All through my early life, I had the eerie feeling of being subject to a sinister, overwhelming power. The enemy was a degraded, corrupt authority, much like the court in Kafka’s The Trial. The centre was nowhere and everywhere at the same time. My distant nemesis could neither be targeted nor opposed.
Self-expression, humour and art seemed the only meaningful way to fight back against such a foe. Even as adolescents, my friends and I knew our enemy had already won the decisive battle. Since we had lost, the best we could do was to carve out a private realm of artistic and personal freedom where we maintained some illusion of control.
When I was five, I remember lying on my grandma’s red upholstered couch, watching the saga of Watergate slowly unfold on her blackand- white television. I wanted cartoons, but she was determined to follow the hearings from beginning to end. Watergate was a mindnumbing drone. It was obvious to me that nobody was speaking directly or truthfully. The dull bureaucrats had mastered the art of shirking responsibility and passing the buck. Everybody seemed embalmed, speaking a dead language.
Watergate set the tone for my future disengagement from politics. As I grew up, I saw the system as a rigged spectacle of manufactured consent, compelling compromise or capitulation to the special interests who pulled the puppet strings of power. Once in a great while, I flicked a voting lever or joined in some protest march. But these gestures seemed empty, degrading. They did not feel like meaningful forms of participation. The sensation was one of being conned and gypped. I knew this system could never represent my values or ideals – even if I didn’t yet know precisely what my values and ideals were.
By the time I came of age in the late 1980s, my Generation X had surrendered without a fight. Overwhelmed by Reagan, Iran-Contras, the global success of the neoliberal agenda, we believed we were powerless to change our society. We turned away from politics or economics.
We identified as bohemians, marginal outsiders. We focused on art, film, literature and the avant-garde. Taking our cues from the culture, we greeted any attempt to discuss the ecological crisis or America’s procession of endless wars with derision and cynicism. The suicides of Kurt Cobain and David Foster Wallace seemed to sum up Gen X’s ambience of hopelessness.
I now feel that contemporary art and culture are a bit problematic. Even when art, films or music seems to have a dissident viewpoint, they often serve to legitimize the prevailing system. Anything seditious, rebellious or seemingly disruptive actually feeds energy to the postindustrial capitalist mega-machine, which thrives on disruption.
Contemporary society has the ability to absorb, assimilate and neutralize almost anything that seems to threaten it. Media critic Thomas de Zengotita calls the method through which any potential alternative or threatening idea gets ‘covered’, swallowed up, by the mass media, the Blob: ‘What must be covered is any event or person or deed that might challenge the Blob with something like a limit, something the Blob cannot absorb, something that could, in resistance or escape, become the one thing the omni-tolerant Blob cannot allow, something outside it, something unmediated – something real,’ he writes in Mediated.
When we understand the mechanisms of post-industrial capitalism, we can use its techniques to potentially subvert it or accelerate its metamorphosis. If we apply our cunning and creativity effectively, it is quite possible we can transform this system peacefully from within. We don’t have to ‘smash the state’. We can supersede it. We can feed the Blob the antidote that will force it to dissolve.
Although I consider the contemporary art world is a nightmare, a black hole of ego and pretension that sucks a huge amount of excess capital and intellect into it, I believe art has a crucial role to play in our post-capitalist future. The German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys came up with the term ‘social sculpture’. ‘Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system to build a SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART,’ Beuys wrote. We can consider many human-made constructs – financial systems, festivals like Burning Man, intentional communities, even governments – as social sculptures, which we can intentionally design to change ourselves or enhance our powers.
We have new tools at our disposal that could allow us to accomplish what was once impossible and unthinkable. Ironically, yet appropriately, these tools are products of the system itself, which is revealing evermore glaring inner contradictions. Art could find its proper function in helping to bring about this redirection. It would no longer be an ornament of post-colonial empire. In fact, if we are going to have a system after this one, art will play a far more integral role in it.
I believe many people feel deflated, defeated and disempowered by the system so early in life because of the failure of our world to provide us with access to anything transcendent or sacred. We are also wounded, in adolescence, by a sadness around love – by the sense that men and women are somehow at war with each other, that our deepest erotic desires are somehow shameful or wrong, and can never be met. When we understand the programming, we can consciously over-write it.
