I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World
How should we understand the moment we're living in? Sarah Wilson is an author, podcaster and philosopher who argues we need to accept that this is a time of profound and inevitable collapse - and that while there is no hope, there is something else happening. Jon hosted Sarah at the Conduit in London for a live conversation that wasn't about elections or citizens' assemblies, but was absolutely about how we save democracy - by showing up, connecting with one another, living fully and beautifully, and building from there.
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Transcript
Welcome to How to Save Democracy. This time, I'm excited to share a conversation I hosted live at the Conduit Club in London with the Australian author, podcaster, and philosopher, Sarah Wilson, about her international best selling book, I eat the stars, how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. I feel like Sarah's journey through life has been a little like mine, starting right at the heart of the consumer story and then asking deeper and deeper questions. Until now, she has found herself somewhere very different. I feel like and I can understand a little how she has come to write a book about societal collapse, the end of rampant individualism, and the need to step into a bigger idea of ourselves after an early career rising through the ranks to editor of Australian Cosmopolitan. This conversation isn't explicitly about democracy, elections, or citizens assemblies. Rather, it's about how we understand the moment we're living in and what the challenge and opportunity of it really is individually and collectively. And that, of course, is how we save democracy and ourselves by showing up, connecting with one another, and building from there. I started by asking Sarah to explain the title of the book since it's not exactly the standard title you might expect for a philosophical inquiry into societal collapse.
I Eat the Stars comes from a poem by, Rebecca Elson. She was a NASA astronaut and also a poet, and she was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 36, and she was given a very short time to live. And so she wrote this incredible book of poetry, with the best title ever, A Responsibility to Awe. And this particular book or this particular poem goes, as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars. And the premise being that as we are forced to face our mortality, we really are then sort of slammed up against things, and there's an urgency created to actually live life fully. And that was very much the experience that I was going through as I started to write this book. And, you know, I mentioned this, you know, when we're downstairs that I sat with the research. Like, I researched this book for almost four years, and eventually, I was in a fetal position on the floor for a lot of that. And I really couldn't start writing until I had that thread. So, yeah, that's where the the title comes from. And by the way, to get... To use even just those three... Four four words from a line of a poem, you do actually have to contact the estate of the person, you know. And I did the same with my previous book, This One Wild and Precious Life. I did the same with Mary Oliver. And, her estate did the same thing, looked at my work, read a bit of the book that I was writing, and then said, yes. We believe Mary slash Rebecca would would be honored to be associated with it. So it's quite a process, and, it doesn't always happen. So I feel very, very fortunate and
honored. Very good. It expresses the kind of beauty that you're leaning into with this book really powerfully. We're gonna come back to that. And I wanted to start there for that reason because I think the the subtitle, How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World, the focus is on living fully and beautifully ultimately. Right? But let's start... Let's go to collapse. What do you mean by collapse? What is a collapsing world? What are we in in this moment in time?
It took about half a book to actually answer that question, but I'll try to, say it rapid fire in four to five minutes. So, essentially, every complex civilization in history has collapsed, and it has collapsed because of its complexity, under the weight of its own complexity. And when we talk about complex civilizations, we're talking about civilizations. Another word is sophisticated. Luke Kemp, who's done a lot of the work in this area, he calls them Goliaths because he doesn't think they're always civilized. They're often barbaric. They become barbaric the more sophisticated they come... Become. Essentially, what happens is these simple societies, they expand, they get more complex, they might expand out in... And so take over more cities, which require more armies, which require more farmers to grow more grain, to pay the taxes, to pay the farmers, to pay for the infrastructure, and on and on it goes. So there's this kind of complexity that happens. And eventually, they reach this threshold where all the fat of the society goes into keeping the complexity going. Then what happens is that there's generally a trigger, and this is actually the work of, Joseph Tainter, who's on the cover of the book. He's sort of the OG voice in this area. I think he's in his sort of eighties now. But, you know, his thesis, and I find it the most compelling, is that it's actually the complexity that is the downfall because, all the fat goes into kind of keeping it all going. And then it just takes a small, like, climate calamity, maybe a volcano or a drought, or it might take a small incursion, you know, from one of the... Into one of the cities. And because they've got no excess fat to defend themselves, down they go. And because everything is so interconnected to every other interconnected system, it's sort of like a domino effect. So people have been tracking where our civilization is at. Now, our civilization is generally regarded as the post industrial civilization. It's roughly 270 years old. And I should just mention, Luke Kemp is the academic who actually tracked all of these complex civilizations and came out with a sort of an average lifespan of about three hundred to three hundred and fifty years. So we're sort of roughly on track. The Roman Empire was a lot longer, but then some other civilizations were very short. So we're kind of tracking, you know, and it's sort of fitting all the patterning. But basically, we reached this point only recently where all these sort of experts in the various complex systems that make up the complex system that is a civilization realized, oh my god, we're reaching this kind of peak. You know, in the case of population, for instance, we're about to hit peak population in a couple of decades. And that bell curve, that the curve that's been going up like this, like as a hockey stick, is gonna go back down the other way. It's the same with oil prices. It's the same with food and water availability and so on and so forth. So these are all happening at the same time. They're all interconnected, and we're at this point where an inflection point where, they're gonna pile in on themselves, essentially. I'll throw one other piece in here. It doesn't... It adds to the question. It doesn't sort of necessarily answer it. But one thing I just want to... Sort of everyone to bear in mind here is that where... Unlike the Roman Empire or the Mayan civilization or or the Qing dynasty, these previous complex civilizations, ours is global. So climate catastrophes that we're gonna have are gonna affect everyone. Our trade routes are global. Our AI, our Internet, everything we do is now global. And in the past, the Roman Empire could fall and indigenous people in Australia just went on with life as normal, right? We don't have that out. We don't have anywhere to go.
And you came at this first previously as a sort of... As a focusing on climate. Right? Yep. And you've talked a bit about that in context, but maybe zoom in there and and tell us why that doesn't feel like the right framing anymore.
