With COP26 finally here and the world anxiously anticipating coordination amongst policy makers, it feels like we’re watching a satire on stage, the actors hopelessly unable to grasp at the strings controlling them. These are the strings of the quasi-religious beliefs of the current global economic system.

With COP26 finally here and the world anxiously anticipating coordination amongst policy makers, it feels like we’re watching a satire on stage, the actors hopelessly unable to grasp at the strings controlling them. These are the strings of the quasi-religious beliefs of the current global economic system.

The only conversation that can have any meaningful chance of combatting the accelerating multi-crises is the one that talks about changing this system.

System change. What is system change? We’re currently in a societal upheaval against the tides of the neoliberal free market world order that’s predicated on a belief system that requires perpetual growth and extraction of material resources, enabling the accumulation of personal wealth to live prosperously. Like any other system of beliefs it requires institutions and collective agreement by a mass of people to live by and within its laws. Heresy, until more recently, has been declared on any person that deviates from the scripted worldview. Policed in the most insidious and cunning mechanisms: conformity. From the moment we step into the legacy Victorian-era schooling systems our capacity for free thinking is slowly eroded. Indoctrinated with uniform ideas under the pressure of competition by examination, these extrinsic motivators have the consequence to breed superiority and righteousness to those who excel. Squashing the creative imagination that nurtures cooperative, intrinsic motivation — the right brain-leaning behaviour. Ultimately, creating the conditions to conform, through the means of social and peer pressure.

Only in recent years has this fundamental school of indoctrination been pierced by an awareness of its mass-incarceration of the human soul to a set of ideas that keep us chained in our self-made-Matrix believing ourselves to be separate individuals in mass game of survival of the fittest. Ruled by beliefs in individualism and competition, private property and ownership, subjugated by an economic system, which steals our right to free life from the moment we are born. Common access to the bare necessities walled behind a pay to stay, rent-based land-sharing system, that makes us outcasts from the world into which we are born, unless we exchange our labour for money.

It may be laughable to think that these topics will be on the table at COP26.

But the fact that it’s this precondition of a belief system, that requires perpetual growth and ever more resources, that underpins the climate and ecological crises is why it’s the central problem that needs to be on the table.