Instead of initiating people into adulthood through an act of visionary courage, our civilization indoctrinates and programmes us in many subtle and brutal ways. This is the residue of our Judaeo- Christian heritage, which denigrates direct experience, or gnosis, promoting received ideas and obedience to distant authorities. In my generation, we got the impression that whoever was hiding behind the curtain – the priest, the rabbi, the expert, the technocrat bureaucrat – possessed power over our world, and that we were exiled from it.
It was only after I published my first books that I realized I needed to explore social theory. It wasn’t enough any more to believe the government sucked and the media was a sham – to reject the establishment, like some angst-ridden punk rocker. I needed to work out a sophisticated, reasoned critique. I needed to know what kind of alternative I believed in – something that had nothing to do with being a Democrat or Republican. I knew our society was approaching a tipping point that might lead to catastrophic breakdown within a few decades, but I didn’t know what I would put in its place, or how this might happen.
To define a political philosophy for myself, I undertook a brainstraining, labyrinthine course of study. I pitted Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution against Lenin’s State and Revolution and surveyed Marx, Trotsky and Mao. I juxtaposed Rousseau’s views on power against Machiavelli’s, tried to understand the concepts of sovereignty and the general will, pitted Antonio Negri’s ideas of ‘immaterial production’ against Slavoj Žižek’s postmodern Marxism. I analysed social ecologists like Murray Bookchin, post-collapse theorists like John Michael Greer, anarchists like Kropotkin, liberal environmentalists like Bill McKibben and Gustave Speth. Years passed as I got more and more lost in a seemingly endless tangle of theories.
Suddenly, it was the autumn of 2011. Occupy Wall Street appeared on my doorstep. By the time I visited Zuccotti Park, the carnival was in full swing, with lines of police facing the young, cheerful, underwashed horde that had turned the tiny square into their motley home. The first reports from the media made it sound squalid and chaotic, a useless gathering of neurotic losers, with nothing better to do. As I found, this was far from the actual state of things.
For David Graeber, an anarchist and anthropology professor who helped inspire the movement, Occupy was the local expression of a ‘wave of resistance sweeping the planet’, part of a global response to imperial control and financial corruption. The plan, he writes in The Democracy Project, was to create the model for a ‘genuine direct democracy’ which would expose the charade of the current representational system. The Occupiers did this by launching the General Assembly. Meeting at the front of the park every day, by a tall orange metal sculpture, they made all their decisions transparently and collectively. Anyone who turned up could immediately participate.
Occupy applied Gandhi’s tactics of nonviolent activism. These tactics had not been successfully used in the US since the civil rights movement in the 1950s – other uprisings had attempted to apply them but were quickly stomped out. For whatever reason – whether it was because it was the lucky or right moment or they needed a new story, or because mainstream journalists sympathized with the radicals – the press flocked to Occupy, giving it copious attention, which provided it with some protection from police aggression.
As I toured the bustling park, I was amazed by the quality of people’s discussions, and the passion everyone expressed. It felt surreal – as if all of the conversations I had been holding inside my head with long-dead philosophers were suddenly being performed publicly, witnessed by a crowd of engaged participants. Everyone who attended the nightly General Assemblies had the same opportunity to debate, discuss and contribute to decisions that impacted on the movement as a whole.
I saw passers-by – office workers and labourers – recruited to help build a new democratic society. I watched their faces light up, as they realized they were being invited to participate as equals in this process. There was electricity in the air – a sense of renewed possibility.
I remember, at one midday teach-in near the library, hearing two young women with matching dreadlocks and wire-frame glasses – they had dropped out of college to join the occupation – talk about what they were learning by living in Zuccotti Park. They called it a process of internal ‘decolonization’. They were freeing their minds, step by step, from the trance of empire. They said there were no experts in what they were experiencing, as they lived in the thick of it. Many Occupiers had a deep understanding of our political-economic system, and the planetary crisis. They knew the situation required a seismic shift and were willing to risk their lives for it.
Graeber notes that Occupy was, at its heart, a ‘forward-looking youth movement’. Its primary constituents were young people who had tried to make it in the mainstream, only to find the system rigged against them. They ‘watched the financial class completely fail to play by the rules, destroy the world economy through fraudulent speculation, get rescued by prompt and massive government intervention, and, as a result, wield even greater power and be treated with even greater honour than before, while they are relegated to a life of apparently permanent humiliation’.