Yeah. I imagine that many of you in this room have kind of come this evening, perhaps because you've been really involved in the climate movement in one capacity or another. I was... It was a real rude shock for me because, basically, I've been a climate activist most of my life, and I reached a point of exhaustion. I looked around, and I saw every person in the space equally overwhelmed, despairing, and exhausted. And it... I sort of realized there was this cognitive incongruence going on. Right? We were out there putting this message that, look, if we just do this and if we recycle and if we switch to, you know, electric and all of this kind of thing, we can make it. And then there'd be these headlines of, well, actually, we've got... We're gonna go past 1.5 degrees. Headline after headline was tumbling in, And I was just sort of watching these climate activists just kind of losing their minds, essentially, and the rest of us were doing the same thing. It wasn't matching up. And then, of course, we started to sort of see, you know, the AI stuff came in, nuclear threat dialed up, that doomsday clock, suddenly ticked to eighty five seconds to midnight, I think it's at now, as of January. As I mentioned, AI was that sort of Christmas where we all discovered, you know, LLMs and and, and suddenly got an awareness of of that threat. Food scarcity, democracy declining, you know, all over the world. It just seemed ridiculous that all of this was happening at once and everybody was walking around going, how come this is all happening at once? Well, there's actually a reason. It's because all these systems are interconnected. So I started looking into it through that lens, through a complex systems lens, rather than a linear lens. And a linear lens is one that has served us for the bulk of the post industrial era. Right? Rationality and material thinking and and that kind of thing. It cannot serve us in the current predicament that we're in, where everything's looping and everything. And so anyone who's read my book or heard me speak on this topic for more than five minutes will realize it's actually quite... I mean, I loop around and we cut... You know, sort of put a pin in over there, and then we've gotta come back to it, and I've gotta jump over here. And the book is the same. I've had to write it in that manner because this is what we're now in and we cannot draw a linear thread through it. And we'd been tackling the climate crisis with a linear mindset, thinking that it was a closed loop, you know? And, you know, there's quite a few people in the room I know through the climate movement. We were always hamstrung by the fact that we had to work within a capitalist system. And so I know that it was sort of something we said on the side, oh, God, we've got to work within. We're gonna have to tell people that they can keep consuming, that they're gonna have to switch to green... The green economy, you know? We can buy our way out of this. And and it was cringy. It was cringy, and of course it is, because it's not... We can't. Now, one silver lining in all of this is that this system that we thought... I mean, I remember saying to people, and in my previous book I said this, I wrote this, we can't tear tear down capitalism in time, so we're gonna have to work within the current system. Well, what do you know? You know what's going down? Capitalism. We're gonna get there. It's gonna be messy and ugly, and it's not the way I would have liked to get there, but nature bats last. So one of the things we are letting go of as I read your book and I hear your conversations is
this phrase, we can make it.
What does it mean to let go of we can make it? Yeah. It took me a while. I sat with that question for quite some time. And in fact, the first chapter took me three months to write. Then I had no choice because I'd announced on Substack that I was doing this book serialization and I had to write a chapter every week, so I was off and running. But until I've actually resolved that particular thing, I couldn't actually move any further. The notion of we can still make it, when I really drilled down, what it really was was we can still get to a point where we can get away with continuing business as usual and not change anything. Yeah. Right? And that's kind of insane because it still implies this idea of infinite growth on a finite planet. You know? There's this idea that there's gonna be these other resources that can feed the the new green economy. The other thing is that it implies that it's a system we want to keep going. And when I first wrote that first chapter about hope, basically, I said, I no longer have hope. I no longer have hope that we can make it. And... But then I sort of drill down to, well, this is, you know, this is what we're really looking at. The response from the 65,000 people that were following me on Substack and holding me to account on all of this was relief. Like, overwhelmingly, it was the response that I got back. And because, you know, we started actually having fun with it going, wow, the depth of this system and this whole kind of premise means no more golf courses, no more, you know, unboxing videos, you know, no more, like, updating your LinkedIn profile. You know, somebody said, oh, I can let go of my LinkedIn version of myself, you know. And you start to realize all these absurdities that we're entangled in, you know, in in this idea of, you know, sort of, we can still make it.
The other aspect of the relief that I've, that I read into and I really loved was you talked about the relief of things actually making sense rather than... You're just starting to hint to that with this this mention of absurdities that we sort of had to hold within. You just say a little word more about that part of the belief. Well, it's actually... I can just sort of speak to a quote from Feklaev Havel, who was the,
former... Was a dissident or was a dissident and the former president of the Czech... Of Czechoslovakia. And, he said that real true hope is not the belief that things will work out. It's the belief that things are making sense. And I think that sort of actually sums up the relief people were feeling. It kind of brings us back to what I was saying before about the cognitive con... Incongruence that was going on, the dissonance that was going on. And I spoke to various psychologists about this. It's actually a profound cause of anxiety to be forced to live in this dissonance and incongruence. And when you can actually speak with somebody... I mean, I spoke to a psychologist who said that in the past, we used to get patients in, and we used to have to sort of show them that their fears were irrational and not grounded in real life. Right? They were internally produced. Now these people, you know, these psychologists and therapists have to actually acknowledge, actually, your response is sane. It's actually, you know... And so, really, I think that a lot of people that come into this space do start to feel the relief that comes from that
dissonance being resolved at a cognitive level. Yeah. And and I think also there's another part of the relief made, that you speak to that is, like, there's almost a... And I think I felt this after after I finished my initial bout of tears. But of, it's not my fault. I can't I can't expect myself to be part of fixing this. And may... Maybe that... Maybe you'll tell me there's a sort of certain age of white man who has that response.
