When I was a child, I looked up to police officers and firefighters. Doctors were rather too comfortably off to earn my childish admiration. By contrast, Jon Alexander, author of Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything Is All of Us, says he grew up believing that one could best contribute to society by getting rich. “Advertizing,” he writes, “was a dream job in the world of that time.” When he graduated from the University of Cambridge, he thus sought and found employment for a prestigious London advertising firm. “I was not only ready to make a fortune but to make what I then understood as my contribution.” I don’t think that he is being honest — who believes going into advertising is to “make a contribution?” — but he insists on it.
Eventually, though, he realizes that his profession mightn’t be terribly virtuous. In fact, he becomes convinced that he has been selling the “Consumer Story,” which is perverting our whole social order. Instead of being Consumers, he now believes we must become Citizens.
To exemplify the wrongs of the Consumer Story, he recalls how George W. Bush after 9/11 “told us that what we people could do — should do — was buy stuff. Keeping the growth of the economy going was how we could show those who aimed to terrorise us that we were not afraid.” Well, I’m too young to remember what Bush said, but I am pretty sure he never told us that we could beat al Qaeda by buying Italian handbags. But to Alexander, this exemplifies our society’s hollowness. He soon begins to worry that he is complicit in the climate emergency. “From this point on,” he writes, “working in advertising was torture.” He quits his job, works for charities, then co-founds the New Citizenship Project to promote civic engagement. His book is a step toward that end. It is thus classic uplift literature.
Its core thesis is that the world is torn between three “Stories.” (He capitalizes sedulously — learned, I suspect, in advertising.) The Subject Story tells us to be obedient subjects to strong rulers. In the postwar era, it was overthrown by the Consumer Story, which liberated us from tyranny but made us into atomized persons viciously competing for riches. But there is hope: The Citizen Story recognizes that we’re “creative, capable, caring creatures.” It can therefore rescue us from mindless consumerism. By embracing it, we can fix “everything.” Practically, it means getting people involved in politics beyond merely voting. Businesses, meanwhile, must put purpose before profit. But the Consumer Story is persistent. It is, he tells us, ceaselessly reinforced by the 3,000 ads we encounter every day. The only ad I can remember seeing on my walk through London yesterday was for bottled water. Pretty harmless stuff, one might think. But to Alexander, it is nothing less than “world-shaping” — it seems harmless only because we’re trapped in its mental “prison.”
The story, he writes, occupies a “foundational realm … informing and inflecting everything we can imagine, everything we build, how we act and interact.” He compares the function of the story to the Matrix — it exists everywhere, but it can be broken through once we learn to see it. This is hard, however, because “everything we build, literally and metaphorically, from the physical infrastructure of society to our institutions and all the products of culture, have their roots in the story and reflect its logic back to us.” But Alexander is here to show us that we “have the power to shape and change these stories.” He says that he is “intentionally avoiding using the terms capitalism and communism” because they “overwhelm us.” He thus frees himself from the constraints of historical materialism, explaining instead that stories propel history.
Far from being the elan vital of history, his stories have little coherency. The book includes a table of word lists covering the three stories. It is one of the silliest things I have ever seen. In the Subject column, we find the word “religious.” But it is not clear why Subject societies should be thought of as religious while Consumer and Citizen societies are respectively “material” and “spiritual.” Nor is it clear why Subject societies are “subjective,” while Consumer societies are “objective.” None of it makes sense. Imperial states, his classic example of Subject states, had large bureaucracies, but “bureaucracy” supposedly belongs to Consumer societies. It is here, on page 20, if not sooner, that he should have paused, considered what he was saying, then binned the book. One simply can’t interpret history using bogus concepts.
Instead, he proceeds with a tedious presentation of how the three stories have shaped world history. He pushes every historical event into his Procrustean stories. Distinctions blur. Having graduated from both King’s College London and Cambridge, or “the finest educational establishments that Whiteness has on offer,” he claims that the “story of humanity was largely taught to me as one of great Men doing Great Deeds, with everyone else largely irrelevant.” Now he believes that history is fundamentally shaped by narratives, with everything else largely immaterial. With a convert’s zeal, he has leaped from one poor historical interpretation to another.
To write a book is hard — a few prefabricated phrases easily slip into the finished work. But this is the most cliche-ridden book I can remember reading. Alexander has enlisted editorial consultant Ariane Conrad in writing it, so I’m unsure whose fault it is, but it is bad either way. The opening paragraph tells us that the future is “up for grabs.” Things seem “very much on the cards.” People “hit the ground running” and think “outside the box.” The “scales fall from the eyes” when they realize that they can be Citizens but they can’t be “knights in shining armor.” Writing the book made him “want to tear my hair out” — I felt the same reading it — but it gave him the chance “to practice what I preach.” The cliches fall from his shoulders like dandruff. But it feels terribly authentic — I can hear his voice. This must really be how he speaks.
What feels less authentic, however, is that his prose is full of corporate-sounding slogans — what Lenin would have called bourgeois phrase-mongering. We’re told that good citizens must embrace “world-mindedness” to solve the climate emergency. He proposes that corporations adopt “the Three Citizen Ps: Purpose, Platform, Prototype.” The rest of us should follow the “Seven Modes of Everyday Participation” — the first mode is (what else?) “tell stories.” Everything is “exciting” or “inspiring.” Becoming good citizens means opening up new “exciting and empowering opportunities.” I guess Alexander and I find different things exciting. Sex is exciting. Corporate restructuring most certainly isn’t.
Politics is conflict by definition. But like many bien pensant liberals, Alexander simply assumes that “polarization” is bad. One of his oft-repeated themes is that we can solve everything if we only come together to “imagine a better life.” This means that we must overcome “Us vs. Them” thinking, “pool our collective wisdom,” and not give in to the politics of “competition.” He calls those who prefer cooperation before conflict “anti-heroes.” Becoming an anti-hero is supposedly easy for people who have been marginalized. But you, too, he promises, can be one. This is because human nature, once free from bad stories, is essentially good. He traces the basis of good citizen behavior to nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes. These hunter-gatherers would sit by the campfire to vote on collective rules. Though that might be true, it gives in to romanticism. They might have had campfire votes, but oftentimes, it would be on whether to raid the neighboring tribe — with the ayes carrying the vote.
Citizens reads as though it were written exclusively for the like-minded — it simply takes for granted, for instance, that everyone “loves” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s premiership. This, together with the earnest uplift and sloganeering, kept me cringing throughout. There is not a hint of irony in the whole book. Indeed, only someone free from irony could title the final section “Unleashing Our Power” or call himself “a member of the south England metropolitan liberal elite” and then proceed to talk about “our Resistance.” And yet, the problem with Citizens isn’t that it is cringe — the same is true of much democratic participation — but that it is very silly. Sure, it has some sound ideas, such as giving British councils more political power, but none of it comes close to the promise of shifting the globally regnant “paradigm.” It is simply a bad book, reliant on smug consensus thinking. It is nevertheless on McKinsey’s recommended reading list, and it has been blurbed by Cambridge and Stanford University professors. If this is representative of liberal opinion, then we’re in worse shape intellectually than I had thought.
Gustav Jonsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in the United Kingdom.