The handling of the 2008 crash radicalized a generation of young people smart enough to realize the current system is in a doomspiral. They are willing to transform what we have – to replace it with something truly humane, just and ecologically sustainable. During the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, the Occupy demographic emerged, for the first time, as a political force, impelling Bernie Sanders to prominence. Despite the efforts of the government, the media and the financial sector to confuse the matter, millions upon millions are awakening to realize that the system we have is not working for them but is engineered to serve the interests of a small, elite group. We will probably see increasing polarization in the next years, as authoritarian movements also gain traction.
Graeber believes the distinction between reform and revolution has vanished in the United States over the last decades. Since the 1960s, the US has transitioned from a manufacturing-based economy to one based primarily on the sale of financial products and services. Financial products and services have no intrinsic or tangible value, since nothing is produced by them. Products like bonds, as well as ‘junk bonds’, can yield tremendous rewards – but these rewards actually amount to a re-appropriation of resources. Wealth is extracted from the poor and middle class and transferred to the elite group of speculators and hedge-fund managers at the top of the pyramid, who control the money supply through the Federal Reserve and other central banks.
As a result of this systemic transition, the US economy became ‘little more than an elaborate system of extraction, ultimately backed up by the power of the courts, prisons, and police and the government’s willingness to grant to corporations the power to create money’, writes Graeber. At the top of the pyramid, financial, corporate and government interests collude to maintain a rigid, centralized system that works against the interests of the debt-burdened multitude. ‘In America, challenging the role of money in politics is by definition a revolutionary act because bribery has become the organizing principle of public life.’
In 2008, we witnessed the meltdown of the global financial system due to the collapse of mortgage-backed securities. While millions lost their homes, the US government bailed out the banks and financial institutions, creating an ever-ballooning burden of debt that can never be repaid. But rather than addressing the underlying flaws in the system, the government committed ‘American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it’,’ journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone.
Virtually none of the money given to the banks in the various stimulus packages and bailouts went to the homeowners or small businesses who were impacted by the system’s malfeasance. ‘Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme,’ Taibbi points out, ‘we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures.’ The initial $800 billion bailout was only the beginning. Up until recently, the Federal Reserve has created, ex nihilo – out of nothing – $85 billion a month, using this credit to buy Treasury Bonds and mortgage-backed securities.
What this amounts to, according to journalist Chris Hedges, is the failure of the constitutional state – the checks and balances which were part of the original government of the United States have been overridden by financial interests, who control the levers of power. ‘The collapse of the constitutional state, presaged by the death of the liberal class, has created a power vacuum that a new class of speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, historically led by charismatic demagogues, will enthusiastically fill,’ Hedges writes. ‘It opens the door to overtly authoritarian and fascist movements.’ As I write this book, Donald Trump has stepped through that door. There may be worse to come.
What has money become in our day and age? Money is a collective agreement that money is worth what the banks say it is worth. It has no intrinsic value, nor is it linked to anything tangible. The bankers and the administrators of the Federal Reserve and other central banks speak a complex technical language, difficult for most people to understand or follow. This is intentional. If the situation was made clear, people would, in all likelihood, rise up against it.
I meet a lot of people who claim to be ‘spiritual’. They have impressive yoga practices, visit shamans deep in the Amazon, attend raw food retreats, ten-day silent meditations, spend megabucks on all sorts of workshops to heal themselves and develop their inner self. Personally, I found many of the twenty-somethings living in tents in Zuccotti Park, hanging out at local fast-food restaurants to get warm and eating donated pizza, to be more truly ‘spiritual’ than the people from the yoga, post-New Age or transformational festival scenes. The Occupiers were not just talking about unified consciousness and justice as some abstract ideal. They courageously risked their lives and their future to protest about our unjust society, seeking to build something better.
Occupy at first had a festive, numinous quality to it – like the last stand of the Mohicans, or the opening of a portal into another dimension. With Zuccotti Park, the Occupiers found an acupuncture point at the solar plexus of empire, just a few blocks from Ground Zero, across the street from Wall Street, the iconic capital of world greed, and punctured it. The brave act of a handful of youthful anarchists garnered global attention, sparking hundreds of copycat occupations across the world, summoning forth a Dostoevskian cavalcade of the wise and wounded, lost and disoriented, enraged and cogent. It was raggedy Buster Keaton pitted against a grim-faced army of RoboCops.
