December 2025

Share International: I really like the way you express this: “The experience [of listening to live crickets] embeds the listener more deeply in the world — lodges him/her in a matrix of connections.” You also say: “I would go so far as to say that sensory experience is the core of intelligence, the engine of metaphor, the essence of understanding, and the architecture of meaning.” The unreal world that technology and specifically AI is creating, that we are being drawn into, really takes us away from what I would call the spiritual path of recognition through our senses, that ‘all is one’. They move us, humanity, from reality to unreality, which is the opposite direction we need to go if we are to save our planet and ourselves. Do you see any glimmers of hope that people will wake up before its too late, before we destroy our planet and ourselves?
Charles Eisenstein: The awakening is already long underway. It is hard to see that, because the systems and institutions we live in are much slower to change. It is not too late. It is never too late. And it is already too late. Much has been destroyed, but much beauty and life still remains. As we awaken into a new story, we discover creative and healing capacities that can meet the challenge we have set for ourselves.

SI: Many of your writings focus on the problem of ‘separation’, the problem that we, humans, humanity at large, suffer from the delusion of being separate from each other and separate from nature. Why do you suppose we run towards the thing (the unreality/AI) that creates more of that sense of separateness? Is it just about numbing / distracting ourselves from the pain the separation creates, not recognizing that we are adding more fuel to the fire, to the sense of separateness?
CE: It isn’t just about numbing and distracting ourselves. It is also that various digital technologies compensate for some of what has been lost. For example, in a context of loss of community, social media provides at least a little bit of connection, or an imitation of connection. AI can offer an imitation of companionship. VR [virtual reality] worlds offer an imitation of exploration and adventure.

SI: Our current economic system also feeds this sense of separation and promotes more isolation, as we reduce all human interaction and co-operation to a transaction, paying for services that the community used to give each other freely in barter or as support to the community as a whole. Technologist Tristan Harris has also warned that the for-profit model behind social media and AI is the driving force that makes it so dangerous, as we sell out the health of ourselves and our societies to feed an insatiable need for distraction, entertainment, etc., not recognizing (or wanting to recognize) the long-term deleterious impacts these technologies have on us and on society at large. Many would say that this is by design, to eventually enslave and control humanity, and the train has already left the station. Do you see a time in the near future when AI and social media can be used to benefit society, if eventually decoupled from the toxic commercial culture we live in?
CE: They can benefit society if we recognize their proper role and become clear on what they can and cannot do. The profit engine that Tristan Harris identifies as the culprit behind the misapplication of these technologies is but one expression of a deeper causal pattern: the colonization of the qualitative realm by the cult of quantity. It is the belief system and value system that attempts to capture creation in data; that believes that ultimately, everything that is real can be weighed, measured, and counted. Once it is in the data set, it can be optimized, it can be rationally administered… and it can be financialized. This form of capture, of domestication, is the ultimate expression of the age-old myth of progress.

In November 2025, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, became the 111th Mayor of New York City — and the city’s first Muslim mayor. While it may appear that Mamdani’s victory is a one-off item of good news, a more accurate interpretation may be that the win was the most broadly visible evidence of a new cultural vibe. Pundits theorized after Donald Trump’s 2024 win that American voters were seeking to return to the ‘good old days’ of male dominance, racial discrimination, Biblical family structures, and conservatism.

However, the first election results in his second term, including Mamdani’s, strongly suggest that voters did not resonate with the supposed return to 1950s’ cultural values. Democrats beat Republicans up and down the ballots by large margins, progressives and democratic socialists beat moderates, and turnout was unprecedented for an off-year election.

More significantly, the Democrats won largely from voters who don’t like the Democratic party, whose ratings are at historic lows. Resistance to Trump’s policies has become far more anti-establishment and left-wing. Voters now have much more positive views of democratic socialism than party leadership. This shift opened the door for the Mamdani campaign, which demonstrated how to effectively bring the disaffected back into the political process.

