This moment is filled with so much hope

Among the chaos and the dark tone of world politics, there is actually rather a lot of reason to feel hope. Things getting better is a long way from guaranteed, but the chances diminish more if we don’t imagine they could be better.

What I'm about to write will sound crazy, but it's not – or at least not necessarily. This moment in global and domestic human affairs is filled with so much hope. I know it may not seem it and I'm very aware that the smart money is probably on 'gets worse'. But let's not will 'worse' into being purely by failing to stop for a minute and have a think about 'better'.

It's important to remember that history is written by the victors – but so is the news and all the works of academia and think tanks. People on low incomes in the global south have next to no access to the kinds of publishing avenues which, between them, 'decide' whether something is good or not.

Thus it is that the one thing 'everyone' agrees on is that, give or take, the last 40 years has been a great success story economically and politically speaking. Globalisation drove a global surge in trade-related growth that enriched the world and international institutions saw off the Soviet Union and created a stable global geopolitics. It was the end of history.

This is not just a stretch, it's bordering on fantasy. All of the above is true on condition that you are one of the top 20 per cent financially in a nation which itself is in a top 30 or so of all nations, or if you're in the top 0.1 per cent of the wealthiest in almost any nation. From that perspective it's been brilliant.

And you know what? Newspaper editors and publishers, think tank bosses, senior academics, TV correspondents, people who get interviewed on TV, economists, politicians, business leaders, senior lawyers – all of them fall into that category. But even generously, only about 1 in 40 people in the world are in the top 20 per cent of wealthiest in a top-30 country.

I'm tempted to list the countries which have not experience geopolitical stability over 40 years but it's probably easier just to do that by continent. I could show that far from trade having raised all nations equally it has polarised the world. It is unnecessary to even explain to you that the gains of economic growth have not been spread easily or that an awful lot of people are worse off than they were 40 years ago (relatively speaking).

For one in 40 people it is undoubtedly the case that the last 40 years have worked, and they are the only people who get published in mainstream sources. For 39 out of 40 people, the picture is different and may be very different indeed.

Plus that is all only if you think of 'success' as 'whether it created an improvement in the wealth of wealthy people'. If you were to start adding in measures like 'and are wealthy people now more or less likely to have their house burnt down in a wild fire or washed away in a flood?', it looks different again.

If we accept at face value that the world got better in the last 40 years there are five broad ideologies which have delivered it – neoliberalism, globalisation, the rules-based global order ('Pax Americana'), centrism and social liberalism. Neoliberalism – get democracy out of the way of commerce. Deregulate, legislate against trade unions, lower taxes all the time, grant businesses extensive legal protections, especially on Intellectual Property.

Globalisation – get democracy out of the way of global trade. Create trans-national rules agreed by rich countries and impose them on poor countries via undemocratic global institutions like the IMF and the WTO. The rules-based global order – prevent democracy changing geopolitical relationships. Basically let rich countries have big militaries and the ability to veto absolutely every other nation via the Security Council of the United Nations.

Centrism – get democracy out of the way of democracy. Use Big Money (seriously big money) to define what is and isn't acceptable for the public to vote for through media ownership and lax political donation rules. Social liberalism – keep all the rich happy. See that 1-in-40 people? It's easier for all concerned if woman and black people can be included so the 1-in-40 don't fight amongst themselves.

Literally all of these except the last are on their arse – and even social liberalism is being pushed back against. In truth, neoliberalism died in the 2008 financial crisis and globalisation was already on its last legs when the pandemic finished it off. In reality, what the US did after the attack on the World Trade Centre accelerated the decline of Pax Americana.

Meanwhile Biden and Harris finished off the hopes of already-teetering centrism in the US and over here Keir Starmer is pushing its last, twitching remnants into a wood chipper as we speak. We have been ruled through four 'empires of thought' and all these empires are imploding.

“There are dragons ahead but it is us who will decide whether they eat us or let us ride on their backs”

This is good. I'd love to paint a picture of what a more hopeful version of this would look like but in the given space that would be optimistic. So let me try and give you a quick sketch.

Neoliberalism is a disaster and there is a world of possible new economic approaches which would all be better. I personally would favour competitive markets via collectivised distribution systems sitting on top of a rigorously-policed foundational economy with all job-destroying technologies effectively captured collectively.

You'd shop on a collectively-owned Amazon where you'd buy things from smaller sellers and producers as well as big who would all be 100 per cent equally free to compete on both price and quality without monopoly distortion of the market or without middlemen syphoning off all the value.

The goods would be delivered via a single courier in public ownership and important things (housing, food, policing, education) wouldn't be delivered via free markets at all but collectively or in highly-regulated ways with price controls. AI would be embraced but always collectively owned. Wages are a wealth redistribution mechanism and so wealth without wages cannot be allowed or we're all screwed.

Globalisation would be replaced with an environmentally-orientated resilience strategy. New manufacturing technologies would enable the automated localisation of production and supply chains would be drastically shortened and policed via 'externality taxes' which prices them in ways that mean markets can actually work rationally. Those are flexible, intelligent and responsive policy-orientated tariff barriers.

That resilience would come from a leasing, borrow, reusing and recycling economy which means that the scramble for mineral rights globally can be replaced (at least in part) by a scramble to ensure they aren't wasted domestically but are retained and recycled. Personally I'd ban Intellectual Property Right protections (again, like in most of history) to democratise ideas and fuel real innovation.

I'd replace the existing 'rules-based global order' with a rules based global order. No nation would be allowed to veto the law and the bodies that create law would be able to enforce them. Regionalisation would force continents to sort themselves out and maintain peace and security regionally. Global power projection would neither be needed nor accepted.

Defence would then become a process of defence, not offence disguised as defence. We'd protect our own territory, and where we needed collective protection we would have a collective army based on territorial security. This would force us to either live in permanent war with each other or negotiate peace constantly. People don't want war any more...

Our domestic democracy would then be revamped in all the ways you'd expect me to propose – heavily regulated media which is required to deliver political diversity and balance, extreme protections on the buying of politics or parties via funding and lobbying rules so precise you'd cut yourselves on them. (See all that lobbying – if it's in the public interest, do it on camera and if you can't do it on camera, assume it's not in the public interest and ban it).

Have much stronger freedom of information rules and make all data accessible all the time, embed participatory democracy everywhere (you know I want a second Citizens' Assembly made up of ordinary people able to hold politicians to account) and simply ban appointment culture, making everything democratic to prevent capture.

What I am describing is a kind of mutually-agreed, peace-fuelled eco-utopia in the making, capturing the best impacts of markets but preventing their abuse, making new technology work for everyone and helping-cum-forcing nations to stay out of each other's business as much as possible while restoring power to a form that enables people to wield it, not money.

Here's the thing; it might sound mad again, but none of this is much of a stretch. Some of it is happening by default, some culturally (you want hope, watch citizens turn against billionaires, which is how most good things begin...), some in a planned way. Other things are pushing hard in the other direction, partly from chaos, and those things could turn this into a corporate dystopian future.

But before you assume that, try assuming the alternative. Donald Trump has taken all of these trends and accelerated them beyond all reason. He's so stupid that he's breaking the system that made him. Neither he nor anyone else has worked out what to replace it with. That's a blank page and a blank page is hope.

There are dragons ahead. They may devour us alive as is imagined in European telling, or they could be wise advisers and friends, as is imagined in Chinese telling. The difference is that it is us who will decide whether they eat us or let us ride on their backs. We will decide it in part based on what we expect to happen. So, I know this sounds mad, but let's try it anyway.

Let's expect hope and see what happens.