Friends from various stages of my life in New York and my years at Burning Man resurfaced as regulars at Occupy, working in the kitchen, running the library or cheerfully pedalling the bicycle generators that powered the media centre’s laptops and cameras. Some friends went out at night to project anti-capitalist slogans on skyscrapers or joined in morning actions where dozens of protestors, dressed as janitors, brought brooms down to Wall Street and swept it out.
When commentators criticized the movement for lacking clear demands, they were missing the point. Occupy was not, in its essence, a protest movement. It was a process movement. The Occupiers were seeking to build a new political system, based in direct participation, to supersede and replace the twisted version of pseudo-democracy we have now. Their goal was not reform. It was revolution – an anarchist revolution, giving power to the people.
As Graeber and other writers note, anarchy tends to be misunderstood. Anarchy is actually the most direct and egalitarian form of democracy, based on building consensus without coercion, recognizing the autonomy of everyone involved. Anarchist writers are often brilliant at summoning up their vision of a truly liberated society, what it would feel like and how it would operate. Instead of supporting institutions that become rigid, hierarchic and corrupt, anarchism would inspire continuous flux and immediate participation. What’s interesting is that our new communications tools could facilitate such a system in a way that was never possible before.
Pyotr Kropotkin, a Russian prince who lived in the late nineteenth century, defined anarchism as ‘the most complete development of individuality combined with the highest development of voluntary association in all its aspects, in all possible degrees, for all imaginable aims; ever-changing, ever-modified associations which carry in themselves the elements of their durability and constantly assume new forms which answer best to the multiple aspirations of all’. An anarchist society would be one ‘to which pre-established forms, crystallized by law, are repugnant; which looks for harmony in an ever-changing and fugitive equilibrium between a multitude of varied forces and influences of every kind, following their own course’. For Kropotkin, who was a biologist, such a society would be based on nature’s principles.
Gandhi, similarly, looked towards a future condition where there would be no political power – no machinery of the state: ‘Representatives will become unnecessary if the national life becomes so perfect as to be self-controlled. It will then be a state of enlightened anarchy in which each person will become his own ruler.’ Gandhi thought the ideal state would have ‘no political institution and therefore no political power’. The ideal state, in other words, would be the one that no longer exists. I find this an exciting prospect.
The commonly held belief is that we need government and the state to prevent terror and chaos. Do we really know this to be the case any more? History reveals the state to be guilty of endless dark deeds and scorched-earth policies. The US government has laid waste to whole nations, causing the death and dislocation of large populations in Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq, using napalm, Agent Orange and shells of depleted uranium to further its geopolitical aims. Could no government do any worse?
Thinkers like Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt draw a sharp distinction between rebellion and revolution: ‘Rebellion’s demand is unity; historical revolution’s demand is totality,’ wrote Camus. The tendency of historical revolution is to demand the ‘absolute negation’ of its subjects, leading to ideological purity, mass murder and slavery without limit. The communist revolutions of the last century obliterated the individual, turning people into puppets of the state, forced to fulfil the inhuman dictates of a mega-machine. Camus preferred rebellion as a model.
Today, the radical reinvention of society – by global insurgency, mass awakening, spiritual intervention – seems necessary. It is something we must demand and enact. If we don’t, there may be no future for humanity. But the models provided by past revolutions are outmoded, old hat. They won’t serve us any more. So what can we do?
I don’t think we can simply dissolve the governments we have now, as that would create chaos. But is it possible that we might engineer a peaceful step-by-step transition from governments controlled by wealthy elites where participation is limited, to a peer-to-peer system where local communities have autonomy, where power is decentralized, where we peacefully dissolve nation-state borders, where the people are free to be? I know this seems impossible. But so did a smart phone, 3D printer or neutron bomb until somebody built the thing.
Why don’t we at least make this thought experiment? Until now, our focus has been technological progress, not social innovation. Our society has been focused on making things that make profit, not on reinventing our social system to support the greatest level of happiness, self-knowledge and freedom for all. What would happen if we changed our focus?
