On this page, you will find the video, summary and a full written transcript of the first chapter of Designing the Revolution, by Roger Hallam.

Summary #

In this podcast episode, Roger Hallam introduces his series 'Designing the Revolution.' He discusses the United Nations' recent announcement confirming that a 1.5 degrees Celsius global temperature rise is inevitable. He compares this to historical events that led to major changes in civilizations. Roger discusses the idea that the upcoming revolution driven by the impending environmental crisis is absolutely certain. He then explains the catastrophic implications of global warming and emphasises the urgent need for practical actions. By the end, he highlights listeners' significant responsibilities in helping to shape the future and preserving what can still be saved from the environmental crisis.

Part 1: Introduction and Global Warming #

In this section, the speaker, Roger Hallam, introduces himself and his series of talks called 'Designing the Revolution'. He explains his belief that a crucial moment in human history occurred in recent weeks when the United Nations confirmed that a rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius in global temperature was inevitable. He compares this situation to major historical events such as the downfall of the Roman Empire and the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols.

Part 2: Predicting the Rebel and Revolutionary Changes #

Here, Roger deepens his discussion on revolution, asserting that it is inevitable. He suggests that ordinary societal patterns of rebellion and revolution are predictable only to a degree, as they are influenced by social factors. However, he contends that the impending revolution caused by environmental destruction is unconditionally certain.

Part 3: The Implication of Global Warming and the Obligation to Act #

In the third part, Roger expounds on the dire implications of global warming, including the loss of sovereign nations and coral reefs and the scarcity of fish stocks. He warns about the possibility of mass starvation and disruption. Underlining the urgency of the matter, he stresses the opportunity for people to create a new way of life from this crisis.

Part 4: Focused Practicalities and the Invitation to Contribute #

Here, the speaker invites the audience to become part of the conversation, urging them to focus on practical measures for change. He draws attention to the importance of catastrophic events' micro-details and insists on concrete actions to address them.

Part 5: Why Listen to Roger and Responsibilities for the Future #

Roger explains his qualifications to speak on the subject, sharing his academic background and involvement in founding climate campaigns in the UK. He communicates the urgency and seriousness of the situation, urging listeners to understand the enormity of their responsibility in helping shape the future.

Part 6: Conclusion #

In the conclusion, Roger reiterates the urgency of the situation and the heavy responsibility carried by those who will listen to or participate in his talks. His ultimate aim is to help these individuals maximise the probability of preserving what can still be saved from the current environmental crisis.

Transcript & subtitles #

This transcript was automatically generated using AI.

Download subtitles with timestamps (SRT)

