But before we change the world, we need to change the way we think.
Russell Brand asks: "Is utopian revolution possible?" Photo: Reuters/Cathal McNaughton
When I was asked to edit an issue of the
New Statesman I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me. I chose the subject of revolution because the
New Statesman
is a political magazine and imagining the overthrow of the current
political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics.
When people talk about politics within the existing Westminster
framework I feel a dull thud in my stomach and my eyes involuntarily
glaze. Like when I’m conversing and the subject changes from me and
moves on to another topic. I try to remain engaged but behind my eyes I
am adrift in immediate nostalgia; “How happy I was earlier in this
chat,” I instantly think.
I have never voted. Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by
politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and
the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means
for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites. Billy
Connolly said: “Don’t vote, it encourages them,” and, “The desire to be
a politician should bar you for life from ever being one.”
I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I
know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World
Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far
as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more
potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to
participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by
obediently X-ing a little box.
Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political
and economic system is what interests me, but that’s not on the ballot.
Is utopian revolution possible? The freethinking social architect
Buckminster Fuller said humanity now faces a choice: oblivion or utopia.
We’re inertly ambling towards oblivion, is utopia really an option?
I heard recently Oliver Cromwell’s address to the rump parliament in
1653 (online, I’m not a Time Lord) where he bawls out the whole of the
House of Commons as “whores, virtueless horses and money-grabbing
dicklickers”. I added the last one but, honestly, that is the vibe. I
was getting close to admiring old Oliver for his “calls it as he sees
it, balls-out” rhetoric till I read about him on Wikipedia and learned
that beyond this brilliant
8 Mile-style takedown of corrupt
politicians he was a right arsehole; starving and murdering the Irish
and generally (and surprisingly for a Roundhead) being a total square.
The fact remains that if you were to recite his speech in parliament
today you’d be hard pushed to find someone who could be legitimately
offended.
I don’t want to get all “Call me Dave, I was chatting to my plumber,
man of the people” here, but the fact is I’m a recovering junkie so that
means I have to hang out with a lot of other junkies to keep my head
together, some of whom are clean, others who are using. Hear you this,
regular
New Statesman reader, browsing with irritation that the
culture of celebrity has just banjoed the arse of another sacred cow
and a Halloween-haired, Sachsgate-enacting, estuary-whining,
glitter-lacquered, priapic berk has been undeservedly hoisted upon
another cultural plinth, but – young people, poor people, not-rich
people, most people do not give a fuck about politics.
They see no difference between Cameron, Clegg, Boris, either of the
Milibands or anyone else. To them these names are as obsolete as Lord
Palmerston or Denis Healey. The London riots in 2011, which were
condemned as nihilistic and materialistic by Boris and Cameron (when
they eventually returned from their holidays), were by that very
definition political. These young people have been accidentally marketed
to their whole lives without the economic means to participate in the
carnival. After some draconian sentences were issued, measures that the
white-collar criminals who capsized our economy with their greed a few
years earlier avoided, and not one hoodie was hugged, the compliance
resumed. Apathy reigned.
There’s little point bemoaning this apathy. Apathy is a rational
reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the
vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the
needs of the people it was designed to serve. To me a potent and
triumphant leftist movement, aside from the glorious Occupy rumble, is a
faint, idealistic whisper from sepia rebels. The formation of the NHS,
holiday pay, sick pay, the weekend – achievements of peaceful trade
union action were not achieved in the lifetime of the directionless
London rioters. They are uninformed of the left’s great legacy as it is
dismantled around them.
Of the two possible reactions to the mechanised indifference and
inefficiency of their alleged servants, not leaders – apathy or rage –
apathy is the more accessible and is certainly preferable to those who
govern.
Righteous rage surfaces rarely only in the most galling of
circumstances, the riots or the Milly Dowler intrusion, where a basic
taboo was transgressed, then we reach beneath the stagnant quotidian to
the omnipresent truth within. In this case “respect for the dead”, the
motif upon which Sophocles’s
Antigone is founded.
Along with the absolute, all-encompassing total corruption of our
political agencies by big business, this apathy is the biggest obstacle
to change. We can’t alter the former without removing the latter. Can
this be achieved? Obviously this is a rhetorical question and without
wanting to spunk the surprise ending the answer is yes.
First, though, I should qualify my right to even pontificate on such a
topic and in so doing untangle another of revolution’s inherent
problems. Hypocrisy. How dare I, from my velvet chaise longue, in my
Hollywood home like Kubla Khan, drag my limbs from my harem to moan
about the system? A system that has posited me on a lilo made of thighs
in an ocean filled with honey and foie gras’d my Essex arse with undue
praise and money.
I once, during the early steps of this thousand-mile journey to
decadent somnambulance, found myself embroiled in a London riot. It was
around the bafflement of the millennium and we were all uptight about
zeroes lining up three wide and planes falling from the sky and the
national mood was weird.
At this point I’d attended a few protests and I loved them. At a
Liverpool dockers march, the chanting, the bristling, the rippedup
paving stones and galloping police horses in Bono glasses flipped a
switch in me. I felt connected, on a personal level I was excited by the
chaos, a necessary component of transition, I like a bit of chaos
however it’s delivered. The disruption of normalcy a vital step in any
revolution. Even aesthetically, aside from the ideology, I beam at the
spectacle of disruption, even when quite trivial. As a boy a bird in the
house defecating on our concept of domesticity as much as our settee, a
signal of the impermanence and illusory nature of our humdrum comforts.