Our networks of communication could be used to orchestrate a worldwide campaign of education. As we teach the people of the world about what’s happening ecologically, we will also train them in participatory democracy, as well as ecological restoration. We know that the collective consciousness is shaped by the media. Therefore, we can feasibly use media to point people in a new direction – one that allows us all to thrive. What I am proposing as the ideal is something like a holistic anarchism, where we apply the existing tools of postindustrial society – the tools of media, communication, industry and manufacturing – efficiently to construct a unified, peaceful planetary culture based on principles of ecological restoration and decentralized, local autonomy.
In actual fact, the United States has never experienced true democracy, except on a small scale, in townships. The American political system from the outset was carefully orchestrated to maintain wealth, privilege and elite control through a system of representation. In the Declaration of Independence, America is not defined as a democracy, but, explicitly, as a republic. James Madison wrote: ‘In a democracy the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, must be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.’ The US government became the model for other nation-states to follow over the next centuries.
Madison, like most of the Founding Fathers, argued that true democracy would lead inevitably to mob rule, factionalism and despotism. He feared what he called ‘the horrors of democracy’. Given the power, the multitudes would undermine the structure of elite privilege and private property that the Founding Fathers, as landholders and legislators, wanted to maintain – and that their descendants have held to this day.
I agree with the Founding Fathers: if we establish a direct democracy where all people have an equal say, elite power and privilege will be dissolved, eventually. There will no longer be such extremes of wealth inequality, and everyone – including the super-rich – will be much happier because of it. I don’t think a planetary democracy would disintegrate into mob rule or despotism, or some grim form of communism. As Rebecca Solnit discovered when she visited former disaster zones, when governments collapse the vast majority of people act more altruistically and compassionately towards others. They come together organically in communities and local democracies. This pattern is repeated again and again.
We seem to be quickly approaching that threshold where, as the social ecologist Murray Bookchin warned, our world ‘will either undergo revolutionary changes, so far-reaching in character that humanity will totally transform its social relations and its very conception of life, or it will suffer an apocalypse that may well end humanity’s tenure on the planet’. This process will only be finished when humanity no longer exists on Earth, or when we have established a just and humane society, liberated from artificial scarcity and free of domination.
Occupy represented the emergence of a new social organism, based on direct democracy and consensus. Like a windblown seed from a hothouse flower, Occupy infiltrated the control zone of imperial power, found a crack in the concrete, took root and suddenly blossomed. During the occupation, Zuccotti Park functioned as a new social organism.
The chaotic appearance of the park as a shanty town or tent city masked a well-defined order. In a short period of time, the Occupiers turned their temporary autonomous zone into a tightly organized command-and-control centre with sectors designated for particular functions. Within its small radius, Occupy included areas for public debate, education, communication, drumming, meditation, waste management, rest and so on. It was much like a cell, with internal functions, maintaining a permeable boundary with the world around it. Occupy Wall Street constantly incorporated new molecules – in the form of curious strangers – from the outside. Either visitors would circulate out again, or they would find their function within the cell’s metabolism and stay put.
Let’s consider what’s happening – and what we might make happen – through the lens of evolutionary biology. Long ago, the trillions of cellular entities and microorganisms that make up our bodies were competing with each other, devouring each other, as they blindly sought to grow and reproduce. Through a series of crises – through an evolutionary process of trial and error – they found they could further their interests by cooperating with each other. They learned to devise more complex structures, like eyes, bones, muscles and skin.
Spontaneous Evolution is a collaboration between Bruce Lipton, a cell biologist, and Steve Bhaerman, a political philosopher. They believe we are being impelled towards our next stage of planetary civilization, marked by interdependence. We will learn to coordinate our functions within the symbiotic super-organism made up of humanity as a whole in a harmonic relationship with the Earth’s ecology.
As an analogy, they consider the process of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn’t just sprout wings. After it has devoured all of the food surrounding it, the caterpillar’s entire body melts down into a biotic goop. The code for the transmutation of the organism is held by a handful of ‘imaginal cells’ that begin to propagate as the caterpillar dissolves. At first, the dying caterpillar’s immune system attacks the imaginal cells, but this only strengthens them. As they multiply, they install the operating code for the transforming organism.
