🤍 The Love Paradigm: How Mini-Assemblies Can Save Us

At our monthly Free As A Bird strategy discussion, I outlined how Trump’s re-election isn't the end for the revolution. It's an opportunity to begin. In the following recording and transcript of my talk, I'll outline how this moment could be the trigger we need to build a new world—one rooted in love, not power. By shifting our thinking, organising assemblies, and fostering deep connection, we can counter despair and fascism alike.

I discuss the foundational human need for love and how it transforms politics, drawing from psychology and practical examples. From personal stories to assembly blueprints, I lay out a roadmap for creating mass movements capable of real change. Enjoy.

Transcript

Hello everybody,

We're all thinking about Trump winning the US election. It's easy, isn't it, to go into panic mode? It's all terrible; it all feels so hopeless.

What I want to suggest in this talk is that all of this is very far from being true. In fact, Trump winning the election again could well be the trigger for people to finally get their act together and create the new world we all want.

Of course, there's no guarantee—I could be talking rubbish. It could well be terrible and hopeless. But what I'm saying is that at the same time, there is massive potential for it to do the opposite. As ever, it's up to us—us on this call—and especially our willingness to work together on what works best and act according to the spirit of being the humans that we are.

So, what's the plan?

The first thing we need to get our heads around is that the whole way we see how the world has to change has to change itself. There are no shortcuts here. This is crucial.

The reason we are panicking is because we've learned to see the world in a zero-sum way, in an "us and them" political way. There is only power, and now they’ve just got lots of it, and so we're done for. It's fight-and-flight stuff, and it simply isn't true.

The way we're taught to think about politics is itself an insidious ideology—that there is only power: me versus you.

As some of you know, for a while now, I've been pointing out that the foundational human need is love, not power. And when I say this, I am absolutely not saying something soppy or sentimental, some wishful-thinking thing.

By love, I mean it in a classical or biblical way. It is an act, not a feeling—the act of enhancing the well-being of the other. We need to give and receive love.

Love is attention, recognition. You basically cannot psychologically survive without each other, without love. We need love when we are born and we're helpless; we die without it. And when we're approaching death, we need the love of others to care for us. During the decades in between, we need it too—for a partner, from friends, from work colleagues.

You see what I mean? The more you think about it, there's nothing idealistic about this point of view—it’s pretty obvious. And as I say, there's nothing sentimental here, because the desire to give and receive love is actually a raging desire. If we are denied it, we become destructive—to others or to ourselves, and very often both.

We need to start here because this enables us to reframe self-interest. As the phrase goes, the desire for power is not the foundational need but simply one strategy to get our foundational need fulfilled: the need for love.

In other words, love comes first. The power strategy is a deficient way to get it. It does not work—or at the very least, it is radically suboptimal. Let’s put it like that.

And, of course, like any foundational scheme, this idea about love cannot be conclusively proved. It has a mythical element—a feeling for what it is that we are. But at the very least, it is a more attractive view of humanity than all this “other than” stuff.

Now, they will show there is a wealth of empirical evidence for how it works. Some of you may know some of these examples, so sorry if I’m repeating them again, but I think they get to the core of how we construct an effective strategy for dealing with fascism.

We all know that a climate crisis, in practice, in how it’s going to affect us, is most likely not directly by storms or floods. What’s going to happen—what’s going to do us in (kill us)—are the secondary, all-pervasive effects: meaning political disruption, social breakdown, and the default taking of power by fascist forces.

What we have just seen with Trump, then, is just an initial reminder of how this is going to happen. But it only happens because the progressive forces have not got their act together, because they don’t get how humans tick and then fail to organise on the basis of that knowledge.

We all know there is nothing more important than this. Fascism in power—we all know where that leads.

So, let’s look at some examples of how things can happen that support the love frame on human action.

Let’s start with something that’s slightly funny: why do fascist men stop being fascist?