Mamdani worked to bring hundreds of thousands of non-voters to the polls, from young people to left-behind immigrant communities. He built a coalition based on class, winning across races, engaging the lower-income renters and public transit users who make the city run while losing to the wealthy, both liberal and conservative. For the first time, the electorate who came out to vote actually reflected the city’s demographics, rather than largely older homeowners.

Ben Davis, who worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, says the most important number from Mamdani’s campaign is 100,000 — the number of people who actively volunteered for the campaign. “They recognized politics as a living, breathing act of being in community, beyond just showing up to tick a box every few years. This has been foreign in this country for decades, but the Mamdani campaign and the Democratic Socialists of America are trying, and succeeding, in rebuilding this community and solidarity — in rebuilding working class political agency.” He calls this the vibe shift just starting.

How did Mamdani succeed? First, he centered his message on issues that were important to New Yorkers — mostly related to affordability, because of the vast income inequality in the city. He called for building more affordable housing, raising the minimum wage to $30/hour, making buses free, and increasing taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents. He used social media in a personal, direct and sincere way rather than applying a slick marketing approach.

He was able to run a successful campaign financially by taking advantage of a populist funding option the city initiated years ago called small-donor public financing. This plan provides matching dollars from a public fund for candidates who rely on small donations from regular citizens rather than big bucks from billionaires and corporations. Using this fund, he was able to raise $13 million — enough to get his message out. Even though he was outspent four to one, the Small-Donor Fund provided the margin he needed to be competitive in the race.

Will he be able to make the changes he promised? Economist Richard Wolff discusses several factors working in his favor. Importantly, he was elected with more than 50 percent of the vote — a clear victory, which gives him a mandate and leverage. He also has allies in the form of other socialist state senators and assembly members in New York — and therefore enough influence to make the billionaires take him seriously. On the national level, he has the support of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Beyond overall election results, another indication that Mamdani’s victory is the beginning of a new politics was a report from Run for Something — a progressive political organization that helps younger candidates learn the political ‘ropes’. They reported that more than 10,000 people signed up to learn how to run for office after Mamdani’s primary win.

To add credence to that outcome, Maitreya, the World Teacher, with whom Benjamin Creme was associated for over 50 years provided forecasts for coming times during the 1990s. Under the topic of politics and governance, he predicted that a new political/economic structure — Democratic Socialism or Social Democracy — will become the norm throughout the world, with full participation of all peoples in their own government. This is already happening on a small scale in the US, and, contributing to the groundswell, new people-focused organizations like Indivisible, which organized the huge No Kings demonstrations, and Vote Common Good are popping up to add their force to those already active in the political space.

From another perspective, the historian Peter Turchin finds from his extensive research on declining empires that, when an empire disintegrates, which the US is now doing, the structure that rises to take its place is usually governance with which the population is familiar. That is, military dictatorships tend to be replaced by new military dictatorships, authoritarian leaders by new authoritarian leaders, and democracies by expanded forms of democracy. Because of its history of democracy, this suggests that the regressive, authoritarian policies now dominating American politics may not last.

Finally, on a cosmic level, each day brings us further into the energies of the Aquarian age whose qualities are synthesis, brotherhood, and co-operation. As Mamdani said in beginning his victory speech: “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University and at the City College of the City University of New York. In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), France. He is also the co-founder of Democracy at Work and host of their nationally syndicated show Economic Update. He is considered by a number of media outlets to be influential in the field of Marxian economics, and The New York Times Magazine has named him “America’s most prominent Marxist economist”.

Felicity Eliot interviewed him for Share International in November 2025, a few hours after Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York. Their very detailed conversation will be presented in several installments.

Share International: I believe congratulations are in order. I gather that many New Yorkers are celebrating the election of the new Mayor.
Richard Wolff: Yes, and it is only just beginning to sink in.

SI: People must be thrilled.
RW: Well, some people must be thrilled. Yes, I would say in the classic sense, half the people are over the top in the positive way and the other half are having to look at assumptions they simply took for granted, which have now exploded out of recognition.

