Last week's editorial congratulated Boris Johnson for teaching voters to withdraw their trust from the Westminster government. While the drama of partygate focuses the public outrage on a small group of actors, the damage done is wider ranging, revealing truths about our power structures that cannot be easily forgotten.

How easy it is for those with power to keep themselves comfortable, while requiring those without power to sacrifice their lives to keep us all safe. How difficult it is to change a system that is overly invested in the tools of self-destruction.

Some would say that's a sorry state to find ourselves in. We would agree. Disillusion is never enjoyable, and we are bound to experience a sense of loss. At the same time, it is a moment of opportunity and one we might sit and dwell on, rather than rush to fill the vacuum.

For some, the only imaginable next step would be to elevate another source of authority - other than parliamentary representatives, that is - into a leadership role. This might be a movement that expresses more of the vision and values you do: Greenpeace or Extinction Rebellion, for those whose top priority is the climate. Or it might be a newspaper or talk show host whose opinion you start to take as truth and whose guidance you would follow.

But can any of these substitutes deliver on our trust adequately? Is that re-allocation of trust going to make the difference we crave? Or might it frustrate us even more, knowing that there is very little available us other than the power to disrupt? This would apply equally to social justice activists, climate protestors or the recent phenomenon of people refusing the Covid vaccine. Each have 'woken up' to the lies holding our society together in different ways, but none have found a winning formula for change.

Perhaps this is a moment when we should return to ourselves, each of us, and ask if we can draw any comparisons with similar binds. Maybe an employer you consider inept or a partnership that is no longer working? And probably all of us have experienced that moment when, as a child, we began to see our parents as those authority figures that we cannot win against. You might try to argue against them, but the truth keeps coming back to you that - whether they are good or bad parents - you depend upon them for your survival and are deeply entangled in the family they head up.

There comes a time in all of the above examples when leaving is the only option. You step away from the constricting space and establish a new one from which you can look at life differently: you leave home and set up somewhere else. Naturally, in all of these 'new spaces' it's quite common for problems to arise that you now have to deal with on your own. But often they are very similar to the ones that caused you to leave in the first space - again you feel frustrated and conflicted. What happens next?

We are all familiar with the temptation to avoid responsibility and hope that someone else will take the blame or step in to fix the problem. But there is also the welcoming of responsibility - the chance to take difficulties on and learn how to resolve them. In many cases, this might require us to take on perspectives we hadn't imagined before, in order to transcend conflict. Or initiate solutions that we have to deliver on.

Changing jobs, separating from a partnership or leaving home can all be done both badly or well. In the best-case scenarios, they can be seen as stage-of-life changes that arise out of development and can be met by growth: we become more response-able.

But what kind of 'leaving home' is possible as a citizen of a country with a toxic public space that cannot change sufficiently to meet the multiple crises? Not many of us would be willing to leave our national home to get away - there's too much of ourselves tied up in our country. In some rare situations, a smaller country - Scotland for example - can become independent of a larger one such as the UK. But that is not easy to achieve.

But what if we - or at least a part of us - could 'leave' simply by reclaiming our sovereign selves? By rediscovering our response-ability and investing our actions in something other than the current system? What might that look like? In the past, it could have meant being invited to join a commune, where you take on the task of coming to agreements with others about how to live together well. Today, it could take the form of a 'microsolidarity' - check Enspiral for a great illustration.

“Taking leave” from an old set of perceptions could also be a new way of being in your local community. Where the people in that place agree to adopt new ways of being and acting that add up to a different impact upon each other and the planet. Some Transition Towns or cooperatives (see Mondragon or Cooperation Jackson) might claim to have achieved that gentle kind of anarchism, as well as the many other forms of citizen action networks (or CANs) we've described over these five years.

But maybe we are in a new moment of possibility now, where far more people are looking for an alternative 'world' to be part of. Where their own intelligence and creativity would count in generating solutions to the problems we face. This comes at a time when we can all get access to the many new tools and methods of regeneration - from new forms of farming, to new ways to run a business in a more eco-friendly way for the benefit of your community. But is it easy to set up this new kind of cosmolocal CAN?

In many ways, it's not much more complex than the setting up of a new home the way you did when you left your parents - especially if you were moving in with a lot of other people. It would have that same feeling of having to work things out for yourselves for the first time; challenging yourselves not to get overwhelmed by the process.

Key to a successful new home is the context for each person to become response-able for the shared space. That might mean simply enough privacy for self-reflection and a culture of listening to each other. Ideally there would be agreements between all the members so that not everything requires debate - but there is always room for deliberation.

Extrapolate that experience to a community - and it implies a shared vision for what the community is committed to, with each person taking on some responsibility for delivering that.

Of course, the culture, structure and ethos of the wider system will always be present in even the strongest of newly imagined communities. Every one of us will continue to be impacted by the growth economy in one way or another. And we each continue to carry some of the baggage of the old system. There is no wiping the slate clean, no re-birth into innocence. However, it is possible to becoming increasingly conscious of the part of you that you want to let go, and to see a new self to invest in.

For example, imagine a community that actively embraced plural perspectives - as if it were a form of richness? How would we go about coming to decisions about vital tasks such as the health of the community? Vaccination is an obvious challenge. This would not be a question of negotiation alone: one person's freedom to avoid the jab appears as another person's prison, compelling them to stay at home for fear of infection. Rather than simply decide by majority vote (whatever the electoral process), can we even imagine a society that has the capacity to deliberate on these clashes of perspective?

Can we imagine ourselves constantly learning and developing our opinions, then designing ingenious solutions in which everyone must grow their understanding? No doubt we would have to have a means of unlearning too - noticing the usual barriers to listening, facing our own unwillingness to change. But in that space, imagine what would happen next if we started to connect with a global community of others, equally ready to occupy this new space of fully grounded possibility.

Over this next couple of weeks leading up to our 5th birthday on March 1st, we are going to be sharing some tools and practice that can help bring into being this shared home that so many are searching for. The place to build what Buckminster Fuller describes as "the new system that makes the old one obsolete".

It already exists in our hearts and minds - but now is the time to feel it underneath our feet.

Alternative Editorial: Time To Leave Home