Yeah, you got it—when they get a girlfriend. I can’t remember whether this is the main reason, but it’s definitely a main reason. When people receive love, attention, recognition, they stop being fascist.

In fact, there are a whole host of studies where people have consciously gone into far-right spaces, listened to people, befriended them, and then these people very often leave that space again. Why? Because they’re getting attention and recognition.

So, another question: what was the main learning from the recent English riots? It was when a young Muslim woman and her friends came out of a mosque with plates of snacks and gave them to the angry demonstrators. Within minutes, they were having good chats—let’s face it, you can’t resist a good samosa.

I use this approach over and over again myself. In the 200-odd public talks I’ve done on the crisis, conspiracy theorists and right-wing people show up and try to disrupt my speech. I’ll do a deal with them: to fully listen to them in the discussion afterwards. Afterwards, then, I’ll get them in a circle and just listen, summarise their questions—and then they’ll just carry on. They’ll be off and away.

I remember probably the UK’s top conspiracy guy turning up, and after sitting with him and his ten followers for, say, 20 minutes, he got up, shook my hand, and left.

And then there’s the story of me being late for a wedding. Yes, I took a taxi. The driver found out I was a climate campaigner. He started ranting on about heat spots and everything. I affirmed everything he said, listening to all his points. And then, when I got out at the end of the journey, he stuck his head out of the window and said, “Look, if I could afford it, I’d buy an electric car tomorrow.”

So, this last story is not exactly scientifically significant—I didn’t do 100 taxi conversations. But there are people who have done this over and over again, and it works. And you can understand why it works if you situate your perspective within the love paradigm instead of the power-ideology paradigm.

The vast majority of people believe things not because they are true in themselves, but because the belief is a means to get what they really want—which is attention and recognition, to be listened to. They want love. And if someone or some operation comes along and does that really well, then they will believe what you believe instead.

This is why social media opinion-forming is super shallow. People change their opinion if they sit down with a nice person who listens to them and sees things differently in a matter of minutes. I mean, who gives a shit about social media? It just can’t compete with the real thing—a human conversation.

I’m not being naive here. As with any social group, there is a power-law curve. Meaning, for instance, 80% of Trump supporters will change their view if they’re listened to consistently. Maybe 19% are going to be resistant and need a good few conversations for them to at least have doubts. And 1% are, frankly, psychopathic—and they’re never going to change, or hardly ever.

All groups are like this. Think about prisoners: 80% of the guys in this prison I’m in should be let out tomorrow and just be given some proper support, a consistent helping hand. But 1% arguably should never be let out, because that’s super done-in.

In other words, we need a sectional analysis.

We need to be sophisticated in what we’re saying. None of this is new. The most influential psychologist of the 20th century, Carl Rogers, as you may know, discovered scientifically in the 1950s that listening to people and giving unconditional positive regard was the best way of helping them heal and grow.

It was a revolution in understanding the person and led to a massive change in how we look at psychological distress and the need for counselling.

So, we need a similar revolution in what we call politics. It needs to be taken away from the economic paradigm that has dominated it for hundreds of years—all that self-interest stuff—and be given to psychology. Politics as a branch of psychology, not economics. Politics is the need for attention in the context of social decisions. That’s all it is.

So, what’s the equivalent of the accounting revolution for dealing with social and political distress? This is the exciting bit: it’s the assembly revolution. Meaning listening, but on a social scale.

I’ll stick my head out here and say we are 80% certain of being able to create a mass movement ten times the size of Extinction Rebellion using this method. Organizations that can compete with fascism, not with power, but by dissolving that power through the same mechanisms Rogers discovered—through listening.

At the moment, I’m working with the team in Assemble in the UK, and we’ve come up with micro-designs and processes which, when repeated, should enable assemblies to grow exponentially, to create critical campaigns that can take over councils and governments. It’s as big as that.

I’m not going to go into all those details in this talk, obviously, but I am writing a book about it, as it happens.

