Reflections on wealth, healing, and the stories shaping our economy
What if one of the biggest obstacles to building a better economy isn’t only policy failure or corporate power, but the way we collectively imagine wealth, success, and human worth?
That question sits at the heart of a fascinating conversation with writer Diana Colleen on Voices of the New Economy. Through her speculative eco-thriller, Diana opens up an unusual but surprisingly grounded line of inquiry: if extreme wealth concentration is part of what is destroying people and planet, then what kind of inner and cultural transformation would be needed to change it?
This is not a conventional economic conversation. It moves between fiction, trauma, psychedelics, inequality, and the politics of imagination. But beneath all of that is a serious challenge to dominant economic thinking: what if we stopped treating billionaires as proof that the system works, and started asking what kind of system produces them in the first place?
Rethinking wealth from the top down
One of the most striking ideas Diana raises is the concept of a maximum wage.
We hear constant debate about raising minimum wages, and rightly so. But far less often do we hear people ask whether there should also be a ceiling at the top. Diana’s suggestion is simple: if someone at the top of a company or supply chain wants to earn extraordinary amounts of money, then everyone below them should be guaranteed a decent share of that prosperity too.
Rather than allowing wealth to pile up endlessly at the top while workers struggle at the bottom, a maximum wage framework would force a different question: how much inequality is a society willing to legitimise?
This is not just an economic question. It’s a moral one.
A system that permits one person to accumulate more money than they could ever meaningfully use, while others in the same supply chain cannot meet their basic needs, is not simply “unequal”. It is structured around a particular story of value: that those at the top deserve exponentially more, and that this is somehow natural or efficient.
Diana challenges that story head on.
Billionaireism as a pathology
Perhaps the boldest idea in the conversation is Diana’s use of the term billionaireism.
She argues that we should think about extreme wealth accumulation less as an achievement and more as a pathology — not unlike hoarding. The comparison is provocative, but purposeful. In mainstream culture, hoarding is usually recognised as a mental health issue. People understand that when someone accumulates more than they could ever use, and becomes deeply attached to keeping it, something deeper may be going on.
But when the same logic plays out with money, shares, assets, and power, society tends to celebrate it.
Diana’s point is not simply that billionaires are bad people. In fact, one of the most interesting parts of her perspective is that she resists flattening them into villains. Instead, she asks whether a culture that normalises extreme accumulation is itself unwell — and whether the people who rise to the top of that system are often deeply shaped by trauma, disconnection, and distorted incentives.
That distinction matters.
If billionaires are framed only as cartoon villains, the conversation stops at blame. But if billionaireism is understood as a broader cultural and psychological condition, then the conversation opens toward healing, accountability, and transformation.
Why fiction can say what policy sometimes can’t
Diana explores these ideas through speculative fiction rather than traditional non-fiction or policy writing. Her novel imagines a near-future scenario in which a group of women kidnap several billionaires and place them in a high-tech facility, where they are coerced into psychedelic-assisted therapy. The aim is not revenge. It is transformation.
That premise sounds extreme, but it creates the space to ask questions that more conventional formats often avoid.
Can people who benefit most from unjust systems actually change?
What would it take for them to confront the harm they are part of?
Could healing and ego dissolution alter how power operates?
And what role does trauma play in the relentless pursuit of more?
Fiction is powerful here because it expands the field of what can be imagined. It doesn’t just analyse the world as it is. It invites readers to explore what could be otherwise.
Diana is particularly interested in hopeful speculative fiction for this reason. Much climate and dystopian fiction shows futures of collapse, scarcity, and social breakdown. Those stories can be important, but if they are the only stories people encounter, they can also become paralysing. People begin to feel that catastrophe is inevitable and that there is no point in trying to change anything.
Her approach is different. She wants fiction to widen the imagination rather than trap it.
Hope is the consequence of action
One of the most useful ideas in the episode is Diana’s framing of hope.
Rather than treating hope as a feeling that arrives before action, she argues that hope is something generated through action itself. You do not sit around waiting to feel hopeful and then decide to move. You move, and hope grows from the fact that you are participating in the possibility of change.
This is an important reversal.
So many people today feel politically exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, or cynical about the future. When hope is imagined as something you either have or don’t have, people can end up waiting indefinitely for motivation to arrive. But when hope is understood as a consequence of doing something — writing a book, joining a campaign, having a hard conversation, building an alternative — then it becomes much more available.
That framing also fits the broader new economy space. Whether the work is cooperatives, degrowth, localisation, regenerative systems, or community organising, hope often emerges not from certainty but from participation.
Inner transformation and systems change
A central thread in the conversation is the relationship between inner transformation and wider structural change.
Diana argues that reform alone is often insufficient because the people who benefit from existing systems have little incentive to dismantle them. This is why she talks about a “revolution of consciousness” being necessary before more meaningful reform can occur.
That does not mean abandoning structural analysis in favour of individual self-help. Quite the opposite. It means recognising that systems are upheld by beliefs, desires, fears, values, and social norms — and that changing those inner dimensions is part of changing the system itself.
This is where psychedelic-assisted therapy enters the conversation.
Drawing on her own experience of trauma and healing, Diana speaks about psychedelics not as magic shortcuts, but as tools that can help break down ego structures, open emotional insight, and catalyse deep personal change. In the context of her novel, they become a way of imagining what it might take for those at the top of violent systems to confront themselves honestly.
Whether or not one agrees with that exact mechanism, the larger point is clear: systems change is not purely technical. It involves consciousness, identity, and what people believe they are entitled to.
Success, enoughness, and the culture of more
The conversation also touches on a broader cultural issue: the way modern economies teach people to associate success almost exclusively with money.
Diana pushes back against this by returning to the idea of enoughness. At what point does having more stop contributing to wellbeing and start subtracting from someone else’s ability to live well? What happens when we stop organising society around accumulation and start asking what is actually sufficient for a good life?
This is a radical question because it cuts against one of the deepest assumptions in growth-based societies: that more is always better.
But in ecological terms, social terms, and even personal terms, that assumption does not hold. There is a point at which more money, more consumption, more extraction, and more inequality cease to produce wellbeing and instead begin to erode it.
The challenge is that mainstream economic culture rarely asks where that point is. It only asks how to keep the numbers rising.
Diana’s intervention is to say that unless we learn to talk about enough, we will remain trapped in a story where the accumulation of the few is normalised, even when it becomes destructive.
A different kind of economic imagination
What makes this episode valuable is not that it offers a neat blueprint for replacing capitalism overnight. It doesn’t. What it offers is something more subtle but just as necessary: a challenge to the cultural and psychological assumptions underpinning the current system.
It asks us to imagine:
- an economy where wealth has limits
- a society where success is not defined by hoarding
- a culture where healing matters politically
- a public conversation where billionaires are not automatically admired
- and a future where imagination itself becomes part of social change
For people working in the new economy space, these questions matter. Policy, institutions, and economic design are crucial, but none of them exist in a vacuum. They are always shaped by stories — stories about value, aspiration, power, merit, and who deserves what.
If those stories remain unchanged, then even reforms can be pulled back into the gravity of the old system.