SI: Well, that’s such an interesting point you make. I was thinking about the assumptions that are embedded in all of our systems, the things we take for granted. And I know that, for example, you talk about the fact that, as you see it, the American empire is coming to an end. The century, the American century, the time of America as the one and only hegemon is coming to an end. But does this not apply worldwide? I’m looking right across the board at Western civilizations, Western leaders, all struggling with similar problems.
RW: Yes, I think it is more than the United States. I think you’re right. I talk about the United States only because it was, I believe, the last bastion, you might say, of Western civilization Renaissance (and after) economic development. And in many ways, my heart goes out to Europeans because for them, this is even worse. They are in worse shape than the United States. They don’t want to face it, but it is the case. Their last empire was the British, and that is far behind us now. As an economist, you look at Great Britain today, the statistics are screaming economic decline. Nothing Mr Starmer or any of the others can say changes that. They’re learning that. But no, you’re quite right. The Europeans are at a point where you have to wonder whether the enormous pendulum of civilization which once was in the East anyway, has gone back, for the time being, to the East. And that maybe the joke in the end will be that waiting in the wings will be Africa finally emerging as a place. And India. Yes, it’s a remarkable story. And when I allow myself, which Americans don’t do in general, to look closely at what the Chinese have accomplished in the last 40 years, only ideological blinders could make you not realize where, for the time being, the future is unfolding.

SI: You use the word blinders: I was thinking our leaders appear to be quite blind. I came across an article in The Guardian newspaper which gave some poll statistics. I think it was Ipsos, The Washington Post and ABC that carried out a poll and they found 68 per cent of people in the US think that the Democrats are out of touch, blind. And we see this apart from Zohran Mamdani’s wonderful results. On the other hand, 63 percent of US public thinks that the Republicans are out of touch. Now, if I look at Britain, France, Germany, I see the same throughout Europe. Many of the leaders are out of touch. What’s the solution there, would you say?
RW: Talking as an economist, but as an economist who sees the political fallout — yes, well, first of all, I could not agree with you more. I think I would phrase it perhaps slightly differently in the sense that I would argue that there is a deepening alienation of masses of people from the traditional political leadership, the traditional political parties, the traditional political rhetoric. This is, let me put it to you this way, to be very honest about the United States, and in no way to diminish the importance of Zohran Mamdani’s win — but do not misunderstand — this is not an election for socialism. I wish it were. It is not. It is a vote against capitalism.

People are more and more aware that the political economic system, for that is what we mean when we use the word capitalism, you know, loosely, in general conversation — that system is inadequate. It is being looked upon particularly by people who are younger, below 40 years of age, as a system that is defunct, is out of whack. It doesn’t work, promises a very poor future for most people, is characterized by grotesque inequalities of income and wealth and power beyond anything that you could justify. It’s becoming desperate for the conservatives, including friends that I have, when we have a conversation, I look at them and I say: “Elon Musk” and I don’t have to say much more. You know, it’s crazy. What are we doing? Why is this happening? How should I say this politely? A mentally challenged fellow in a position to buy and sell the American election. You have to stop and take a look.

And it is that alienation that you saw voting here in New York City. This is a place of young people, particularly people trying to make a life. They want opportunity, that’s all. They’re not really asking for much more. And they don’t see it. And the opportunities are closing. And they feel it in their lives. They see it every day. And they want something else. Not the old politicians, the old Democrats and the old Republicans, and I don’t mean old chronologically, I mean they are old in the sense of where they are in the consciousness of people.

SI: So, you mean that Mamdani’s election was in fact a gesture of rejection?
RW: Yes. What you saw was a rejection. He won by over 50 percent. In other words, he got more votes than the other two combined. That should tell you something. This is a rejection of all of that. And that Mr Trump decided at the last minute to endorse one of the two losers is also going to have enormous effects here. Mr Trump was defeated last night. And if you know about the other elections in Virginia, what did we see? We saw really large victories, by a South Asian and two women. These are the people that Mr Trump rails against. They are his enemies. They have been his punching bags. They came roaring back. He endorsed their enemy, and they trounced the people he endorsed. No one is missing the message here.