Hello, my name is Roger Hallam, and this is the first episode, the first talk in a series called Designing the Revolution. The name of this talk is The End and the Beginning. I want to tell you, first of all, about the most important moment in human history. I want to make the proposition that this happened a few weeks ago. You may know this moment, it was when the United Nations made a public declaration that it's no longer credible to believe that the world will not go over 1.5 degrees of global warming. In other words, what the UN was saying was 1.5 degrees is now locked in, it's going to happen. Now, there's been a number of peaks which have been extremely important. I just want to run through, say, three of them. The first one was when the Goths sat to roam in around 450 AD, and that was the end, in many people's opinion, of the Roman Empire. Another example is the Mongols destroying Baghdad in the 13th century, and the destruction in many ways of the Islamic way of life at that point. And then there's the Ottoman takeover of Constantinople, which was renamed Istanbul in the 1400s. Now, if you want to check out those three episodes in history, what you'll find people saying is that these were not just the destruction and sacking of a major city. It wasn't even like the destruction of an empire. What it was, was a lot deeper than that. It was the destruction of a civilization, the destruction of a way of seeing the world, as you might say. So, why I'm here in this first talk to say is that we are entering into a crisis which far surpasses those crises. And the talks that I'm going to do are going to be looking at the implications of what that means. So, let's look a little bit in more detail about what 0.5 degrees looks like. I'm going to be talking about this more in the next episode, but just to give you a little flavor of what this means, 0.5 degrees absolutely means we will be destroying sovereign nation states. In other words, states which are low-lying, and they're going to disappear because of sea level rise. So, countries are going to disappear. Absolutely. That's locked in. Secondly, at 1.5, the coral reefs will disappear. That's a tragedy and horror in and of itself, of course, but it also means that 25% of fish stocks will disappear because they depend on coral reefs, which will cause massive levels of starvation and disruption around the world. Now, it could give you, and you could look up at 10 other similar horrors that what 1.5 means. But the main point here is that 1.5 creates a pathway through to 2 degrees. And 2 degrees is the point at which it's impossible to stop the feedback systems in the global geophysical system, which will lead to the extinction of the human race. Now, there's a little bit of a get out clause, which we will be talking about, which is geoengineering or earth repair and what have you. So, it's not over till it's over. But the main scenario that the UN is making clear over the last few weeks is that billions of people will starve to death, will be slaughtered over the next century. And whether we're going to avoid that is very much in question. Now, I'm not telling you this because I think either myself or you listening to this are going to be able to comprehend what that looks like, how awful it is. You simply are not, and neither am I. That's not what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do as a sort of introduction to these talks is to get you to understand that we are absolutely entering into the biggest and most massive crisis in human history. And this will be a crisis on all levels, political, social, spiritual, etc. The point of these talks, however, is that there's a definition of crisis, which you may know, which is two things, danger and opportunity. So, a massive crisis means there's a massive danger, which I've just outlined, but there's also a massive opportunity. And what I'm going to be looking at over these talks is what that opportunity looks like and how we can use the opportunity to create a new way of living, a new way of being human. That's what this is all about. Okay, so let's just look at this revolution idea in a bit more detail. There's been revolutions, you know, uprisings, rebellions, and all the rest of that on a regular basis throughout human history. So it's nothing unusual. Maybe every 50 years or so our society will enter into some major war, which will lead to a collapse of the regime or some sort of uprising or whatever. Now, with all these revolutions of the past, it's been possible to predict them beforehand, but not with any absolute certainty. And this is because they're all what you might call social, they're all dealing with social factors. So, for instance, you know, a lot of people listening to this will probably say the Labour Party is going to win the next election. It's almost certain that will happen, but no one's pretending it's certain because you never know, because you're dealing with social things and social things are not absolutely predictable. However, what we're dealing with here is not a social thing, we're dealing with a physical thing. In other words, physical things are absolutely certain. So for instance, if you pour your kettle on to boil on gas, then you're absolutely certain that the water will boil at a certain point. If you put ice in a room over one degree centigrade, you're absolutely certain it's going to melt. So what we're dealing with in 2022, as I do this talk, is something of absolute certainty. What we're dealing with is coming towards the Earth. It's a piece of rock, it's definitely going to hit the Earth, and it's definitely going to. That's what we're dealing with. Obviously, it's not a meteorite, what it is, is the melting of the polar ice caps, forest fires, and all the rest of it. So what we can say is that this revolution, this period of revolutionary change is now inevitable. There's two sort of elements to this. First of all is when people realise what's happening with a visual certainty, then they will not want to die. The first thing that human beings do is they want to survive. That's our first instance. They don't want to overturn the social arrangements that led them to this situation. Secondly, human beings don't just live for survival, they also live for moral principles, a sense of right and wrong. And when it becomes clear the extent of destruction and vandalism that the present social system has created, then people again want to overthrow it for the moral reason that it's so terrible, from a moral point of view. The third thing to say about this, and this may surprise some people, is that the main reason why regimes collapse is not because there's some big revolutionary force throwing them under their own contradictions. So for instance, with COP, these yearly get-togethers of the great and good on the climate, there's been 30 of them, and each COP they say, okay, we're going to reduce carbon emissions, and then carbon emissions go up. This has happened 30 times. So it's the most stupid, ridiculous sort of ritual that the system knows how to do. And if you think that's bad, then it's just going to get worse and worse in terms of the stupidity of the public announcements by people who represent the existing political arrangements. And that's why it will collapse from the weight of its own contradictions. Okay, so let's look, then, at what a phase of revolutionary change means. What it fundamentally means is that we have the opportunity, as we've just talked about, we have the opportunity to create our own future. This is what a crisis means. There's an enormous amount of agency. We're not in some, you know, dreary, deterministic, peasant society where no one can actually get anything done. Everything's going to be changing. Horizons are going to widen, and everyone's going