Revolution (29 page)

So there is opportunity for growth and collaboration but within democratic and responsible guidelines. I’m beginning to see that these principles are explicitly designed to inhibit predatory people like me.

This model is designed to perpetuate further co-operatives. I expect the entrepreneurial spirit could still thrive but not at the expense of more-important collective values.

Daniel Pinchbeck was talking about how these kinds of organizations could now communicate and collaborate on a global level using the incredible technological advances of the last few decades. Now, though, it would benefit us all, not just an elite, and with the removal of dumb ideas that increase pollution and waste, like those bloody jet-setting apples.

This co-operative model—in conjunction with localized farming freed from oppressive global trade tariffs, as explained by Helena Norberg-Hodge—would improve life remarkably for us by creating job opportunities and autonomy and wealth and leisure—and for the planet, mostly because we’d stop that mad international waxed-apple ricochet.

The values of community development, democracy, and opportunity are emptily bandied about from politicians’ mouths every time I see them on my telly.

They’re forever up on podiums, thumb on top of index finger, like Clinton was taught to do, telling us they want us to have opportunities and build communities and participate in democracy. Telling me I’m irresponsible for not voting. Gloating that they’re participating by door-stopping and flesh-pressing and press-fleshing
and baby-kissing. As soon as the red light goes off, their expressions change and they go back to their true agenda: meeting the needs of big business. It isn’t even their fault; it’s a systemic corruption that they unavoidably serve.

By the time you get to be an MP, you’ve spent so long on your knees, sluicing down acrid mouthfuls of Beelzebub’s cum, that all you can do is cough up froth.

We can’t blame them or even condemn them; we just have to ignore them.

Elsewhere in the world, modest versions of these ideas are already implemented. Whether it’s Portugal, where drug users are no longer pointlessly criminalized; or Switzerland, where democracy is already more inclusive and referenda on civil issues a regular occurrence; or Iceland, where corrupt bankers were booted out and told to sling their hook re bailouts; or Germany, where large companies, including Bayern Munich FC, have workers—and, in that case, fans—on the board of directors.

It’s worth noting that Iceland—y’know, Björk, aurora borealis—Iceland in 2008 had a Revolution. They peacefully overthrew their government precisely because of the financial piracy and debt enslavement which the rest of the world continues to be tortured by. They did this by mass civil disobedience and the replacement of their corrupt parliamentary system with an assembly of representatives taken from the population. Not people who’d been conditioned and groomed to compliantly abide by the system that exploits them.

They refused to pay back the international debt they were told they owed, and because they were unified, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. If it worked for them, it can work for us.

These modest measures are working. These suggestions don’t just amount to “play nice,” like some equal-opportunity PC crap to hold out a hand to the disadvantaged; they work better. The German economy is the strongest in Europe, perhaps because its workforce feels invested in its efforts, instead of trolling around like eunuch mannequins, castrated and hopeless, waiting for a two-week holiday.

What we must now demand is a radically altered society. We’ve gone way off track, put some absurd people and institutions in charge of our planet, and it’s time for radical change. That change cannot come from within the system. The successes I’ve listed above are improvements, and improvements are better than a kick in the balls from Bobby Charlton, but I think we can aim higher than incremental change or modest reform. I think we’d all be a bit disappointed if all this talk of utopia, ditching capitalism, and Revolution boiled down to: “We want to be a bit more like Germany”—fuck that.

Remember, we have no choice; there are ecological imperatives that have done our thinking for us. The planet is in trouble; there has never in all the history of our dopey, lovely species been a time of such inequality. The time for change is now. Will that change be delivered by David Cameron or Ed Miliband or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama? Of course not. Look at them, just look at them; you’re not an idiot, you can see what they are; look at their eyes. They are all avatars of the same neoliberal concept, part of the problem, not the solution.

We have to immediately dispatch with the notion that we’ll get any dice whatsoever from people who already have jobs in oak-paneled rooms with leather seating.

Cast your mind back to the end-of-term glee that accompanied Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can,” “Time for Change,” “Ain’t We Neat” election. There was such hope, such optimism, but what happened? Nothing. Nothing was ever going to happen, nothing could happen in that context. That’s the whole point. The joy of Obama’s presidency after eight years of Bush amounts to an insipid blowjob at the end of a rotten evening. Very nice for a moment, but who’s going to actually mop up the mess?

We are, obviously. All else has failed; it’s time for a Revolution.

A
REVOLUTION IS WHERE A POLITICAL SYSTEM IS OVERTHROWN
from outside the formal political structures that already exist.

The 1997 UK election that swept Tony Blair’s New Labour into power, jolly though it may’ve been, wasn’t a Revolution; it was at best a refurbishment. It was comparable to the election of Obama or Clinton: A bloke with a nice smile and an angle is swept into power after a more obviously despicable regime and then behaves more or less exactly like his predecessors. We shouldn’t be disappointed. No version of “bloke with nice smile,” or different-color skin, or accent, or vagina will work. True change has to subvert the system that produces these people.

Joseph Campbell has a lovely analogy to help us understand mortality. He explains that a school janitor in charge of minor repairs, on discovering a lightbulb has broken, doesn’t collapse into a quivering puddle of grief, warbling, “That was my favorite lightbulb, and now it’s gone.” The janitor, if he’s any good, knows that the bulb is just an expression of the electricity that illuminates it and simply unscrews the dead, useless bulb, tosses it away, and pops in a new one.