SI: I wonder though, okay, so we’re looking at that rejection and we’re seeing that people are fed up with the inequality, the unfairness, the injustice, and the very fact that they hardly get through the week or the month on their salaries — if they still have salaries with so many people having been put out of work and so on. But so we have to look at whether the American public and the Europeans are willing to accept a very different economic basis for their social lives? Are we at the stage where people are actually ready to start at least tinkering with the idea of more equality, perhaps call it socialism, perhaps call it Marxism, or make a combination of these, but is the public ready? I know, we’ve seen a rejection, but how ready are we to make real change? There’s this swing, as you mentioned but a large section is also going to the right. And this makes people like Keir Starmer in the UK, and people in many parts of Europe, think that they ought to move even further to the right. I’m wondering: how ready is the populace to take on the possibility that we are moving into a different system and we need one?
RW: I think the only way to give you an honest answer is to give you an answer that is self-contradictory, but that reflects where we are. So my first reaction is we are not at that point. We are not, we in the United States for sure, but my guess is, the Europeans too, are not ready to make the big move. At the same time, they are closer to becoming ready than I have seen in my lifetime.

SI: What do you make of that?
RW: If I were, I haven’t been, but if I were asked by Mr Mamdani to give him a piece of advice based on — I am a voter, by the way, I live in Manhattan. I voted for Mr Mamdani yesterday morning, along with my fellow New Yorkers. If — he were to ask me, I would say to him, “You are a Muslim socialist. And your number one job will be to make those two words have a whole new meaning in this country from what they now have. You were not elected because you were a Muslim, and you were not elected because you were a socialist. You were elected, and I wish it weren’t true, but the truth is you were elected despite those two adjectives. You were elected because you’re young and you’re energetic and you’re new and you’re different. People were happier you accepted the adjective ‘Muslim socialist’ than they were about the content of those terms, because that was a clear marker. You’re not a conventional Republican or Democrat, because they run away from such identifications as fast as they can. You didn’t. You embraced them.”

Look, there are polls that indicate that the most popular politician in this country at this time is Bernie Sanders. Yes. And the interesting reason? Well, he has the benefit. He’s different. He accepted the term socialist. He’s not tarnished by any of the normal ugliness of American politics. You know, women have not come forward to describe horrendous interactions with him. His fingers are not in some disgusting stealing operation of the government. You know, he hasn’t abused any part of our population. And so everybody looks at him, even the people on the right, as a kind of kindly elderly statesman, which he is. And a little bit of that is attached to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

One of the things that came out of the elections now is the recognition that the American public is not anymore where it was. The support of Israel is fading, and that, I don’t know if Netanyahu and the others there understand it, but their support is very, very fragile. And if they’re not very careful, which they’re usually not, they’re going to lose it. And this election, I mean Zohran Mamdani was elected, having said during the campaign that if Mr Netanyahu were to visit New York City, if he wins the election, he will arrest him. Whoa!

You know, this makes very clear to every voter that the wind has changed, that a politician, you know, would gratuitously go that far, tells you something. And Mr Mamdani is wildly popular in this city. And I should tell you, among Jewish people who are a big block in New York City, they also, voted for him, you know, in huge majorities in many parts of the city.

SI: Thinking about all this and how public opinion has changed or is beginning to change vis-à-vis Israel and actually people are finding themselves able to say the word genocide or fascism and so on. But that brings me to the point of the role of the media in all this. Do you think this is part of a collapse of Western culture in general? We have said a very definite goodbye in the mainstream media to honest reporting and clear ability to speak the truth to power, allowing reporters and the media in general to do their job. And so many reporters, as we know, journalists, were killed quite deliberately in Gaza. Added to the hounding of the honest independent media is the fact is that in the States and in many countries now, for example, in Britain, one may not support certain parties or certain campaigns deemed to be terrorist organizations. And so free speech has become muzzled; the authorities have really clamped down on the media. And I’m sure you yourself have experienced such harassment.
RW: Yes, we do. The way we explain it here, or at least the way I would offer an explanation for it, comes directly out of the way the capitalist system has worked. We now have a capitalism in this country that is comfortable and indeed is laudatory, more than comfortable, is laudatory about extremes of wealth that were pretty harshly criticized.

