Brilliant! Well worth a listen. Excellent last line: " ...despite that we are such an altruistic and empathetic species we allow psychopaths to govern us."

3:19 "you have to sell them stuff they don't want" but some of consumerism is "baked into" the system - planned obsolescence makes it so that we have to continually replace things that wear out, break down, or just don't work from the get-go. My grandfather explained to me that he could fix any metal appliance with metal parts, but plastic parts break and are hard or impossible to repair.

George Monbiot, my hero. What a man, what a humanitarian, what a shiny example of sense, compassion and intelligence.

I absolutely love hearing Mombiot.

More good thoughts from George Monbiot. I couldn’t agree more about consumerism and how it actually makes people feel worse, not better. In advanced economies, the consumerism needed for continued economic growth comes with a couple of bedfellows: increasing private debt and the need to earn more in order to buy more and pay off the debt. We end up striving for ever bigger houses we don’t need, working longer hours to ‘get on’ so we can buy more and move further up the property ladder. It seems our one hope is we can reach and be comfortable in retirement. Who cares is we sacrifice our best years for this.

Since my wife died, I hardly buy anything anymore, except necessities.

I'm staying on the sane side of social media to preserve my mental health..

Sadly, in our fragmented community under assault from all sides most people are too apathetic to take on the work needed to challenge these forces. I live in a street of 16 houses and I could only call on one of them if I ever got into difficulties! And where I live that's good going! It's true that with extinction rebellion it only took a couple of thousand determined people to draw attention to the climate crisis, but we are going to need a real groundswell of opposition to make the real fundamental changes we need to survive, and now after covid most of us will have to work our socks off just to prevent eviction and destitution so demonstrating looks to be low on priorities!!!

Answer to the headline question: YES, YES, & YES.

Keep going George, the truth sounds wonderful, we rarely hear it these days from our leaders!

Psycho fanatics. I really like the way he has described such people. I met them in America in the 80’s when I moved there to live with my mother. And everything I saw there, then - Is now here in Britain, and I mean nearly everything on every single level of existence and human experience. There were gangs over there in the 80’s killing each other and it wasn’t happening in the UK at that time. Now it’s here! There was food stuffs that I had there that you couldn’t get here. Now you can! There was 24 hour tv and news channels and cable tv over there in that time, but tv in the UK signed off. Now it’s here. Gun culture was crazy over there, but there was hardly any of that here. Now it is. They were big on coverage of their stars and celebrities and it was constant, but not over here. Now it is. I could go on and on and on and on about what I saw as a teenager in the 80’s in New York City and how the American ways of life, lifestyles and even psychology has manifested here in the UK since………………. September 11th 2001 And it has become worse through “acceleration” over the last twenty years. As if orchestrated! America is a crazy place and this place has become crazy like America.

Brilliant George ! Keep up thé good work !

Very inspiring. You are not my celebrity, but your thoughts and analysis are really spot on and help me a lot to better understand what is going on.How can we spread these insides better? Thanks a lot George

not doing tv is good for mental health , i have not had a tv in my home for nearly 12 years now ,,

Agree, this is what a real leader sounds like.

Without even watching: YES.

Always enjoyed Al Pacino's performances

I think it’s that coupled with corporate employers becoming more and more exploitative.

George for PM (of course he wouldn't want to - he's no politician) - So with him on this.

We feel we need expensive gizmos because they will save us time and effort, because we spend so much time at work earning money which we have to have to buy those gizmos!!

Just look at the relationship between advertising and mental health....the more advertising = more mental health problems and they know I but they don't care about anything but money.

Ted Kacszynski warned us about this over 20 years ago.

If you got your dopamine hits from shopping prepare for a serious withdrawal.

How about Maslows hierarchy? Climate change fears and increasing poverty keep people on the very bottom of the pyramid with the threat of the basic human needs, food,shelter water etc being withdrawn. With more and more people getting poorer, the threat of homelessness etc bring about decline in mental health. The threat of a climate disaster has the same effects. Both scenarios come with almost nil chance of getting out of it. And especially with no chance of getting into nature to heal or having any control over us lives , we are mentally stuffed.

Perhaps you address this from another angle, but there is this arbitrary community that can arise of exploitation. If you make the perfect sustainable community, another external community can arise that simply functions to destroy and steal from your own. You cannot fix community without addressing this, and yet the fear of this is essentially the source of pretty much all bad policy in history, and with good reason. Therefore those who propose community models without adequately addressing this are simply setting up their community as prey.

You can’t rely on state money for community land projects etc, it will never happen, we need to organise locally to build housing/Land/Workers Coops, and take control of LA’s with GP & progressive Councillors.

Is relating the cause of a mass problem to two other issues narrow-mindedness?

Take politics out of community. And you have what humans have done for millennia!. All living towards a common cause, which we can still see even today with what's left of endogenous tribes around the world.

George have you read "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" ??!!? 1968

Is water linked to the sky?

Alien nation. Alienation.

I’m order to govern ourselves, We need sound, decentralized and not confiscable money, which is Bitcoin….. “And no leaders please” Charles Bukowski

George Monbiot's insights are not rocket science. ... His observations are mostly simple factual common sense. ... But probably less than ONE PERCENT of Us can perceive the meaning of Reality this deeply. ... THAT fact should scare the shit out of Us shouldn't it?

the majority are powerless. we feed at the Capitalist trough, day in day out. we do not have the luxury to get off the treadmill unless we want poverty for ourselves and our kids. unfortunately, the herd-level cognitive dissonance of climate collapse, is so far removed from even failing to be locally active, that, we simply continue on, on the treadmill. once, the shit hits the fan, and the treadmill busts, only THEN will we have to stop and recalibrate. until _then_ even for the most clued up, listening to a good man as George certainly is, has me at any rate, tuning out after the first 10 minutes. the power-elite, don't mind a herd-level cull prompted by the first real global "event" that will cause the suffering of tens, nay hundreds of millions of us...they see it as the natural progression of natural selection; whether the dispossessed like it or not, they are for the chop indirectly by a very thin strata of global society...and they (the elite) believe they can continue to live amongst us, after the event...for that we shall all have to wait and see. batten down the hatches, its gonna be an existential ride...we have been there before, and we will survive this one too and we shall rebuild afterwards.

Those Democrats were still funded by millionaires.. two sides of the same coin.

@Sinead Bloom Bloody heck Siead!!! Please do not reply.

You are also omitting the fact that the fundamental alpha dominance sexual drive is around isolating and dis-empowering those underlings to the point of ideally using them as resource, rather than dealing with them as equals, in order to get that dominant player's seed first. You do not fix this with the facts, because it is fundamental to alpha behavior to risk it all to get that winning point. You literally have to fix the entire understanding and common sets of acceptabilities around what goes on, and that more than anything else is why it may be far too late for humanity. Because with every engineered win, another alpha will arise to destroy it all and take resources for its seed to dominate again. Without a good long term solution, you just play like cattle into the hands of the sexual alpha, and the alpha in turn will ignore, and largely never learn the resource problem science, so he will drive the system to oblivion.

Wokeness is a better explanation for the mental health crisis.

this guy represents class, privilege and agenda. Otherwise in summers, he is taking nice boat rides in the middle of france, raising awareness for greenwash capitalism, under the garb of climate justice. Basically folks like GM can never imagine a future outside their given privilege and lifestyle.

Let himself down with mention of Cortez, a total virtue signaller there matey.

Have you considered that some of the mental health issues,especially in the young, may be due to you doom merchants?