March 18, 2025
Following Sunday evening’s screening of “The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism” at Brattleboro’s magnificent Latchis Theater, the vibrant Q&A session went well overtime. Despite the desire of so many people to stay and continue the conversation – and there is so much to discuss these days – the time came to wind the evening down.
The next day I was informed, however, that an important question – a question that so many of us are asking these days – was cut off, just as the mics were being powered-down and packed away.
That question was: “Where is the hope?”.
I want to take a moment to respond to this, as it’s a central question The Invisible Doctrine seeks to address, and an important question I wish we’d all been able to explore on the night.
As we propose in the film, our belief is that the hope lies in the creation a new a story – a story that provides an alternative to neoliberalism – as story that articulates and fosters a “Politics of Belonging”.
The hope lies in rejecting the neoliberal assumptions that we live in competition with one another, that our relationships are a zero-sum game, that the world is comprised of clear winners and losers, that our lives are merely transactional, that the we’re meant to operate as consumers rather than citizens.
The hope lies in our awakening to the fact that, instead, we are the ultimate altruists among the species – an attribute embedded in our DNA – and were it not for our empathy and innate ability to cooperate, our collective survival would not have been possible. (How else could we have prevailed in the early days of our evolution on the African savannah – in a world of horns, tusks, claws and fangs?)
The hope lies right in front of us – in our communities. In the realization that we are intrinsically linked with one another, as well as the planet that sustains us.
It can be difficult to generate hope on our own, in a society that – by design – has rendered us divided, isolated, siloed, lonely, despondent, and lacking a feeling of agency.
But together, we can create a new story. A story based in community and the Politics of Belonging. A story that unfolds in our own backyard and in the expansion of the commons – where we can most easily wrest control of our shared destinies, and continue to build upon that.
A story that recognizes that when we engage and collaborate with one another, we feel less alone – we empower ourselves and one another – we learn that we share far more values than those we allow to divide us. And, as a result, we’re inspired to reinvest in that community – because it’s ours, and we feel a part of it. We create our own sustainable virtuous circle of hope.
Sound trite? Naïve? Reductionistic? Panacean? Well, I disagree – and I can tell you why.
Over the years with my work, I’ve had the opportunity to observe and learn from communities across the country – and I can tell you with absolute certainty that the strongest and most resilient ones are those who have come to the realization that neither the government, nor any particular political party, is coming to save them.
In many cases, these were communities that had suffered the most government neglect – that had been ignored and written off – literally, left for dead.
So, they stopped waiting. Instead, they chose to take control of their own communities, created their own versions of participatory democracy, and got busy building the world they sought. They harnessed that altruistic and collaborative DNA that we all carry within, took inventory of all the rich personal and community resources they had in front of them, and got to work on the things that mattered to them most.
It’s a cogent reminder that together, we have power – but divided, we have neither agency nor recourse, and are left to twist in the wind by those for whom we are simply not a priority.
So, let’s create that new story together.
Now, more than ever – let’s generate hope by coming together to create that better world that we envision.
It’s only a failure of imagination that stands in our way.
We have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
Peter Hutchison
“The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism”
