm sure he'll do it great from his headquarters in Mars. 

What's also important is that we recognise how damaged everything is, and that the future will have to be built to be regenerative by design.

Scary

What matters is how we are developing people - and ourselves - in collective ways. 

The work now has to be making things together, a living, breathing practice of making the new World 2 together that moves as a process and is in relationship to itself. 

We have to get people into Doing Mode, not just thinking or showing up sometimes, but to be doing things together over the long term.

This Doing Together is key. We have to get into a flow of doing, making, building. It’s ‘work’ we need to do, but in a ‘your life’s work’ kind of way, not a nine-to-five kind of way. It will need to be heart led, living from the heart.

And there’s no better way to get people to do something that might feel difficult or scary or challenging than to first of all get people to simply pretend, play, or act in that way.

Perspectives

I’m talking to a lot of people right now about how this might actually work. 

How we might land in a place, convene the 150 or so organisers, activists, artists, already doing the work, and help them play, reinhabit and redream their work into a bigger story: not simply of making the best of World 1 where they live, but making the leap into World 2.

What are the other roles we need in this play? What are the systems of psychology - like Robert Schwarz’s Internal Family Systems - or systems of theatre - like forum theatre - that we can learn from in developing this idea? 

I’m talking to brilliant people such as Ruth Ben-Tovim at Town Anywhere and of course my friends at Dash Arts. 

Who else can I be learning from? Questions I’m asking are: how can the play help develop perspectives in ecological ways? How can we improvise in real time? Can it accommodate the bridge builders and agitators? 

Survival

It’s not all rosy and frictionless. In an ecosystem, some things fight and some things eat one another. We noted this an Extinction Rebellion (XR) story circle back in 2022. But it is ‘being’ a form of intelligence, self-perpetuating and learning through doing and experience.

We have to dream ourselves into a new ecological reality. 

The issue up to now has been that some humans have imagined some systems into existence – like permanent growth – which cannot survive their contact with reality on the earth. 

Some humans have dreamed up a system of supremacy over nature - and over each other - that leaves us very much not in right relation to the ecological, the planet, or each other.

But because some people really benefit from these systems, at the expense of the vast majority of us, they defend their systems with violence, even as they destroy the very ecological reality that underpins survival.

Shift

It’s the paradox that we must imagine and dream the new while making sure it is realistic in terms of earth systems, energy and material and life itself. 

The skill we need for this is reality-bound dreaming. And where else better to rehearse this skill than inside a play?

We did a lot of this work during XR. It was our ambition to dream into reality a new regenerative culture. 

I still think the best banner we ever did was: Empathy, Humility, Frugality. At the time they were unfashionable words. But they summed up what we were trying to do. 

Before XR, when I created the Bodypolitic project with Miles, it was out of an early recognition of the lack of spiritual thought and support structures in our society to help shift the system. 

Confused

The ideas we need are around the transcendent and the sacred, so it necessarily went to this language. 

Questions like ‘what are you even alive for, and what are you doing with that life?’ were, I think, a major attractor for the ecologically-conscious membership.

We were moving people into a perspective of being and becoming - and out of the mode of having, acquisition, or even of achievement. Virtue ethics, not utilitarianism.

It is the practice of being, acting, listening and then doing that appealed to the ecologically minded, who know that the problem is that we are not, as a society, in right relation to the reality of the problem. 

And the same questions were probably a reason for so much of the confused response to XR from the materialist left.

Re-enchanting

Elon Musk has the attitude that ‘I'm going over there because over here is fucked, and that means Mars’.

The far right is saying ‘the system's fucked, we're going over there to the right, to the white ethno-nationalist, supremacist, authoritarian state’. 

So when we say ‘the system's fucked, we're going over there’ for us ‘over there’ has to be towards a place-based, commons-grounded, interconnected society and bioregional economies based on love, care and freedom. 

It is play. It is diverse and multicultural. It is digging down into the grassroots and down to the ground.

It also means going down into the self, our inner experience of life and re-enchanting ourselves with the miracle of living and breathing on this magically beautiful Earth.

This Author

Clare Farrell was a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and is now building real democracy in service to life. The original version of this article was published at Clare Farrell's newsletter.