Revolution (23 page)

I think this is a beautiful principle. Any group, tribe, society is free to live by any creed they choose, unless their conduct has a negative impact on other communities or our planet.

My friend Daniel Pinchbeck, who has spent the last ten years smashing his brain into a high-functioning mush with ayahuasca, has given us a brief account of what a global utopian vision could look like:

“We can create a peaceful planetary civilization, entirely powered by renewable sources of energy, based on cradle-to-cradle practices, where everyone on earth enjoys a high quality of life.”

Daniel ain’t playing; he’s gone in hard there with an ecologically responsible peaceful planetary model. Unless you’re some kind of ludicrous hippie, you won’t know what the hell “cradle to cradle”
refers to—well, I do; I looked it up. It’s based on the idiom “cradle to the grave.” By changing the “grave” bit to “cradle,” it implies that we have a responsibility beyond our own lifespan.

That is, of course, the type of idea that we must adopt. What “cradle to cradle” means in practice are technologies, products, and systems that don’t produce waste, and implicit within these systems, as in the phrase itself, is a different attitude to ownership. I was given the example of a pair of cradle-to-cradle shoes, which sounds like something Jimmy Savile might’ve worn but is actually a pair of ecologically responsible trainers. Training shoes where the top part would be reused and the sole recycled, made from biological nutrients. Apparently these things already exist, and I bet they’re fuckin’ rubbish. Which means I’d probably recycle ’em as soon as I got ’em and stick me Converse back on. I’m sure the aesthetics will improve, and at some point I’m going to have to manage my priorities.

Daniel also mentions renewable energy, a subject about which we are being horribly misled. I recently saw a depiction of the area of solar paneling required to provide energy for the entire planet—it was titchy, about the size of Billericay. As usual, the information we get on emergent ideas that can change the world is tightly controlled by people who want the world to stay the same.

Food and cigarettes are the best examples of industries where the genie has, after years of stifling, gotten out of the bottle. As I explained earlier, and as you knew anyway, these industries for years gave us information that suited their economic advance and, in conjunction with an ideologically and sometimes financially allied media, concealed information that hampered it.

This is why it is vital that we challenge the dominant ideological space, says Daniel:

“As part of this transition, we can restore and replenish our planetary ecosystems. This shift can happen over the next decades.”

Daniel acknowledges that ecological reparation is a process that will take decades but, optimist that he is, he believes it is possible.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time with Daniel. He is what you might call a psychedelic shaman—he looks sort of like a live-action Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo
. Most notably, I spent some time with him in an
ashram-type thing in Utah, a temporary commune where free-thinking loonies congregated in yurts to discuss far-out ideas. I went because I’ve always been fascinated by this stuff. Like most people, I’ve always sensed there was more to “heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” as that misery-guts Hamlet said to his pal before ballsing up court life in Elsinore.

My clumsy adolescent hallucinogenic experiments unraveled my limited conception of the sensory realm. I met an IVF physician once, and he gave me a cool metaphor for contextualizing knowledge, given additional credence by the fact that he spends his working life jamming recalcitrant spunk cells into dislocated eggs. This empiric knowledge of the micro had awoken him to fathomless tiny continents of impenetrable, invisible wilderness.

What is the process that accelerates cellular subdivision? Why do cells stop being indistinct and start to take on particular identities and agencies?

This physician is on the top of his game and has concluded that a convenient shorthand for this potent and purposeful entity is “God.” The world as we understand it is limited, he explained. “Imagine your sensory being as a finger,” he began. I often do, so for me it was a doddle. “The conscious awareness in the sensorial and experiential world is like a finger in a glass of water: It can experience the parameters and depth of the glass; it can feel the edges. This is how our awareness interacts with the known. To comprehend the unknown, we should imagine putting our finger into the ocean.”

What a lovely metaphor, easily envisaged and if necessary enacted. I might pop down the beach and plunge my dumb digit into the briny and inform the concerned onlookers I’m probing the unknown.