No. No. I I think... I mean, there's a couple of things that I would say to that. A big part of our system, and I was speaking to someone earlier that, you know, that... Who was... Who's here this evening because of my I Quit Sugar books, you know, and it seems like bizarre trajectory. I'd... I acknowledge it looks that way. But really what I've done is I've tracked these big... You know, it was Big Sugar, then it was Big Pharma, then it was Big Oil, and now it's Big Bloody Everything. But what these industries all have in common, what the whole capitalist system actually has done, is impose responsibility on us. So Big Sugar did it with the calories in calories out, Furphy, totally made up science. There's not a scary of evidence to it, but they imposed it on us. Anyone who grew up in the eighties and nineties, we all lived it. Right? And then, you know, big oil did it with the carbon footprint, put it all onto us. And so we thought that we were the problem. And so I think there's a certain element of actually seeing through all of that now that actually goes, this is systemic. This is bigger than all of us. But what I will say, and I I... The book is actually a sort of melange of me going into deep left brained science y stuff and modeling and thesis and philosophies and so on and economic theory to explain the stuff because I think this is the world we're in. We need these explainers to be able to sort of explain it to our recalcitrant uncle at Christmas or something like that. But then there's the other sort of interweaving of philosophical and and spiritual truisms to guide us through this. But one of the things I actually do deep dive into is this idea of Moloch. Moloch appears in the the Hebrew Bible. He's the God, that requires that people sacrifice children for a win on the battlefield, which is this cruel irony because most people fight wars to give their children a better future, although in 2026, I'd argue that's no longer the case. And it's sort of been picked up by game... As... By game theorists. It basically describes a zero sum rest to the bottom situation, which kills the game. So for instance, if, you know, you you three in the front decide to stand up, the next two rows would feel they need to stand up to get a bit better view, and then so on down down the room. And eventually, everybody's standing up, and everyone loses. Right? Because you've got perfectly good seats to sit in. But if, you know, somebody in row four decides to sit down, they lose. This is... Sort of describes the predicament that complex systems arrive at. An example would be the nuclear arms race. Well, if we stop, you know, Russia will get ahead. The AI tech race Yeah. If we stop, China will get ahead or one of our competitors will get ahead. And so it's a race to the bottom where everyone loses. Mutually... Mutual destruction, basically. And so when I kind of absorbed that fully, I realized, oh my god. It was the penny drop moment for me. Other people have other penny drop moments with some of the theories I bring in. But it was like, wow. None of us are to blame, and yet all of us are to blame. And that produced both a profound compassion for how ridiculous we are, you know, for our arrogances, but also our vulnerabilities, also for our earnestness. Because a lot of what we did was a good idea at the time, and then it ran out of control. I describe, watching my four year old niece one day just making an absolute, like, hell zone of her bedroom. There was wet socks and bits of wool and Lego, and it was just this big tangle. And she was having the best fun. And then her dad walked in and went, Melena, clean up your bedroom. And she just looked at me and went, and she's realized there was absolutely no chance in hell she could put all of that back together again. And it's like, we are that four year old. We're suddenly looking at it going, oh my god. The other thing about this sort of Moloch framing, it also made me realize that we need to be a lot more humble to get through this. We don't know. We... I don't know if I can use foul language. You have to expect that we have an Australian on the stage. At some point, we're gonna have to accept we fucked up. We've really fucked up. And it's like, and now what? And that's kind of, you know, the question I ask myself, you know, and now what? And what are we gonna do? And, you know, you've you've heard this phrase before. I think Jen Bendel probably came up with it. We're no longer in a problem that can be fixed. We're in a we're in a predicament that can only have responses.
Yeah. And I think that... And so I'm just gonna read a little bit of this because you're you're hinting at this, and I think this framing of this framing of the moment feels really important. You say, we don't know how collapse will go. Collapse may strike hard and fast or things might just be a little more shit for a few generations. But this sphere of speculation is not where we want to hang out. My point here is that while we don't know which way things will go, we can be absolutely sure of this. We will all have to live in increased volatility and discomfort while we wait to find out. And this meantime is critical. And this is where we're starting to bridge into, okay, what's the agency here? Yeah. Right? Like, there's Exactly. There's... I I love the way you frame that just now that that we are all... So we're all to blame and no one's to blame. Like that... And in that, there starts to be a hint again at what this agency is. But but stay with us. Stay with... Keep us in this moment of uncertainty because we... The nature of the complex, the collapse of the complex system is also that we don't know exactly what the collapse will look like. Right? People try to pin me down. How long have we got? You know? What's it gonna look like? And I think some people also think that the certitude with which I speak makes it sound like I have answers to those kinds of questions.
I don't. And I'm very, very careful not to sort of say that I do know. And I would encourage you all not to trust anyone who says they do know, because that is the point. We do not know. You do not know how collapsing systems work and how... What... Where the nodes are gonna erupt. And so what are we faced with? We're faced with massive uncertainty in an era in which could, like, basically, we have been completely left unable to deal with uncertainty. You know, I wrote about this in my last book. 70 to 80% of all technology created in the last thirty years, and this was five years ago. So it was geared at reducing or getting rid of uncertainty. You know? So we had little orbs that could tell us exactly how long our pizza was gonna take, you know, before it arrived at our door. We can we can monitor everything and track everything. And so we've become completely cocooned from from uncertainty. And of course, now that uncertainty is... Well, life has always been uncertain. It's dialed up immeasurably. So we are left exceedingly vulnerable in this moment. So in terms of agency, one of the things we can do is not just get... Like, we've gotta get super cool. We've gotta work that that that sort of acceptance muscle in and around uncertainty. We are in an incredible liminal moment. And, you know, I think that that little bit you read might have been from the liminal chapter. I really fleshed that piece out as well. We've had many... You know, humanity's experienced many liminal moments. You know, I I sort of focus very heavily on the period between World War I and World War II. And that period... And I'm sort of... We're moving into sort of some of the the positives, you know, the the agency, the hope, hope in inverted commas. That period was, you know, Simone de Beauvoir in her book, you know, What is Existentialism, wrote about how the uncertainty and the the the the memory of the horror and also the fear of the horror ahead basically saw people come to Paris in particular to wrangle together what could be going on and where we need to head as a species. And so from that period, communism, existentialism, and fascism emerged as three ideas. -isms also emerged in the Axial Age, you know. That was a period that saw Buddhism, Judaism, the market system, Confucianism, like, sprout roughly in the same sort of period around the world. So these liminal times are scary as all hell, yet at the same time, as a species, we are built for it. Another example I'll just sort of give is during the the London blitz, Winston Churchill was very, very scared that Brits would lose their mind, you know, because of the fear and and so on. He'd had to shut down the the main... The mental wards and move them out to the sort of outer suburbs. And he opened up even more out there thinking that they'd be packed with people, you know, freaking out. The opposite happened. Even those who were sort of, you know, mentally on... Mentally unwell, basically joined the war effort and