Helena Norberg-Hodge on Ladakh, the blindness of good people, and why the argument is not more government or less, but which direction.
In ancient Tibetan, the verb tells you whether you saw it.
Not the tense. The witness. When you speak to someone, the affixes carry a claim about your own eyes: I watched this happen, or I did not, and you will have to take my word. It is grammar. A whole language built around the difference between what you have stood in front of and what you have been told.
Helena Norberg-Hodge learned to speak that language fluently. She arrived in Ladakh — Little Tibet — before the roads, before the media, before the money, and she kept going back for over forty years. Long enough to see what was there. Long enough to watch what replaced it.
The first thing she said to me, before I had properly finished my opening question, was that the idea of managing global civilization is already the framing of a blind system.
I want to stay with the blindness. Because what she told me next is the most uncomfortable thing I have heard this year, and it is not about the people you would expect.
I reached, mid-conversation, for one of my default references in my toolkit. Dana Meadows. Twelve leverage points. The most powerful place to intervene in a system is the paradigm out of which the system arises. I said it the way you say something everyone at the table already agrees with.
She stopped me.
The blindness she was describing, she said, includes Dana. Dana was a friend. Dennis was a friend. The systems dynamics group at MIT was, in her words, her tribe — the first people she had met who thought whole. This is the seventies.
By the late eighties, she watched those same friends stop looking. She described a newsletter in which Dana wrote warmly about a company in St. Louis that had decided to move from producing toxic chemicals to feeding the world sustainably.
That was Monsanto.
Then a conference in Washington about changing the American dream, aimed squarely at the consumer — you have to change, you have to buy differently — and not a word about what the corporations were doing. Dana brought along a nature-loving woman from Monsanto. Helena tried to talk to her about the trade treaties being negotiated at that very moment, and what they would mean. It did not land.
Her explanation is not corruption. It is not stupidity. It is far more frightening than either.
You are based in one point on the map. The media reaches you there. The funding for your science reaches you there. Both are steering, gently, continuously, and you cannot feel the steering because you have nothing to compare it against.
Helena happened to be gone half the year.
That is the whole credential. She missed the decade in which everybody agreed that the electric car would save us — the same people who, ten years earlier, had opposed nuclear power precisely because it centralised control. She wasn’t smarter. She was elsewhere, repeatedly, for long enough to notice that the story had changed while the structure had not.
Vandana Shiva, with whom Helena worked in India, called it monocultures of the mind. I had always read that as a metaphor. Sitting with Helena, it stopped being one. We do to knowing exactly what we do to land: we specialise a single site, optimise it for a distant market, and export the yield. One institution, one discipline, one funding stream, one output, shipped to conferences that reward it. High productivity. No resilience. And nothing left in the soil that could have told you something you did not already believe.
She said something I have not been able to put down: she comes from several points of grounded observation.
Nobody asks for that credential. Not on a panel, not in a grant application, not before the sentence “what the world needs is.” It is the one qualification the Ladakhi verb would have demanded before you were allowed to speak.
I asked her where a person in a European city should even begin, given the overwhelm. She gave me practice, and she gave me a fact.
The fact is called ISDS. Investor-state dispute settlement, a clause our governments have signed into trade agreements, permitting global corporations and banks to sue those same governments in front of arbitration panels. Not for profit lost. For profit they might have made. Germany decided to phase out nuclear power and was sued for billions by a Swedish energy company over money it had been planning to earn.
I gave her the example from home. My wife is Costa Rican; we spend our lives between there and here. The Costa Rican people are unusually good at standing up — several times this year alone, mining concessions have been stopped by ordinary people refusing. And now the country is paying a Canadian company for the ore it declined to let them dig.
A country too poor to afford it, paying compensation for a future it chose not to have.
Governments now pay rent on the roads they do not take. That is the machine. Not an abstraction, not an ideology. A clause, with a name, in documents that have signatures on them.
Which is where she took my vocabulary away from me.
I told her I use Molochian shitshow — the shitshow of Moloch, the god we feed our children to — because it is the most precise descriptor I have. She was kind about it. Then she said she does not use “neoliberal.” She does not much like using “capitalism” either. Abstractions, all of them. They let the argument float. What she wants named is the enclosure, the subsidy, the treaty clause, the specific infrastructure our taxes laid down as a red carpet — bigger ports, bigger highways, bigger everything, faster everything.
She is right, and it stung, and I am keeping the word anyway — but only as a headline. Underneath it, the clause. Always the clause. Which leads to the reason I think this conversation matters beyond the two of us:
The fight is not big government against small government. It is a direction.
We need our governments to be far stronger upward — over an empire of monopolies that currently answers to no one and sues anyone who tries. And far weaker downward — over the goat farmer in France whose family has supplied the local town for three generations and who now needs tiles in his ceiling, at a cost of thousands, in the name of hygiene. Over the family that wanted to let out a spare room and was regulated into impossibility by hotel chains. Over the person who wants to buy raw milk and is told, in a national newspaper, that this makes them a fascist.
Power up on the empire. Power down on the neighbourhood. Almost everything in the current debate collapses the two into one dial and then argues about which way to turn it.
And her answer to where you push first is not abstract at all. Food. Not because food is nice, but because food is where the original wound was made: enclosures and slavery drove people off diversified production for nearby needs and into monoculture for distant markets. That is the structure. Reverse it and the rest follows. Line-caught fish instead of a trawl net that could hold seventeen jumbo jets. Oak that becomes a building instead of woodchip. Smaller farms with more people on them, not bigger ones with drones.
She also corrected me, gently, when I got romantic about it. I told her the story of giving up single-use plastic when my first child was born, and how it forces you to make your own gnocchi, and how the gnocchi turns out to be cheap and delicious and a crack in the pavement. She agreed. Then she said she worries about asking too much of people who have no time and no money — that the crack in the pavement is, right now, something of a privilege. She worries about the localisation movement running ahead into bioregional redesign while the people it needs are being squeezed by rent, by clocks, and by algorithms that hand them everything to be angry at except the corporation.
So her minimum ask is very small. Find one other person. Two, three, up to twenty. Meet regularly. Reconnect, rethink, resist, renew, rejoice — in that order, and do not stop at the first one, because most people stop at the first one.
I offered her a line I use often: three hundred thousand years of being human is stronger in us than three hundred years of destruction. She liked it, and then she made it sharper. In Ladakh you live inside seven generations — your great-grandparents and your great-grandchildren, and you in the middle. Which means, she says, there was no need for altruism. Not because those people were saints. Because caring for a hundred and fifty years in both directions was simply caring for the room you were standing in.
We have not abolished that capacity. We have removed the room.
This is the first of what I hope will be many conversations. The next one we have already agreed on: food systems, from the local to the global, and how we actually do this properly.
Until then, the question I am carrying is the one the Ladakhi verb asks automatically, and which our institutions never do.
Before you tell me how the planet should be run: how many points on it have you actually stood on, and for how long?
Listen to the full conversation below.