‘When provided with a new awareness,’ write Lipton and Bhaerman, ‘the cellular population that comprises the deteriorating larva collaborates to restructure their society in order to experience the next highest level of their evolution.’ We have to hope that at the inevitable end of the metamorphosis of human society, we will have a live butterfly, not a dead moth – or an army of robot flies.
Biology reveals a pattern of fractal self-similarity on different scales and levels of complexity. Immature ecosystems are characterized by competition and aggression, while mature ecosystems are based on cooperation and sharing: our own bodies provide an example of this. They follow the same principle defined by the United States’ original slogan: ‘e pluribus unum’ – ‘from the many, one’.
Evolution does not happen incrementally. Crises induce sudden mutations and rapid leaps. These leaps represent ‘an evolution of increasing levels of communal complexity and interrelationships’. Theoretically, humans are on the verge of making a jump to collective harmony, modelled on the coordinated activity that happens within our bodies, which work together to support the success of the whole without wasting or hoarding energy. That is what the pattern of evolution suggests.
Unless we wipe ourselves out entirely, I think it is inevitable. The only question, actually, is the time-scale and the amount of destruction that will occur before we make this transition. It could take hundreds or thousands of years (which are tiny segments of time, compared to the millions and billions of years of evolution), during which the human population may crash drastically due to ecological catastrophe – perhaps down to a few hundred million or less. A better option is that we use our current infrastructure to bring about this change in our current lifespans, sparing our human family untold misery and suffering.
What we will see in the future is not a further biological evolution of individual humans – we won’t suddenly mutate to be able to breathe methane and eat plastic – but a social evolution, facilitated by technologies and social technologies. Breaking through the current obstacles posed by governments, the financial system, the cult of profit and hyper-individuality, we will learn to build durable communities. A community is an assembly of individuals sharing the same interests and seeking the same goals – which can be as simple as a peaceful, happy life. Just like the microorganisms in our bodies, which gave up some degree of autonomy to become integrated within a greater whole, we will form communities to gain increased self-awareness and resilience – to enhance our happiness.
In Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright similarly proposes that evolution reveals a direction, pointing towards humanity becoming a harmonic planetary super-organism, a holon made up of nested holons. We are, inexorably, becoming a planetary community that orchestrates itself in an ever-more harmonic and unified way. ‘As technology continues to shorten economic distance, the logical scope of supranational governance could conceivably become the whole planet,’ he writes. Where I differ with Wright is that the kind of ‘supranational governance’ he envisions seems like the neoliberal New World Order taken to the next level. Instead of more corporate globalization, we can choose to reinvent our political and social systems to support local autonomy and bioregionalism within a truly planetary framework.
According to the postmodern worldview, as alienated individuals, we fight to maximize our personal advantage in a cutthroat world. The reductive scientific paradigm sees the universe as mechanistic, with genes as the master molecules determining our fate, but the new vision from biology is one of interdependence and symbiosis instead of cutthroat competition.
Much like single-celled organisms hundreds of millions of years ago, we find ourselves at a threshold where we must overcome our sense of separate identity to evolve new social organs. To survive, we must overcome limited self-interest and learn to cooperate for the benefit of the whole. This requires a change in our social nature.
As a new paradigm, epigenetics overturns the mechanistic ideology, presented by Richard Dawkins and others, that sees DNA as ‘the selfish gene’ or the ‘master molecule’ which controls the organism’s behaviour. The DNA code within a cell can produce tens of thousands of proteins. How genes express themselves, what proteins they produce, depends on the cell’s relationship with its environment, as the cell chooses, in a sense, what to incorporate into the cell’s metabolism through its permeable membrane, based on cues it picks up from its surroundings. In other words, instead of being helpless captives of our genes, we have great power to influence both our health and our environment, if we can reckon with the subconscious programmes that guide much of our behaviour.
If we are going to make a leap to a new state of consciousness and social system, we must overcome the subconscious beliefs that distort our perceptions of our world and ourselves. At the moment, a great proportion of our behaviour is controlled by invisible ghosts, phantoms from the past. These ghosts limit people’s awareness of their innate potential – their capacity to see their world clearly, heal themselves and work together for humanity’s collective benefit. This is another reason that our self-transformation requires a spiritual evolution, an opening of consciousness, not just a political change.