were driving ambulances and and helping people. And it's recorded as the happiest time in British history, which might say a lot about British levels of happiness. I don't know. But it was also the healthiest time in British history. A lot of you might be familiar with that because rations and austerity, actually was a really great thing. It's a reminder that we are built for tough times. We are built for enduring. And we're also built for creating and flourishing in such times. And it's a reminder that I try to make throughout the book. And we're gonna get into that now. So All that comes from facing uncertainty like an adult. That's the other piece to all of this. Right. A lot of what we're talking about here is stepping up into a kind of maturity I think most of us have been craving. Toby Ord, another Australian who works out of Cambridge, he works out of the existential department for existential risk. It might be called the institute. I can't remember now. But he, he tracked, you know, sort of mammalian species like ours, should last x amount of millions of years on the planet. And he tracked the average lifespan of a human, let's say, eighty to eighty five years against it. And, basically, we come out as a 16 year old. And... Better than a four year old, maybe, but not much different in some ways. That's true. Yeah. That's... I think parents of teenagers would say not much different. So I think we've been behaving like teenagers, thinking there's somebody out there that's gonna fix our problems. We're kind of big and sophisticated enough to make a a mess, a very dangerous mess, but we don't have the sense of responsibility
to clean it up, and I think this process is taking us in to that sort of, initiation. But maybe also a 16 year old wants to be adult as well to your point. Like, we're wanting to we're wanting to step into something else. Strikes me talking to you that the... This one thing we need to let go of is that is that we can make it. Another thing is that is the we can control it. And someone's gonna come and save us. And someone's gonna come and save us. And so if we let go... So I'm reminded the the latest episode actually of the of the podcast was with, a woman called Carola Sikada who was one of the organizers of something called Dina Heals, which is a mutual aid center that sprung up in the aft... In the context of one of the fire... Of the Eaton fires in Los Angeles. And she talked to us about this idea that she was like, as much as what you said in the blitz, like, we we stepped into the fullest version of ourselves was the language she used. And that that seems to be what you're now... What you're then saying, this is the opportunity. So so what does it look like? What is the work now then? If we are... If we let go of someone's coming to save us, if we let go of, we can control it and make it tidy, if we let go of, we can make it. Start to lead us into what's left.
Well, I almost need to bring in the anecdote of the rich dude who owns the boat. I was hoping you would go back. Yeah. So, I was tackling this exact thing on a Greek island, and, I was coming home one night from a party that somehow wound up at and I was hitchhiking. It was like one in the morning or something. And this guy picked me up in the back of his motorbike and drove me up the hill. And, anyway, the next day I was in a cafe writing on my computer and this, this old guy, walks in, Anthony is his name, he said, oh, it's you. And, kinda sat down next to me, and, he's British and very, very wealthy. Anyway, he started moaning about the fact that he thinks he's... He's asking me what to write about, and I said, you know, the end of the world. And he said, he said, you know, I think I've gotta sell my boat. You know? It's a carbon catastrophe. You know? But if I sell it, all the other rich guys are not gonna sell theirs. So what's the point? Anyway, I said, well, is that why you make your life decisions? Is that... And so we just sort of swam around all the kinds of things that generally come up when you start discussing this kind of stuff, particularly with entitled rich people. And, eventually he just slumped in his chair, and then he looked at me and went, this is gonna have to be spiritual, isn't it? And I just went, yes. That is it. You got there on your own. And he actually... He looked very annoyed with me. But that is a sense... The actual line in the book is, Anthony doesn't look convinced. He shrugs and eats the biscotti that came with my coffee. That's it. And so this is sort of the journey that we're all going to have to go through with our privilege, and it's going to have to be spiritual. This is what... We go to meditation retreats or we read sort of, you know, 12 steps to becoming a, you know, enlightened guru or something. You know? We read these things and we get these kind of nice feels, these wafty nice feels where we go, oh, yeah. An expansiveness, you know? We get that sense of what Oliver Burkeman calls cosmic cosmic insignificance, you know? And we, oh, yes. This is what life's about. And then we enter back into the day and it's all gone. We... I sort of say this in the book. All of that work has actually... We call it practice. It has actually been practice for this moment that we're gonna have to face, where where we're gonna have to deal with loss. We're gonna have to bear. You know, that's a word I use in the book a lot. We're going to have to bear. So, you know, it's almost like... It it is almost like the spiritual language has to be used to actually talk about what what we're going through, but... And what we're going to have to step up into. I think we're really... It is a stepping up into adulthood, as I say. That's gonna be what's entailed. We're going to have to learn how to process emotions.
Grief is the big one, and I spend a lot of time discussing grief. I interviewed three grief doulas
at discussing grief. I interviewed three grief doulas and... For the book. And, you know, we're we're going to have to know what to do with all of these emotions. We're also gonna have to draw on each other a lot. One thing that's sort of come up a lot for me, as well is the the battle going on between the sexes, which has been sort of stoked by social media. We're gonna have to resolve that. We really are. We're gonna have to get over ourselves because we need each other. We're gonna have to get used to the idea of going collectivist. I remember when I was doing climate activism and the wonderful people building community this and community that, community gardens and everything. I used to get impatient because I'm quite a left brained operator. I'm like, God, we've gotta go up river. It's gotta be bigger than that. It can't just be all these little gardens going on. I've had to actually get used to the idea that's exactly what it's gonna have to be. And so, you know, there's all kinds... Again, I go left brained again. I go and look at the studies to see exactly what size of groups are gonna work, you know. And turns out, the the number of humans that can... Are required to create a self sustaining community. I don't know if we're gonna get to this, but I might just jump to it now. A lot of people immediately ask me when we start talking about this, should I be prepping? Should I be going off to the hills, buying some land and stockpiling my tinned tuna and and batteries? And I'm gonna have to sort of put a pin in the other thing and just answer this question now. You guys that we can get there? Well, only if you're willing to defend your tinned tuna and your batteries. Right? And it's gonna have to be violence and guns. Because if it gets that bad that you're having to go off to the hills with your tinned tuna, you are gonna have to defend it because everybody else is gonna be starving. And what about when the five year old neighbor, you know, the kid from next door comes around? And I decided very early on, no. I cannot do that. Nothing is worth that because it goes against everything I know to be true about being human. So going back to the little thing I pinned over here, the studies show that, yes, less than 5% of these so called intentional communities last longer than five years, and that's been... You know, these studies have been done over a long period of time. You need between one hundred and one hundred and fifty people to keep a community going at a level where you're gonna have security, food systems, water systems that are gonna actually sustain and keep a keep a family, an extended family alive. That also happens to be the Dunbar number. You know, many of you would be familiar with the Dunbar number. The Dunbar number is the number of people that we can kind of keep it now, because...... Keep track of. Yeah. Right? It's also, I found out the other day, from doing a a presentation to Meg Wheatley's Yeah. Kind of spiritual community. It's also the number... The ideal size for a congregation.