Where Pinchbeck and his tent-dwelling acolytes excel is in their willingness to bust the finger wide open with consciousness-expanding plants. Pinchbeck in particular has returned from his many voyages into inner space with all manner of useful social notions. Generally when I took acid I surfed along the treacherous coastline of impending mental breakdown. Pinchbeck meets a host
of inter-dimensional beings that manifest in consciousness when the typical impediments of sensory inhibition are lifted.

I can’t express to you how much I’d like to take ayahuasca or the compound derived from it. Accounts by those who’ve taken it read like hippie science fiction: tiny bright beings of light offering giggly advice, the muddled narrative of your own life relayed with new clarity and meaning. It sounds brilliant.

As we sat huddled in a wigwam on a Utah ranch, the spilt Milky Way radiant above, I envied my cohorts. Wrapped in blankets with their unwrapped minds. Daniel and I then held an amplified discourse and took questions from the tripped-out assembly, me jealous like a diabetic at a bake-off, Daniel saying stuff like this:

“We can accomplish this Revolution through a collective movement of civil society that supersedes the current structure of nation-state governments and the corporate military–industrial complex. The transition is from a paradigm of competition and domination to one of symbiosis and cooperation, from greed to altruism. It begins with the realization of our shared responsibility for the future of the earth, and our inherent unity with each other and with all of life.”

In this short passage, a new world is described. Big, powerful structures must be overcome to bring about this new, gentler, morefree society, where we work less and have more leisure. Where technology is used to liberate the many, not to engorge the few. Where positive human attributes like altruism and cooperation become the ideological pillars for society.

Our current system is the physical manifestation of will, but will, like everything, can change.

A recent demonstration of the power of activism and collective will is the change we have seen in attitudes and legislation with same-sex couples. I spoke to lifelong troublemaker Peter Tatchell, a campaigner for equal rights for gay folk, which must’ve at times seemed hopeless. Like the time he was beaten up by Robert Mugabe’s henchmen or the hours he sat in a cell in Canterbury for having disrupted the archbishop’s Easter Day address.

During the years that Tatchell has been campaigning, though,
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues (LGBT) have undergone a transformation as radical as any endured by the “T” in that acronym. People that argue against gay marriage now are peered at as if marvelous fossils emerging from a bigoted mist. When I was a kid, homophobia was de rigueur, lads that played with girls de facto “poofs,” and a condemnatory “Don’t Die of Ignorance” HIV-as-Old-Testament-retribution attitude was as unquestionably correct as “Just Saying No” to drugs. It turns out both those ideas were half-arsed and unhelpful.

Kids come out as gay in their early teens now. Gay pride is attended by serving politicians, publicly, not sneakily in masks, and the legal rights denied same-sex couples for years are finally being granted.

This has been wrought by the tenacity of men and women like Tatchell, who overcame years of abuse and frequent violence because they believed in their cause. A cause that affects us all, because as long as there are maligned and persecuted groups, it remains impossible, by definition, for anyone to inhabit a fair society.

Tatchell claims the changes we have seen in civil rights have come about due to internal lobbying (cheeky), activism, and community self-empowerment. I said that with civil-rights issues it’s true that the establishment will ultimately concede, because these changes pose no fundamental threat to the economic power and wealth of the establishment, and Tatchell agreed. He pointed out, though, that the concessions are still not easily granted.

I suppose that’s because the different groups that are campaigning for equality are often favored targets for an Establishment keen to keep the majority of people divided and distracted. Gays, immigrants, disabled folk, different-colored people, all crop up as accessible scapegoats when public tension reaches potentially threatening levels.

So it’s expedient for the Establishment to mark them outsiders by pejorative legislation. When, though, as Tatchell says, the hearts and minds of the general population are won over, territory can be conceded.

Where I’m from, Grays, there’s no love lost for the ol’ gays and
immigrants. In recent local elections, Ukip did quite well by enforcing the erroneous belief that immigration was negatively impacting on people’s lives.

