Alex Evans: Politics, Meet Psychology: An Exploration of the Places Our Inner & Outer Worlds Collide

Talk by Alex Evans and The Collective Psychology Project at an Advaya event on 2nd December 2019.

Talk description: If we want fix the outer crises, we need to attend to the inner ones. We need to see the crises burning around us – accelerating climate change, extreme inequality, hyper polarised politics – for what they are: outward symptoms of our inner worlds. Status anxiety. Loneliness. Threat perception. Grief. Shame. Lack of self-worth. The loss of our old stories without new ones to replace them.

The Collective Psychology Project is a new start-up that sees the crises burning around us – climate breakdown, extreme inequality, mass extinction, political extremism – as outward symptoms of our inner worlds. Status anxiety. Loneliness. Threat perception. Grief. Shame. Lack of self-worth. The loss of our old stories without new ones to replace them. The good news: we can learn to use psychology to help us heal both ourselves and our politics, in the process helping us to see ourselves as part of a Larger Us rather than a them-and-us.

Join the Project’s founder, Alex Evans – a former special adviser to two UK cabinet ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and author of The Myth Gap – for a shared exploration of why we need collective psychology, what it looks like in practice, and how it can transform how we live, work, and campaign.

The Collective Psychology Project explores what kinds of collective psychological issues matter most for politics. What we should be aiming to achieve, and what success looks like. And above all, what approaches offer most potential for treating the wounds that threaten to tear us apart just at the moment we need to come together.