I can add actually to your list. It's also roughly the I... The the the seems to be the most effect... Roughly the most effective size for a citizen's assembly at one of these participatory democracy structures so that these these numbers are powerful. I want to just... So you were you were coming around to something that that the the you put a pin in that we're we're losing... So when we when we...
So my brain's going... No. It's okay. I thought you... The pin that I put in was the fact that, you know, we... You know, I was surprised that it was community led stuff. And the message that comes out of that sort of, you know, 100 to 150 people is that we don't need to go off and separate ourselves in the hills and think we've got to bunker down. That is the mindset that caused the problem in the first place. Yep. It goes against everything that has kept humanity ticking along for 300. Right? We are not a strong species. We can't run fast. We haven't got horns. We don't have fangs. All we've had is our ability to be collectivist, to communicate and to cooperate. And in fact, the studies on Moloch have shown the only way that you can get around that Moloch mess that I described before is through communication and collaboration. So you think of the prisoner's dilemma. Again, I'm swirling all around the place, but I think you kind of can see where I'm going here. The prisoner's dilemma, many of you would be familiar with. It's where I... It's sort of a... I think it's was it a real life thing or was it a sort of a hypothetical? It was kind of abused, actually. The the the point is connection and community. Well, the point is that these two people have been sort of conned by the police, and there's damned if they do damned if they don't, unless they can communicate between the the prison walls. And that is the message here. We need to be in rooms together, in groups of around hundred and hundred and fifty people, which, what do you know, happens to be the size of a small town or a sort of a suburban cul de sac... Extended cul de sac situation or an apartment building. We do not have to... Or this room. Exactly. This room. Yeah. Have a look around. This is the size that we were... Operate best in. And we... To use the Pima Chodron wisdom, start where you are. Yep. Start where you are and do this work now and in the situation you're in. One of the other things I bring in is the fact that we've been efforting so hard. Right? We've been going... We've been square pegs just shoving ourselves into round holes with the post industrial system, with our, you know, LinkedIn version of ourselves and all that kind of driving our our kids insanely to soccer and sports and just exhausted by Monday morning, you know. We've lost the Sabbath. All these kind of sensible things that used to keep us on the straight and narrow. I posed towards the end of the book, and it almost seems rude to say it. This could actually involve a lot more ease Yep. Than we expected.
And it's... And a lot of it is that sense of showing up in community, showing up as ourselves, being Being human.
Being human. We have wandered so far from what is sacred to us as humans. We, you know, we are lonely from it. And, you know, this is the thing, you know, as I was writing the book, by the end of the chapter, I felt a bit pollyanna ish because each chapter, I'd sort of realized, oh, and this ridiculous thing is actually forcing us back into our humanity again.
Over and over again, everything that I was exploring, I went, oh, but of course, this is forcing us to grow up. This is forcing us to turn to kindness and love. And what what I've seen since the book came out, I I put it... When when my book, Citizens, came out, I put a page on my website that said invite me and I will come. If you see this happening, invite me to your community and tell me the story of what you guys are doing. And what I've seen is that across the country, across the world, actually, people are leaning in in the places where they live. They are starting... And these community gardens and so forth, it's not just community gardens. There's there's community energy projects. There's projects. There's something like 500 community energy organizations across The UK. One built England's largest wind turbine last year in in an in a neighborhood that's one of Bristol's poorest and generates energy to power all their homes on a £100,000 of revenue for their community every year. Like, people are doing this stuff.
And the other thing to bear in mind with that, because I used to get a bit deflated and go, okay. Well, they're fine, but how are we gonna, you know, scale this? What we're talking about here when we're talking about complex systems is, you know, emergence theory, and it can operate the other way as well. When we actually make small right moves, they're highly contagious, because the congruence starts to kick in and it feels good, and we resonate. And there's a sense of attunement and emergence once it starts to take hold is can be exponential.
Right. And
so this is the thing. This is where our real agency exists, is we can actually start doing all of these things. And the other thing I say is don't be shy and demure about it. Advertise the hell out of this because people need to see it. We need to make this contagious. I also say, we've gotta make this new way of being sexier than the status quo. You know? So feeling like yourself flagellating while you grow your tomatoes or, you know, whatever it is that you're doing It's not what this is about, you know. This is about accessing the joy of being human and radiating it so that we can make this new way of being
the better way. It's gonna be through charm, basically, that we're gonna we're gonna do this revolution. A revolution through charm. I just... That that makes me think of two two lovely things that are going on at the moment. There's a there's a wonderful podcast that I would highly recommend people check out in The UK called Screw This, Let's Try Something Else that absolutely is telling some of these stories. And the other is there's a a nascent campaign that, called Citizen Friday, which is to try... Which obviously I love. I didn't start it, but, which is to try and replace Black Friday with a day... Citizen Friday with the call to action, share, repair, and get out in the fresh air with people starting events all over the world. Actually, they they decided to do this a week ago, and there are now 60 pins in a global map within a week, and and word is spreading.
