Many of us have been crying out for a sea change in our politics such as the one described by George Monbiot (Feeling the urge to take back control from power-mad governments? Here’s an idea, 13 July). He mentions the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, but getting to grips with that is very hard work, so I recommend reading The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber, which suggests that the way things are is not inevitable and that people have lived successfully in decentralised polities for thousands of years.
Many of the older generation, who continue to prop up this dishonest and incompetent Tory government, yearn for things to be the way they were in “the good old days”. Perhaps knowing that our ancient ancestors actually were capable of caring about their less well-off neighbours, and seeing to it that people like Boris Johnson got their comeuppance before they had the chance to ruin the country, might make them feel that governance from the bottom up is not new and terrifying but simply another way of doing things that has always been an option.
