This analysis [The Traumatised Society] integrates many data and many explanations to attack private land ownership as the basis of current economics. Harrison argues that cultural genocide … has afflicted Western civilization … [He] relates this to the omission of land as a term from the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to the evisceration of economic rent by neo-classical economics.

‘Harrison offers a general theory of cheating; all to do with the control of land … The dishonesty which appropriates the commons to the purposes of a minority has established a dishonest social order.

‘Harrison’s views on humanicide merge with those of Polly Higgins on ecocide, and with those of Marx, J.S. Mill, Adam Smith and Ricardo. Harrison is trying to establish again and again that the privatising of value in land underlies all rottenness in society.

‘Harrison’s analysis of capitalism’s flaws pervades the book, but the chapter [ch.11] on society’s automatic stabiliser begins with the question (p. 172) “why, despite more than 200 years of economic data, are economists still unable to offer a coherent explanation for the regularity of disturbing booms and economic busts?” … The overwhelming strength of this one chapter – indeed, the book – is that the knowledge exists to correct course, but there is a lack of ethical or political capacity to make wise decisions.

‘Harrison cites a US intelligence report which – at last, after ca. 40 years – acknowledges the prospect of converging and interacting problems which may exceed the capacity of man to devise good outcomes or avoid bad ones. Yet the appallingly ill educated generality of politicians – not only in the US – continue as if they were capable of looking ahead beneficially and justifying their decisions on sound evidence: a charades of government. Harrison calls for psychotherapists.

‘What would happen if Harrison were to give a series of Reith Lectures, or even a Dimbleby Lecture?’

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