Those things, as I hear you, that's sort of the contagion of the of the showing up. Right? Yeah. And some people say to me, well, Sarah, you know, what about this? What about that? What if you're wrong? That's eventually where they land. They chive through, and there's a chapter in my book where I'm at a dinner party. I often get invited to dinner parties where I'm... I realize thirty seconds in, I've been brought in to convince the husband or convince the neighbors, the right wing neighbors or something of of all of this. And, I was at one of these dinner parties where I had a science journalist just kind of barrage. Well, what about this? And and, you know, haven't we always gone through collapse? And didn't we always think the world was ending? And, you know, I was able to sort of come back with some good, you know, balanced, calm responses. So... But then I did this the spiraea discaglia, you know, the... You go home and lie in bed and go, oh, for god's sake. I should've said that. Anyway, so I wrote a chapter which is all the responses to those kinds of things, but it generally drills down to, well, what if you're wrong? I'm like, good point. Because, like, I've settled along. I don't know. I do know that I've... I do know that there are a number of systems that are already in collapse. They're not reversible. And once one or two systems go, the whole thing goes down. Right? I do know that, but I do not know when it's gonna happen exactly. And I do not know whether we're here in London, how you're going to experience. I've got a fair idea, and it actually goes back to the agency piece, and I'm just gonna slot this bit bit in before I go back to the other bit. The agency here is really... Everyone in this room is probably not going to be burnt to a crisp by a wildfire or, I don't know, die by drowning from inundation. The most likely situation that we're gonna face is mass civil unrest. As we lose our shit because the market system goes, we start to have power outages. There's food and water supply chain issues. This is going to start happening now. It really is. So part of the reason I wrote the book and, really, the real call to action here and the real agency agency we have is to actually be, to use Meg Wheatley's term, an island of sanity in all of this. We have to regulate our nervous systems. We have to get comfortable with discomfort and uncertainty so that as our friends and neighbors and the people around us wake up to this stuff, as they will, as they start to get implicated and affected by all of this, there's somewhere to go. And we don't descend into the chaos that will ultimately be our undoing. Can you remember where I left off from all of this? There was a really good point that I was covering off.
I'm a very good off here. Communities
and that whole thing. It doesn't matter. We'll move on. You've got a It's about
the questions that you're
Oh, yes. Yes. What if you're wrong? What if you're wrong? So, yes. Drills down. Drills down. Thank you. And we land Crowdsourcing. Thank you. Yes. At, you know, well, what if you're wrong? And I'm like, yeah. Okay. That's... Yes. I could be wrong. Let's just imagine that. But I'm not us... I'm not suggesting we do anything that we don't want to be doing anyway. Right? So there is actually nothing to lose in starting to think this way. Because as you start to look into all of this, you really do realize we've been trapped in a system. We've been fed this idea that capitalism is the only way to go about things. And I think more and more people are starting to wake up, There
There's a love... The way you put it in the book is perhaps the most off off repeated truism. I chant in my head as we do it anyway. Whether collapse turns out not to be as bad as the models predict and it's just a bit shit for a few decades or whether the whole lot goes down, I would do all of the above anyway. And I'd be as grateful as I am now for having been compelled into it. I'm gonna invite people to turn to one another, reflect a little bit, and then we'll hear some soundings in just a moment. But just before we do that, I'd like to leave it with a few of the ideas that are just around that in... At the end of the book where you speak to this notion. There's two two particular ones that leapt out to me. The first is the story of the pacifist, AJ Musk, who protested against Vietnam in The US by standing outside the front of the White House with a candle every night. And someone said to him, do you really think you're going to change the policies of this country by standing out here at Loner Night in front of the White House with a candle? And he replied softly, oh, I don't do this to change the country. I do this so the country won't change me.
Yeah.
And then just after that, you quote an activist who's also called Sarah Wilson. I don't know why you just don't claim her language, but she writes apparently, the way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred until the sacred in them remembers.
Yep. And this is what we're all in. And this is why we have to practice radical compassion as everybody starts to to remember, really. The book, ultimately, I'm giving away at the end is a homecoming. This is... Not the book is a homecoming. Collapse is taking us to our homecoming, I believe.
On that note, let's hand it back to you guys. We'll give you ten minutes to chat to one another, and then we'll take a few soundings. And, what I'll do is I have a little, like, fifty nine second rule for those contributions, but I want to... We do wanna hear what you're thinking, not just questions. So have a chat with one another. We'll take a few soundings, and then we'll wrap this up. But thank... But over to you. Okay, folks. If you can see me, raise your hand and close your mouth. If you can see me, raise your hand and close your mouth. If you can see me, raise your hand and close your mouth. It always works on the third time. So let's take a few soundings from the room. As I say, I'm gonna put a little cheeky timer on it because I'm clearly not shy of making you hold your hand up, and I will time the fifty nine seconds. But Will the band stop playing? The band will stop playing. And let's take some sounding. So who... Where have we got some bands? We'll take this lady over here first. This lady in the coral top. And then and then we'll come to this hand or this lady first if you may.
Thank you, John. Thank you, Sarah. I have not read the book yet, but I've listened to your podcast for many, many years, and many of the people that you've spoken to. The thing that is tripping me up is this idea that none of us are responsible and all of us are responsible. And where I keep tripping up is that I don't think that responsibility is equally or evenly shared. And I worry about a narrative that lets those of us, myself included, that have the most privilege and wealth and etcetera in the world kind of off the hook for the role that we have played and the role that the choices that I make every day now continue to to have. So,
yeah, that's the thing I keep chipping upon. It comes up a bit. Do I ask No. Can we... Could you mind if I if I gather a few, and then we'll come back? But thank you. Let's come to this chat. Come from your left.
So I've spent the last five years looking at how to design complex systems incredibly well. And humans have a love of applying linear frameworks to complex systems, and I wonder if signs of collapse could just be signs of needing to design and manage complex systems better, and where the aim is not about needing control. It's about observation and adaptation.
Okay. There was one just in front of this gentleman as well.
Thank you. My question is related to education because I run a charity to develop critical thinking in education, and I'm trying to, like, spread critical thinking so that people can learn how to stay in insecurity, like, in in unsafe situations. And my question is, how, like, is how could this be done in education? How can, like, student be ready... Get ready to deal with this future? I mean, it's one way is, yes, develop cognitive skills and think more critically. What else?
Okay. Thank you. We'll come to this side and at least two and then more maybe.