So far, I have tried to be as honest as possible about what I personally believe is happening to our world. I have suggested we can see the ecological crisis as an initiation and also as a necessary stage in our evolution as a species. To me, it seems that nature has not abandoned us, but has orchestrated this transition. The best I can do is give you my best efforts to understand our situation, holding nothing back. As I said earlier, you don’t have to agree with me about everything.
I have been primarily focused on the material and tangible aspects of our plight, but I think we should consider also the occult or invisible forces that may be involved, without overdoing or belabouring an examination of this question. Some writers, such as David Icke or John Lash, believe that humanity is currently controlled by off-planet or extra-terrestrial forces. This is also discussed or alluded to in many ancient works.
The Gnostics are often thought to be a sect of Christianity. In fact, the Gnostics were not Christian heretics. They carried the knowledge of the ancient Mystery Schools, which were brought to an end when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the fourth century ad. The Gnostics thought this world was an illusion – much like the simulated reality of The Matrix – constructed by deviant spirits, which they called the Archons, ruled by a cruel, deranged Demiurge. The Archons sought to compel humanity to believe in them, and to deny the existence of a true reality that we can only find through our personal efforts. In the Gnostic Gospels, Christ says, ‘Open the door for yourself, so you will know what is.’ But as Christianity merged with the Roman Empire, it enforced faith and obedience, rather than self-knowledge.
According to Lash, the Gnostics recognized the rise of Christianity as a deviation from spiritual truth. They believed it was devised by the Archons, who wanted to maintain control of humanity. When the Gnostics tried to educate the people and sound the alarm, they were killed – brutally assassinated, burnt at the stake. The priests used methods of indoctrination to control the people, in place of initiatory techniques.
David Icke believes that humanity was manipulated by extraterrestrials at some point in our past. We were intended to be a slave species. These aliens either interbred with, or perhaps performed genetic experiments on, our primate or hominid ancestors. He thinks the ruling families – many of whom can trace their family trees back to early Roman emperors – are focused on bloodlines, because they can trace their genetic descent back to our alien, reptilian overlords. The trace of this heritage is the combination of genius with sociopathy. I find this an interesting thesis, but too literal and one-dimensional.
The alchemical philosopher Patrick Harpur looks at our situation differently. He questions the basis of modern, mental–rational consciousness. We have an inveterate tendency to believe that things must be either literal or imaginary, true or false. We are trapped in either–or dualism. Traditional and aboriginal cultures don’t share this bias.
‘Traditional societies do not distinguish between myth and history in the way that we do. Mythical events were not thought to have literally happened; yet in another sense they were true, as if they had,’ Harpur writes. He quoted an ancient author, Sallust (86–34 bc), who wrote: ‘These things never happened; they are always.’ I believe we will attain the next level of consciousness as a species – overcoming the limits of mental–rational postmodernity – when we integrate the scientific worldview with this traditional perspective. We will transition from a dualistic viewpoint to an integral realization, accepting the paradoxical nature of reality.
Even our belief in a linear cause and effect is ultimately an act of faith. The universe might be organized on principles that are quite different from what we understand or imagine. The effect might precede the cause, as Nietzsche noted. ‘History is that mythical variant we have chosen to take literally,’ Harpur asserts.
By gaining initiation into the spiritual worlds, people realize the world is a cosmic illusion, ultimately a dream, as Tibetan Lamas remind us, as 5-meO-DMT directly reveals. Paradoxically, this doesn’t make the world any less important or ‘real’. The dream we are in is our precious opportunity for learning and awakening, for evolving spiritually. As it is in dreams, time may not be as linear or as straightforward as we believe it to be. There may, indeed, be other forces – powers or principalities – who seek to manipulate humanity, as the Gnostics believed; who play with us through history. But these forces are also, in the end, projections of our psyche.
If only one consciousness unfolds its creative capacities through all of us, then everything we experience as a nemesis or an opponent is actually a helper or a teacher in disguise. We have more reason to be ‘pronoiac’ than paranoiac. Pronoia is a concept developed by the astrologer Rob Brezsny. He thinks the universe is actually conspiring, at every step, to give us the most amazing experience we can handle at that moment.
