Jeremy Lent (author, systems thinker) is a leading authority on civilisations and has just created a manifesto on how to shift from the current crumbling one to what he calls an Ecocivilization. He joins me to discuss how we can actually get there, drawing on real-life, tangible examples and a bunch of concepts that tend to get people excited. In this chat, we cover: fractal flourishing, phase transition, mutually beneficial symbiosis and the Basque self-governing cooperative Mondragón.

Jeremy is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network, an online discussion community, and convenes the Ecocivilization Coalition. He has been described by George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age”. Lent’s latest book, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All, follows two previous award-winning books, The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning.

SHOW NOTES

• You can learn more about Jeremy Lent’s work via his website.
• Get your copy of his book Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All here.

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Francis Weller (psychotherapist, bestselling author + “soul activist”) believes we have entered a “Long Dark”, a multi-decade (century?) period of collapse and psychological pain that will demand we learn to grieve deeply, messily, fully.

In this episode, I ask Francis whether grief is the missing piece of the impasse we’re at. If we finally drop into our grief, will we wake up, will we finally let ourselves move into a new way of being that ditches the destructive soul-sucking paradigms, and prioritises our aliveness? Because that’s what I think we all know we’re aching for.

Francis has worked for more than four decades, bringing together psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions to educate communities on how to metabolise loss and grief. He’s also written a bunch of books, including The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which Anderson Cooper repeatedly raves about.

As he is famous for saying, “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.”

SHOW NOTES

• You might also enjoy one of my all-time favourite episodes, this one with James Hollis: The Jungian take on 2021
• I really loved this chat with death walker Stephen Jenkinson, too. It covers similar, still and deep themes.
• You can find links to grief circles run by therapists who were trained under Francis here.

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Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

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Ruth Ben-Ghiat (historian of fascism +NYT bestselling author of Strongmen) is an internationally recognised expert in how psychologically unstable men come to power and use corruption, sexual predation, staged victimhood and violence to rule. She’s recently, however, turned her focus to how societies subjected to such tyranny have survived and fought back…using moral authority.

Ruth is an American history professor at New York University and a political commentator with an expertise in fascism and authoritarian leaders. Her 2020 book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present was a global bestseller. She publishes the hugely popular Substack Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy and will publish her next book, Resisting Autocracy: What History Teaches About Fighting Back, next year.

SHOW NOTES

• Be sure to check out her Substack Lucid
• Purchase Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present here
• You can catch up on the Ece Temelkuran episode here
• This episode with Lindsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt’s ideas on resistance might also interest you

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Watch on YouTube or Substack

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page

For more such conversations, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it’s where I interact the most!

Let’s connect on Instagram

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.