Hi. Thank you. This has been such an interesting conversation. I think, Sarah, your point on uncertainty really just, like, wow. It really resonated with me because it is framed as something that's so deeply uncomfortable that almost realizing that it's meant to feel that way feels like a massive relief. And at the same time, realizing that being resistant to that uncertainty makes it that much harder moving forward. It's like bad things are gonna happen, and it's whether you accept it and then spend time, like, crafting that story of what's gonna happen next or just, like, rarely mulling it over. And maybe it's less of us trying to, like, figure out what we're doing next and more, like, holding space for all those emotions that come with that uncertainty and knowing that that feels normal. Not just feeling the positive side of the emotion spectrum of happiness, all of that, but the full rainbow of it all.
It was exactly on fifty nine seconds, so the alarm didn't play. Thank you very oh, there it goes. There we... My problem. And we'll take one more, and then we'll see where... Just beside you the hand there. Thanks.
Hi, everyone. Two points. One, I'm really appreciating the psychological permission to feel that I'm not going mad and to make sense of... I knew I wasn't going mad, but this is helping me go home and know I'm not going mad. And the second thing is I have an overriding sense that we're in nineteen thirties Berlin, and I need to hold two ideas in my head. The book... The best of times and the worst of times of what humans can do is about to be what we're gonna witness, and I'm gonna be preparing myself accordingly.
So I invite you just to breathe into that for a moment. I mean, for me that the... This thing about the responsibilities coming through, like, I found the framing of, everyone is to blame and no one's to blame very powerful because I think what I'm hearing in it is that the the question of responsibility is in a... Is in some way less less important than the question of agency and what do we do from here rather than self... But I'd really like to zoom in on that one first. And I... What's the risk of that and versus... And why do you why do you think that's important to say?
Understand. I understand the sort of the the eek feeling behind that that sort of questioning that sort of thing. It's one thesis in all... In a lot in the book. So there's a whole range of things we're going to have to hold going forward. And I have a phrase that I introduce people to fairly early in the book, this and... So it's this and this and all of these things. You know? We can hold many ideas at once, and we're going to have to. I think also what it alludes to is also this sense that we're in a privileged, you know, where we are in a privileged world, Gaza, Congo, Sudan, arguably Cuba fairly soon. They're already, you wanna know what collapse looks like? Yeah. They're already in it. And so some people do in audiences say, well, Sarah, you know, you're writing this book about living beautifully and fully in it. Isn't that just, you know... And I'm like, yeah. Well, I'm writing a book for people who are gonna buy my books. Right? And we are... We've got a lot of power and agency. And so I'm trying to hold people as they start to wake up so they don't lose their shit and they hold on to their agency, and we start to... You know, we talked about this before. They start to actually fully take responsibility for the two levers that we do have available to us, reducing inequality and reducing polarization and, you know, to the democracy piece. Right? We can do that. Right? So we do have responsibilities, but the book is really to kind of meet people where we're all starting to land as we start to wake up to all of this. So it is about holding multiple ideas at once. We all have our own journey with our own responsibility and our own guilt and shame and our... All of that to do. Yeah.
Yeah. And speak to that... Speaking to that, our own journeys a bit more, because in your journey with this, because you you started out very... I guess, it sounds like it was pretty traumatic for you. It's certainly hard for me to hear you at the beginning, but you seem much more easeful with it
now. I wailed my way through this. It was the toughest time of my life, like... But also, I felt... I mean, it's no big secret. I wrote a book about it. First We Make the Beast Beautiful is about my journey with anxiety and bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorder. And I've lived in high anxiety and just thinking I'm going mad all of my life. Since the age of seven, I started seeing patternings that to me didn't make sense. I started questioning everything. And I write about that in the book, you know, to rise above myself, you know, and and see things and just go, you know, and I... I'd get very anxious about it. So I kind of went... I mean, basically, this has been... This process facing up to the reality of things has been the biggest salve for my anxiety. I feel more sturdy than I've ever felt in my life. And this work is basically now what I do, you know, and I feel less insane because that congruence has... Incongruence has been resolved in many ways, to put it simply. But, yeah, I I have to treat the, maintenance of my nervous system as a responsibility Yep. To be an island of sanity in all of this. This is not just, you know, I don't meditate because it feels nice. I do it because I have to. Like, I wrote this book by jumping on a train and getting out of... To the outskirts of Paris into forests, and I would run with paper and a pencil down my bra and just wail into the forest. And I would have to, you know, hold onto trees just to get it all out. I've had to learn practices to get, you know, this... And you're inviting us to see that as part of our responsibility in a way, to see holding... Yeah. Because if we if we, you know, to what you were saying with your question about uncertainty, this is gonna get really gnarly and hard. Even if it's a mild version of things, it's gonna be shitty and then shittier still. We're not going to... We're not gonna suddenly recorrect. I think after COVID, we all thought we'd go back to something normal, and we haven't. And we're not going to. It's gonna be, you know, maybe one step forward, one and a half steps back for a long time now. So, yes, we do we do need to face our shame, our guilt, our pain, and it ain't a bad thing. Yep. This release and to learn dancing is another thing. I have a whole chapter on dancing. I'm a terrible dancer. The beat happens, and my limb gets out there, and it's missed the beat, and it's come back in, and another beat's happened. And, but I intuitively started dancing, going to... I found these intuitive dance nights in in Paris. And this is a whole community. I don't know if in London it's the same. I know in Australia, all these intuitive ecstatic dance sort of things are happening. Gaga and five rhythms, and I used to think it was all weird guys in fishermen pants, you know, and this... And it is, but it's still wonderful. As well. Yeah. I know. But there's a whole history of dance being a way that we coped with these traumatic times. We danced through the Black Plague. We danced in the liminal time between the world wars. It was called Dancemania. People died. They would dance for, you know, they do these dance marathons in across Europe and in The US. People who are so traumatized by losing so many brothers and loved ones to both Spanish flu and the war, they dance their way out of it. And, you know, when I was researching the book, I went, I wonder when disco started a couple of weeks after the Vietnam War stopped. And so this is what we've done. And, you know, I go into the science of why it works. So we... There's ways that, historically, we have coped with this. We're not on our own. But, yes, we have to do it.
And so to bring in a couple of the other questions and and thoughts to arise, so is this more a question of how we manage complexity and and what skills do we learn? What's... What do we need to learn in this time? I'll just bring those two together a little bit. Yeah. This was your sort of question.
