THE GRAVITY OF GHOSTS: A Primer for those who Govern, Advise, and Organise

THE GRAVITY OF GHOSTS: A Primer for People Who Govern, Advise, and OrganiseThe crises converging on us now-ecological breakdown, democratic erosion, and the fracturing of shared reality-are not failures of policy, technology, or political will. They are the consequences of a worldview: a set of assumptions about what is real, what matters, who counts, and what time is for that has become so pervasive it is no longer visible as a worldview at all.
It exerts its pull the way gravity does - without announcement, felt everywhere, located nowhere. The Gravity of Ghosts is a work of world-system philosophy addressed to everyone who steers institutions: politicians and civil servants, city planners and corporate strategists, movement organisers and policy advisers. The book argues that the most significant barrier to intelligent governance is not a lack of information or expertise but rather an inability to recognise the underlying assumptions that are already driving the system.
Until these assumptions are identified, scrutinised, and, if necessary, revised, all other reform efforts will be carried out within a framework that has not been thoroughly examined. The book moves across five territories. It makes the case for treating worldviews as philosophy's most underdeveloped discipline. It anatomises industrial economism-the civic religion of growth, extraction, and monetisation-as the dominant worldview of the past two centuries, tracing how it has evolved from a set of assumptions into an entire planetary infrastructure of incentives, laws, debt architectures, and habits of mind.
It introduces ecority - a different axis of value organised around ecological security, collegiality, concord, sufficiency and interbeing - not as a replacement doctrine but as a practice of threshold-crossing. It examines what happens when incompatible worldviews collide and how translation across ontological difference is possible without colonisation. And it proposes concrete methods of praxis - diagnosing, slowing, re-storying - through which individuals and institutions can begin to work at the level of worldviews rather than merely within them.
Throughout, Richard David Hames draws on decades of engagement with governments, corporations, communities and social movements across the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and beyond. The result is a book that is simultaneously philosophical and practical, civilisationally ambitious and personally grounded - an invitation to see the assumptions we are enacting and to choose, with some deliberateness, which ones to keep watering and which to discard.
The Gravity of Ghosts is published by Asian Foresight Institute