Ukip, like all far-right parties, offers a modest amplification of the prevailing political mentality. Nigel Farage said, for example, that elderly people are “uncomfortable” with homosexuality. Well, Sir Ian McKellen seems alright with it. I met him on a chat show once and he very nearly charmed me into a new lifestyle in a cubicle.

If Farage’s imaginary grandparents are abstractly uncomfortable with homosexuality, like all homophobes, they don’t have to do it. It’s not like washing up, an unpleasant but mandatory chore that if left undone will clutter up your kitchen. “Well, I’ve watched
EastEnders
. I suppose I should be getting in the kitchen now and doing some gayness. That anus isn’t going to felch itself.”

It’s an abstract concept unless you voluntarily embrace it. Obviously, outside of a tiny mad minority, no one thinks like that now. There will always be mileage, though, for those keen to distract us, in matters that have an atavistic, visceral attachment. Ideas that bypass our rational brains and inexplicably provoke fear or revulsion.

It is helpful too to continually stimulate that fear and nominate visible groups as receptacles for tenuous blame.

Tatchell said that over time the powerful will always acquiesce on civil-rights issues if the opposition becomes voluminous. The real challenge comes, he observed, when you attack the economy. He described this as “the fortress that must be protected at all costs.”

This fortress, though, is defended so vigorously precisely because of its vulnerability. An economy that is designed to benefit the few to the detriment of the many obviously requires highly efficient structures in place around it.

Fawzi Ibrahim, who sees a powerful corollary between our current ecological crises and the deterioration of capitalism, said, “Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.”

The reason the occupants of the fun bus are so draconian in their defense of the economy is that they have decided to ditch the planet.
You would think that Ibrahim’s choice is a rhetorical one, to which the immediate and passionate response would be, “We’ll ditch capitalism, thanks, seeing as how it’s gone nuts and isn’t working anyway.”

The well-protected minority have the opposite intention, and that is why it is so integral for them to maintain that there are no alternatives. No alternatives except for a system that benefits them and destroys the planet. Does that sound right to you?

What about all the systems that preceded capitalism but now would be enhanced by a global communications network? Or the many new alternatives fleetingly precised in the pages of this book?

I
T IS A TROUBLING INDICATION OF HOW LOW OUR EXPECTATIONS
have sunk that even the modest economic reform as proposed by Thomas Piketty is met with whoops of delirious rapture on one side and an international smear onslaught on the other.

He came round my house the other day, Thomas Piketty, French as kissing, with eyes that twinkled like petrol in a puddle. He had, though, the demeanor I know well, that of a man besieged by diagonal stabs of insidious judgment.

Dear ol’ Thomassy Piketts, ol’ Piketty, Licketty, Rollitty, Flicketty, has been given a right kicketty by the right wing for daring to suggest that we need transparency around the wealth and assets of the super-rich—the swines have been hiding their stuff, like hoarders on them programs. Once we know what they have, we can modestly tax them on their wealth instead of just their income.

The financial world has responded to this suggestion as if he’d just demanded they all diddle their sisters. The opposition to any kind of reform or redistribution is so pernicious and vociferous, Piketty agrees, that we would require either cataclysm or a worldwide organized movement to implement it.

Capitalism is held together by will; it isn’t, as we’re constantly told, the result of some righteous natural tidal force. It is Machiavellian in construction and vulnerable if opposed. That is why the ideas of Piketty—who says he is a capitalist, just not a full-on evil one, maybe like one of Darth Vader’s admirals that goes a bit whey-faced
and reticent when the dark lord wants to blow up a moon or whatever—are met with a media death grip and strangled into silence. Death grip, by the way, is the literal translation of the word “mortgage.”

Imagine how the evil empire will respond when we start realizing the full extent of our human potential and demand the kind of utopia that Daniel Pinchbeck is still in the middle of describing:

“Authoritarian structures of control can be replaced by mass volunteerism, orchestrated through social technologies that allow everyone to participate directly in a planetary democracy. We can realize society itself as a living, ever-changing work of art.”