I was born in the United States in Ohio, right in the middle of the country. I’ve lived and worked here all my life. But I grew up in an America in which what was celebrated for us as students in the schools and the universities was, quote unquote, classlessness. I remember as a young student finding it ironic that if you listen to Soviet literature, they prided themselves on being classless. And when you listen to American literature, they prided themselves on the same thing. We were told that the United States is one vast middle class. Yes, we were told there are a few very rich people, you know, great athletes or movie stars or something like that, and there’s a few very poor people. But the vast majority of us are in this wonderful middle class, which has a car and an apartment and is able to send its kids to college and all the rest. of that. All of that’s gone now. Now we have people with hundreds of billions of dollars co-existing with at least half of our population for whom the funny joke that they tell each other every day is that there’s too much month at the end of the money, you know, because that captures their situation. Okay, now let me show you what the logic is.

SI: It’s the inequality that just keeps growing.
RW: The more you concentrate wealth, and by the way, this is a lesson that goes back thousands of years. It’s not just about now. It’s a truism that ought to be at the forefront of people’s consciousness. The more you concentrate wealth, the more you create in the minds of the wealthy the anxiety about the fact that they alone are sitting on a mountain of wealth, and that they’re surrounded by the people who clean their basements, who drive their cars, who manage their money and all the rest of it, who don’t have that wealth. They are surrounded by people who are envious, who are jealous, who are bitter, who are critical, however they see it. So what do they do? They realize that they’re in danger.

You know, I’m a bit of a philosopher, and so when I was young I studied the German philosopher Hegel, from whom a great deal of modern wisdom comes. And he has a fantastic passage, it’s a dozen pages, called ‘The Master and the Slave’ in one of his books, The Epistemology of Consciousness, or however it’s translated from the German. He shows the dialectic, as he calls it, in which a master and a slave together discover that, yes, the master is the master of the slave. But by having a slave upon whom he comes to depend, the master becomes the slave of the slave. And this is a kind of symbolic grasping of the dialectic that is everywhere.

Well, here’s an example. The wealthy become relatively more and more wealthy. The wealth is concentrated. You know, we have a couple of thousand billionaires in the United States who have an absurd share of the national wealth. Well, they can’t tolerate a public consciousness produced by people who aren’t wealthy because it’s too dangerous for them. So what they do, what they’ve always done, is they use their wealth to protect their wealth. Mr Bezos, who sits at the top of the Amazon Corporation, purchases The Washington Post. Look at the way it is. I can give you a dozen other examples. But I don’t need to, because we’ve had that pretty much everywhere, with very few exceptions. About four or five companies now own the bulk of our radio and television stations. The internet has become extremely important not because of the electronics of it, but because it is the only place left that approximates a public space into which reasonably little people, you and me for example, can intervene.

Perhaps it is not so much a case of history repeating itself but more a question of karma. The unresolved in our lives, both collective and individual, returns until resolution is found, a new balance is achieved and energy is freed to allow forward motion again into a new cycle. We know this as evolution — that eternal urge towards growth of consciousness. Under the Law of Karma, challenges, difficulties and weaknesses are bound in cycles of repetition until confronted, understood and solutions are implemented.

With these thoughts in mind, and grappling as the world is at present with knots of ancient tendencies and recurring karmic entanglements, we present yet again a number of insights, analyses, and solutions as given repeatedly by Benjamin Creme’s Master. The hope is that at least in this small corner some light is shed that may help to begin to untangle the karmic knots.

The following articles, although written over 20 years ago, sadly still apply today. Even if the specific circumstances belong to the past, these problems still plague the world, demanding resolution. The names, places and precise events may be different but the tendencies and knotty situations still need to be tackled. Substitute current names and facts to bring the events and tendencies of the past into our times.