That said, let me be as clear as I can be on this: you should not focus on the big endgame stuff but rather on the here and now. You, listening to me now. The most important moment by far in creating a social movement—and I’ve done it a few times now, so I sort of know what I’m talking about—is the first meeting.

Remember, XR started with 15 people in a room. Last Generation in Germany started with five miserable young people on a Zoom call—I remember it well. I’ve just read today that Podemos, the most popular left party in Europe, started with a meeting of 28 people.

And how many people are on this call? Look around—exactly. So it will all be fine.

So again, what’s the plan? The plan is to make a start. A first step. It’s as simple as that.

Robin is going to outline the creation of regional Rev21 groups around the world from the few thousand people we have on our mailing list. Whether a lot of people or not, it will be based on a region or even a city. Where there are only a few people, the group might just cover a whole country.

You will agree to meet four times together, and during that time, each person will agree to run a mini-assembly themselves—with fellow activists, friends, family, people you know, online or offline, whatever works best.

But really, just a few people is fine—five to ten people. The running of the mini-assembly is very straightforward, but it’s crucial you stick to the format.

You start by going around, and each person listens to each other. They say what their background is, their life journey to this point, and how they’ve come to the meetup.

The second step in the mini-assembly is to go around again, with each person sharing what they feel isn’t going well—in their city, their country, or even the world. Once more, everyone speaks, and everyone is listened to. After this, there’s a bit of discussion about what people notice in common.

Finally, in the last go-round, each person offers three to four things they want to see changed. These could be specific policies, ways of organising, or the big issues they care about. Together, the group works to agree on four or five key issues or demands they share.

Then comes the critical part: everyone in the group is invited to run a mini-assembly themselves. For example, someone might organise one in Perth. Those participants, in turn, are encouraged to do the same. And so on.

A mini-assembly only takes about an hour to an hour and a half. It’s not a big deal. You might want to start or end with some food to make it nice and social. But over several iterations, if five more mini-assemblies come from each initial one, we could involve tens of thousands of people in just two to three months. Do the maths!

This creates the momentum needed for a series of offline assemblies in local areas. These assemblies can then form alternative councils to make local demands—or even put up community candidates in elections. It’s a clear pathway from collective action to power, making it credible.

And alongside this, there are rallies, marches, sit-downs, tax resistance, and, of course, my personal favourite—the banquet.

There’s about 50 pages of details on this, still being polished, but Rev21 is an excellent place to get this going. And it’s not something we’ll do in isolation—we’ll link up with existing projects in different countries.

If this all sounds a bit high in the sky, let me remind you of recent history. In many Western countries, campaigns have gone from zero to major players in a matter of months.

Take the Greek party Syriza: they went from 4% to 40% during the debt crisis in just a year. Podemos in Spain went from nothing to 20% in the elections in about the same time. Macron in France built a movement in six months by having his supporters listen to 50,000 people about the changes they wanted. Jeremy Corbyn went from a political nobody to leading the Labour Party in months. And Bernie Sanders? He started with 2% name recognition and built a movement of half a million volunteers to compete for the Democratic nomination.

The lesson here is clear: when there’s no authentic left option, people vote for fascists instead. It’s happened over and over in history.

Now, all those campaigns I mentioned had significant cultural and design problems. And that’s good news. Why? Because we can learn from their half-successes to create something that will actually change the world—to create a new civilisation. Not because we’re arrogant or hubristic, but because unless we do this, unless we change the whole system, nothing is going to change. And the unimaginable will become locked in.

So, what a time to be alive, friends!

One last thing: I’m pretty cheerful about the prospects, and I’m saying this from a prison cell. So, you’ve got no excuse not to cheer up and get on with the job!

This will take a few months—quite possibly a few years—but we can’t pretend we don’t have a strategy that could work. So, we just need to do it.

Okay, thanks so much, everyone. Thanks for all your incredible work. Sending you all my love. Bye.

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