to be going, okay, so what are we going to do? In other words, it's what I would call a massive amount of social fluidity in the social system. So there's a default outcome to this, and the default outcome, as you probably know, is nihilism. The idea that it's okay to kill people who aren't in your social group or in your country, and the idea that killing people doesn't really matter because there's no morality in the world, in other words, nihilism. We know what that looks like, we had it in the 20th century, and that's the default. In other words, if we don't get our act together, that's the way we're going to go extinct. However, there is an alternative, which is some sort of progressive revolutionary change, which is going to open up, and this series of talks is going to be looking at that and seeing how we can design it. And that's like the main issue here I'm going to suggest, is that social change, political change, is partially a matter of making more arguments, it is irreducibly partially a matter of physical coercion, but it's primarily about design, particularly in complex social systems that we see today. In other words, it's how you organise social spaces, how you organise how people relate to each other, how people act together, and such like. Okay, so let me just go on to a quick definition of what a revolution means. I'm not making some great claims, by the way, in these talks that revolutions are good or bad, they can be terrible, they can be great, you know, the jury's out. The point is, is revolutions are coming, and what they technically mean is a change in the political regime. So this doesn't mean like just a change in government, it doesn't mean a removal of the state, it means a change in the system of government. So for instance, from a tyranny to a democracy or vice versa. Now, obviously, the revolution that we're looking at here, or the series of revolutionary changes is going to be a lot deeper than simply a change of the regime, it's got to be a change in the way we organise the economy, a change in the very way we look and design our culture, how we design our social spaces. And the central proposition here is that social spaces need to be designed to maximise pro-social behaviour, in other words, sociability, the way people look after and care for each other. And this paradigm is completely different to the one that we've been sold for the last 500 years, which is the idea of atomised individuals who have this thing called self-interest. So we're going to be talking loads about this, because this is going to be probably the central theme of the transition we need to make. And this is a question of design. But also towards the end of the talks, I'm going to be thinking a bit more about the very idea of what it means to be a person, to be a self, you know, who is Roger Hallam, for God's sake? You know, what does it mean? What does it mean to be yourself? And that's not an easy question. And also, you know, relatedly, what it means for the world to exist? Is the world a function of our minds? Or does it have an independence separate to them? Now, we're not going to answer these questions, obviously, because they've been going on for 10,000 years, and they'll probably go on for another 10,000. But the point is, is we need to engage with the wisdom and thought of people over the last millennia, in order to reconstruct the world that we need to change over the next 10 to 20 years. So that's going to be the broad outline. Obviously, you know, this is going to be a draft, okay? A contribution is not going to be highly polished, it's going to go on various tangents, I might, you know, ever put time or bring in other people to make contributions on areas I'm not particularly an expert in. So it's collective effort, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants and all the rest of it. But what I would say is that I'm going to be focusing on practicalities, okay? Because there's nothing worse than, you know, hearing some guy rumble on about how to change the world without any idea of what it actually concretely means. So it drives me mad, and I suspect it probably drives you mad in not knowing, you know, what the guys actually means. So in all these talks, I'm going to be, you know, talking about actually what you do, you know, where the biscuits go on the table in the meetings, all that sort of thing. And that's because these practical micro details, as I would call them, are actually major determinants in the way, the way of life that we need to change. Okay. So why should you listen to me? Good question. Okay. So as some of you may know, I've spent 35 years, you know, looking at these questions with some sort of obsessiveness. My life's work is what I do every day. I spent around seven years at King's College in London doing systematic research on social and political change, both at a small scale and a large scale. I helped found Extinction Rebellion and East Late Britain, just to boil and burst with that, climate campaigns in the UK, and I've facilitated and co-designed some most successful campaigns around the Western world. That's basically what I do. And this leads me on to this point that Grumsky made. If you don't know Grumsky, check him out. He's a great guy. He said that intellectuals concerned with revolution need to be on the front line. Obviously, this is a moral thing, unless you're on the front line, then why can you tell other people to do dramatic stuff? But also, probably more importantly, only by being on the front line, do you really get to understand what it means to try and create radical and revolutionary social change. So at this point, I meant to say this at the beginning, but here we are. If you're not aware, this is being recorded down a telephone line from a British prison. I did a speech about four weeks ago, and it was recorded by the newspaper. So here I am in prison. I might be in here for a few weeks, in which case most of these talks will be recorded when I get out of prison, but I might be in for a year or two, no one really knows. So yeah, I've got no idea how many people are going to listen to this, maybe a few hundred, maybe. But the key thing I want to communicate is that those of you who are listening to this have a massive amount of responsibility. Because as you may know, the general rule, the world changes when a small number of people get organized. There's a quote about it somewhere, and that's so, so true. So that's good, because it means potentially the few hundred people that are listening to this are going to be the people who are going to save humanity, for want of a better way of putting it. But also, like I said, massive responsibility. And it is a responsibility, and that's just the way it is. And all my talks here are going to be based upon the way things are, right? The way reality is, rather than thinking about what we might like it to be. We might like it to be, you're just listening to this talk, and it's interesting that the situation is that you have a responsibility to billions of people over the next hundred thousand years. And it couldn't be more serious or onerous, that responsibility, but it is what it is. So there's no point avoiding it. So what it is, is those of you listening to this, particularly if you get to the last episode, you are going to get the code, as it were, for how to maximize the probability we can save what's going to be left to save. And obviously, you're going to take these designs and improve on them. But the fact of the mat ter is, the situation couldn't be more serious, and it's all systems go. Let's put it like that. All right. So that's it, I think, for today. Obviously, thank you so much for listening, and the best of luck. And hopefully, I'll have the next talk out fairly soon. Thanks very much. Bye.