I tend to agree with Brezsny, but I also think pronoia only makes sense – the world seems more pronoiac to a California dreamer than a Somalian refugee – if we also integrate Eastern ideas of karma and reincarnation. According to these wisdom traditions, our souls pass through many lifetimes; our actions in one lifetime determine our opportunities in future lives. Physics has demonstrated ‘quantum nonlocality’, where particles remain connected, even across vast distances, indicating that time itself is an illusion. Perhaps as we extend our knowledge of the quantum world, we will gain deeper ways of conceiving phenomena that are now considered mystical, such as reincarnation, or the chakra system.
If space and time are tools of our animal understanding, if they don’t exist in reality – a reality defined by quantum nonlocality – then what we call a ‘past life’ might be more like resonance with an energy cluster. A particular set of experiences, feelings and thoughts might leave an imprint or remain connected through the quantum world. The subtle bodies and esoteric energy centres could have substance through consciousness itself, held in a morphogenetic field.
What some left-wing critics call ‘empire’ is a projection of our collective ego. The ego seeks control and solidity and can’t admit these are illusions. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy discovers that a frightening spectacle of omnipotence is created by a little man hidden behind a curtain. We are in that situation today. The little man represents all of our fears and inadequacies, our lack of faith in our own powers.
In our society, a tiny group – the ruling elite, dubbed the 1 per cent by Occupiers – run the financial institutions, the mass media, the energy corporations. Seeking to maintain their power and control, this group employs experts in persuasion and propaganda, neurolinguistic programming and social psychology. It has inherited a whole structure of empire that is based on indoctrinating people, controlling them through artificial scarcity and violence, and keeping them ignorant, divided, disempowered, acting against their own interests. Now this control system is reaching its limit, confronting an obstacle which it can’t control or assimilate.
I could go much further down this rabbit hole. I could look at the connections between the Bavarian Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Yale secret society Skull and Bones, and so on. I could consider the nihilistic worship of power as something occult and, in Steiner’s terms, Ahrimanic. I don’t think it will be helpful. Conspiracy theories have a hypnotizing, fixating quality. They can be profoundly disempowering.
I do not doubt there are many levels of conspiracy and complicity among those in power. Some of them may have an occult understanding of our situation. Some may be literal Satanists. Some may believe they have contacts with entities, Gods or grey aliens, that are not from this world. Whether this is true or not, it doesn’t mean we can avoid our responsibility or abdicate our agency.
I recognize there are very strange, sinister worlds relegated to the cultural margins. These range from well-documented satanic rituals of child abuse among British Members of Parliament to semi-credible reports on treaties and technology transfers between the US government and extra-terrestrials. But these levels of subterranean connection and conspiratorial shadows are nothing compared to much more unbelievable facts. Among these is the fact that we exist at all (on a planet spinning around a star at 67,000 mph, as that star spins around the centre of the Milky Way at 450,000 mph), that the moon and the sun appear to be the same size in the sky and form perfect eclipses, that the relationships between the orbits of our planets weave perfect harmonic patterns according to Phi-based ratios, and so on.
Previous civilizations such as the Aztec, classic Maya and Egyptian understood that dark and light were complementary principles and both needed to be honoured and recognized. They created initiatory paths for those innately attracted to sorcery, malevolence and cruelty, as well as those who used ritual magic for benevolent ends and healing purposes. Mesoamerican cultures had temples dedicated to Quetzalcoatl or Kukulkan – a creator deity who protected life – as well as places to worship Tezcatlipoca, the god of black magic and the jaguar. In this way, those with innately destructive or sociopathic tendencies were integrated into the social order. By denying this polarity, monotheistic religions like Christianity actually empowered those with sociopathic tendencies to become leaders of society as a whole. If we are going to restore the sacred dimension to post-postmodern civilization, we will have to find a way to acknowledge the power of darkness, but place it within a system that allows the benevolent forces of light to guide, guard and rule.
In the transition from ancient myth-based societies to modern civilization, we lost ceremonies and rituals of initiation, while the priests and ruling elites designed a social structure based on hierarchical control and indoctrination, which kept the power in their hands, forcing the masses into obedience. In order for humanity to survive and eventually thrive, we must bring about a polar reversal of this system by creating a new synthesis, using its tools and techniques to bring about our freedom. As we will explore, there are many reasons to believe we can engineer this transformation.