Ben Phillips, Director, Public Good Narrative Project
At 18, Ben Phillips moved into a South African township as its only white resident, just months after Mandela became president.
It was there, invited to weddings, funerals and into family homes, that Ben — now Director of the Public Good Narrative Project and author of How to Fight Inequality (And Why That Fight Needs You) — first learned the lesson that would shape his entire career: freedom isn't won by great leaders, it's won by thousands of ordinary people nobody remembers the names of.
On the latest episode of Causes, Ben talks Dave through what came next. The heart of the episode is Ben's "evidence-based paradox" — the uncomfortable discovery, made in a room full of brilliant policy economists, that nobody could name a single time in the last century when handing decision-makers evidence actually changed their behaviour on inequality.
Because facts, he argues, don't win fights. Stories do — and he traces how the post-war cooperation story, the 1970s "the state is the enemy" story, and today's "outsiders are out to get you" story have each produced not one policy, but hundreds.
This episode doesn't shy away from the darker bits of trying to make change - burnout, repeated defeat, and whether hope is realistic at all. Ben's answers are candid: he admits the people united are often defeated, but insists the people disunited are always defeated. And he argues that hope isn't spin - it's a strategic necessity, because a movement that only sells catastrophe ends up causing one.
Asked what he'd tell every social justice activist in the world in a single text message, Ben doesn't hesitate: I know it's dark, you are the light.
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