Here I will use Campbell’s maintenance fable to deliver two points: 1) we human beings are the temporary expression of a greater force that science as yet cannot explain but is approaching in its fledgling understanding of the harmony and transcendent principles of the quantum world, and 2) all political figures are the expression of a refined systemic energy and cannot therefore ever
convey a significantly different ideology—it’s not their fault; they’re just not plugged into it.

I chatted to a boy from an expensive British private school yesterday. The boy was smart, alert, and funny. The most obvious result of his education, though, was an adamantine, unblinking certainty that things are the way they should be. That there are no alternatives to the current political system. Anything else would be mayhem, violence, and corruption. I suppose that must be one of the key priorities of any elitist educational establishment, to indoctrinate the pupils with a turgid and absolute sense that change is impossible, that privilege is correct because it exists in a realm beyond morality. It seemed like even to countenance an alternative would be a kind of blasphemy. These ideas had been wedged into his head, and no room was left to ponder alternatives.

Whenever I’m surprised by some unrecognizable behavior or trait, I try to think of comparable phenomena within myself. Pedophilia is the most obvious example. Every time another icon of my childhood is slung into jail for diddling his audience, my peers, I am astonished. Whenever we hear a gut-wrenching tale of child abuse, we are sickened by the aberration. Our impulse is revulsion, disgust, to recoil from these monsters and their practices for fear of some indiscernible contamination. Like perversion is radioactive.

Clearly, the ancient urge that motivates my own compulsions that are conveniently socially appropriate, are comparable to the drives of a pedophile, if aimed at a conveniently socially acceptable target: adult women.

When pedophiles talk about their obsession, they always say they have no choice and that the urge is overwhelming. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that can’t identify with that urge or obsession; the distinction is the object.

Sometimes I tell myself not to smoke a fag or eat a chocolate biscuit, but the urge overrides my will. Fortunately, the subject of my desire is not taboo and doesn’t have a negative effect on others—unless you’re comparing passive smoking to child abuse. When I was single and lived a life of nocturnal excesses, I got out of the habit of curbing compulsion; if I wanted to indulge a behavior, I
usually could. How pitiful if, for some reason beyond choice and will, the subject of your urges were forbidden.

Judging from the number of people who’ve experienced abuse as children, this desire is incredibly common. What of those that feel forbidden lusts but don’t act upon them? Those who suffer pedophilic urges but suppress them? What do they get, a medal? A parade? Even wanting, imagining, sexual contact with children is disturbing, only marginally less than the act. Really, then, it’s just an unpleasant thing that exists, that doesn’t seem to be hugely curtailed by penalties or current therapeutic solutions. If our objective is to limit the number of children subjected to abuse, we must be open to new ways to treat the perpetrators as well as the victims. Not just out of some wet liberal notion of tolerance but because it will yield better results.

Come with me now on a brief New Age hippie ramble, which may be of no help and, if you’re reviewing this book for the
Daily Mail
or are a concerned parent picking it up in a teenager’s room, will have you apoplectic. Don’t look under the bed, for God’s sake. The horrors that lurk there will dwarf this eastern liberalism. Although do kids these days even have things under the bed? Isn’t all their porn, booze, and weaponry stored in a digital cloud floating around the house about to burst and drown us in a contraband downpour?

Back to my jumped-up, hemp-dusted theory: If we consider humanity to be not a disparate and separate conglomerate of individuals but the temporary physical manifestation and expression of a subtler electromagnetic, microcosmic realm (thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven), like in Campbell’s lightbulb allegory, then all resultant phenomena emanated from a single source, so we are all jointly responsible. If we are all one human family—and there’s not a theory out there from any denomination that opposes a single human source—then we cannot reach solutions based on “separateness” or “otherness”; it’s mechanically incorrect.

As the TM Foundation’s Washington experiment demonstrated, the transcendent consciousness of a group of meditators had a positive impact on the city’s crime statistics. There is no real gap between
my consciousness and your consciousness. The separation is a retrospective, sense-based application.

We’ve all seen the heartening and peculiarly uplifting news story of a recently bereaved parent who somehow instantly forgives the killer of their child. Someone who has somehow overcome the initial rage, hatred, and urge for vengeance that accompanies such tragedy. Seemingly, though, beyond that pain is a kind of sanguinity in forgiveness. How do they do that? From where is that strength sourced?

Resentment is painful to carry, justified resentment no less so. All resentment has to be relinquished to find peace. As it says in the St. Francis prayer: “It is by forgiving that we are forgiven.” If we want to be free from pain, we have to forgive everyone we believe to have wronged us, to find love beyond the pain, as these heroic parents do. In this forgiveness is the acknowledgment of our unity. That we are one human family. One consciousness. One body. Increasingly I learn that spiritual principles only have value in adversity, when applied in opposition to a powerful contrary tendency.

It is precisely when I want to kill or fuck I have to look within and see if there’s another way. For years I lived by subduing my sensitivity. Eckhart Tolle says, “Addiction begins with pain and ends with pain,” meaning that pain is behind compulsive behavior. Eleven years clean, I still feel the urge to medicate pain. Whenever events don’t go my way, my first instinct is to annul the feeling, to look for an external resource to solve the problem. The second part of Eckhart’s edict kicks in here—addiction “ends with pain.” Medication of any kind offers only a temporary solution; it always leads back to pain and becomes therefore predictably cyclical.

These myths—Sisyphus, Prometheus, and the sun-god Ra—all recount this cycle of perpetual struggle.