I think where we're at is because we have barged our way with a linear mindset through complexity. And, yes, the only way we can get through this is to have a much better understanding of how complex systems work, and so really understanding how emergence works, and it's so easy to get once, because it's natural to us. You know, this is what we've done, This is how we've evolved. Like, everything that we're actually being returned to is what we've done all throughout history up until about three hundred years ago. Mhmm. So it'll actually come very... It'll come easily, I think, once people start to wake up to it and dismantle the, the other ways that we've been doing things. But it's not a silver bullet, but it's gonna be how we emerge, how we move through this. Another big thing that hasn't really come up is to what pragmatic things do we do. You know, ironically, it was Milton Friedman, the sort of founder of modern capitalism, who said, real change only happens off the back of a crisis, And what happens... What comes next will depend on the ideas that align around at the time. This is the advice that he gave to sort of the early carnation of the Heritage Foundation, which has now informed MAGA, the Trump administration, and most of the tech bros in their sort of ideology and is basically steering much of the Western world to techno fascism. But it's a really great wisdom. We can adopt it. Only real change comes from a crisis, and what happens next is gonna depend on the ideas that align around at the time. So apart from anything else, what we're doing is getting these ideas growing out there, happening with life and energy to them so that as other things start to crumble these things can come through. It sounds like magical thinking, but it is how change goes about comes about. Something comes and replaces, and the danger we face is that as these vacuums start to occur in these liminal times where there's uncertainty and institutions are being demolished and all the things that we took as safe things that we could adhere to, that the fascists come in and fill that vacuum. Right. This is what fascists are great at. They come in and they put plant a certainty stake in the ground, and they fill that space. Again, another responsibility. We've got to get into that... Those voids and actually create other ways of thinking and being. And maybe as a sort of
will lead to a closing point, but it feels to me listening to you that those those macro and personal responsibilities are actually pretty linked. Right? So in this moment, as this collapse occurs, as as things are falling apart, one response is to be fearful for our nervous systems to be triggered for us to act from that place. And that creates a kind of vulnerability to those who would offer full certainties and and who would like... And who would lead us to It's the thesis of your book. Which which would lead us to be divided and hate one another. That opens us to the... It's the nineteen thirties fascism moment. The other is to respond from our... With a... To take that responsibility on ourselves of how we how our nervous systems respond, how we respond as individuals, show up and live fully and beautifully, and be open to something else. Be open to showing up together and preparing from there. There's a lovely phrase, some of you might have heard a a moral maze on radio four the other night. A friend of a friend, a lady called Elizabeth Oldfield was on, and she... There was a... It was on the end times because of something that, JD Vance had said. And she she came out of the line, neighboring is the best prepping.
It's absolutely right. It's... And and Nate Hagans calls it pro social prepping. Pro social prepping is essentially building community and bonds and baking muffins for your grumpy neighbor down the corridor in the apartment block or whatever it is, but that that is what we need to be doing. It works.
And so just take us right... So the macro, it's like we stay away from the fascists and and create some better ideas that are lying around. At the... And then at the personal, like, come back to that and leave us there. The the the work in this moment emotionally, what is required of us? Just, like, really hammer it home to leave us with that.
Be as human as you can. When you're feeling that you're wanting to grip at individualism and and me, me, me, go out into the world and look at other people's faces, look into their eyes, be reminded of the kindness of humanity. Do something kind. Go first because it's contagious. Go first and watch as other people feel the, you know, the same impulse. Don't wait for somebody else to come and save you. Start to be the person who goes and saves those around you, you know? Soul nerd, read the works of people that came before us who lived through difficult, liminal, dark times and went down into the depths of it all to find threads and ways of being that can actually hold us and our loved ones through this before the fascists burn the books, basically, or AI shreds them. Care and don't question where the line should stop in your caring because that is a waste of time. Just keep caring. And when you doubt yourself, just care. Just care. Like, give a shit. I think a lot of people sit back going, do I give a shit about this or do I... No. Just go. You know? Say yes. Be a yes person. When you see the opening, go there. You used the word... You quoted me using the word compelled. You know, my my therapist who fired me because I became a friend, and then we went and did psychedelics together, so that's probably, you know, lucky that she fired me. You know, she said to me, Sarah, you are going to be... You know, we're going to be called upon to do the strangest things, but allow, like, you you will feel compelled. Be... Allow that compulsion to come through you. You know? Don't don't stop it in its tracks. Don't block that energy. And allow... This isn't an this isn't an energetic thing. I'm gonna sound particularly woo woo here, but this stuff needs to be moved through us. So I find that sitting in meditation is not always the best for me. Like, move, walk, dance, walk in nature. I wanna answer the question about children or young people. Nature is the best teacher. You know? You can actually see the fractals and how they operate. You know? There's this perfection. When we watch things in nature, you know, the swirl of a whirlpool or the fronds of a fern or the petals of a of a flower, the rings of a tree trunk, they're fractals, and our eyes are made up of fractals. And apparently, when our eyes see fractals patterning in nature, we sent... We sense this congruence and it creates this sense of belonging in the world. Becoming a student of these kinds of patternings is, I think, a big part of this as well. And, you know, to go back to that, you know, Rebecca Elson book, we have a responsibility to awe.
You know? Study it. Begin it. Love it. A responsibility to awe. There's one last little bit that I underlined when I was right at the end where you say, there's... For years ensconced in the system, we thought we had certainty and stability, but what we squandered was living. We were breathing just a little and calling it to life. Now, however, there's less certainty than ever and conditions are dire, and yet we can but live fully. And I want to thank you for leaving us with the book and with that for this evening and say the bar will be open for a little while. The queue for books, as you've already been told, is carefully crowd managed and will be orderly. And this will be released as an episode of the How to Save Democracy podcast very soon. So... And finally, I'd like you to join me in thanking Sarah Wilson for the book and for this evening. Thank you. And thank you, John.
This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omezine Khalifa, and produced by Joe Barrett....
Of Open Society Foundations and you, our listeners. We've got big plans. So if you can chip in to help us make them happen, we'd love to have you on board.