The riot in question came when I was working at MTV and for the first
time in my life had money, which to me was little more than regal
letters to be delivered to drug dealers.
My involvement in the riot came without invitation or intention, I
was in fact oxymoronically shopping (emphasis on the moron) with a
stylist in the West End, at the expense of MTV, which is perhaps the
planet’s most obvious purveyor of neurodross and pop-cultural claptrap –
like a glistening pink pony trotting through your mind shitting
glitter.
I was smacked up and gacked up and togged up in the nitwit livery of
late-Nineties television, a crackhead Harlequin with Hoxton hair, when
it came to my attention that Reclaim the Streets had a march on. On
learning this, I without a flicker of self-awareness palmed off my
shopping bags jammed with consumer treats and headed for the throng.
Just before the kettling and boredom, while things were still buzzing,
bongos, bubbles and whistles, I was hurt when a fellow protester piously
said to me: “What you doing here? I’ve seen you, you work for MTV.” I
felt pretty embarrassed that my involvement was being questioned, in a
manner that is all too common on the left. It’s been said that: “The
right seeks converts and the left seeks traitors.” This moral
superiority that is peculiar to the left is a great impediment to
momentum. It is also a right drag when you’re trying to enjoy a riot.
Perhaps this is why there is currently no genuinely popular left-wing
movement to counter Ukip, the EDL and the Tea Party; for an ideology
that is defined by inclusiveness, socialism has become in practice quite
exclusive. Plus a bit too serious, too much up its own fundament and
not enough fun. The same could be said of the growing New Age spiritual
movement, which could be a natural accompaniment to social progression.
I’m a bit of a tree-hugging, Hindu-tattooed, veggie meditator myself but
first and foremost I want to have a fucking laugh. When Ali G, who had
joined protesters attempting to prevent a forest being felled to make
way for a road, shouted across the barricade, “You may take our trees,
but you’ll never take our freedom,” I identified more with Baron Cohen’s
amoral trickster than the stern activist who aggressively admonished
him: “This is serious, you cunt.”
A bit too fucking serious, actually. As John Cleese said, there is a
tendency to confuse seriousness with solemnity. Serious causes can and
must be approached with good humour, otherwise they’re boring and can’t
compete with the Premier League and
Grand Theft Auto. Social movements needn’t lack razzmatazz.
The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best
tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and
self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and
incubating individualism.
I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or
selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of
the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier
to connect these selfish inclinations.
This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and
acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.
If you are naked and starving and someone gives you soup and a blanket
your happiness will increase. That doesn’t mean that if you have 10,000
silken blankets and a golden cauldron of soup made from white rhino cum
your happiness will continue to proportionately increase until you’re
gouched out, swathed in silk, gurgling up pearlescent froth.
Biomechanically we are individuals, clearly. On the most obvious
frequency of our known sensorial reality we are independent anatomical
units. So we must take care of ourselves. But with our individual
survival ensured there is little satisfaction to be gained by enthroning
and enshrining ourselves as individuals.
These problems that threaten to bring on global destruction are the
result of legitimate human instincts gone awry, exploited by a dead
ideology derived from dead desert myths. Fear and desire are the twin
engines of human survival but with most of our basic needs met these
instincts are being engaged to imprison us in an obsolete fragment of
our consciousness. Our materialistic consumer culture relentlessly
stimulates our desire. Our media ceaselessly engages our fear, our
government triangulates and administrates, ensuring there are no
obstacles to the agendas of these slow-thighed beasts, slouching towards
Bethlehem.
For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily
political. This, too, is difficult terrain when the natural tribal
leaders of the left are atheists, when Marxism is inveterately Godless.
When the lumbering monotheistic faiths have given us millennia of grief
for a handful of prayers and some sparkly rituals.
By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one
another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines
what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world
work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through
spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage
of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as
it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By
teatime.
Can this be achieved when we are enslaved by old ideologies, be they
theological or economic? The absurdity of our localised consciousness
and global ignorance hit me hard when I went on a Comic Relief trip to
Kenya.
Like most of the superficially decent things I do in life, my
motivation was to impress women more than to aid the suffering. “A
couple of days in Africa,” I thought, “and a lifetime cashing in on pics
of me with thin babies, speculate to accumulate,” I assured my anxious
inner womaniser.
After visiting the slums of Kibera, where a city built from mud and
run on fear festers on the suburbs of Nairobi, I was sufficiently
schooled by Live Aid and Michael Buerk to maintain an emotional
distance. It was only when our crew visited a nearby rubbish dump that
the comforting buoyancy of visual clichés rinsed away by the deluge of a
previously inconceivable reality. This rubbish dump was not like some
tip off the M25 where you might dump a fridge freezer or a smashed-in
mattress. This was a nation made of waste with no end in sight. Domestic
waste, medical waste, industrial waste formed their own perverse
geography. Stinking rivers sluiced through banks of putrid trash,
mountains, valleys, peaks and troughs all formed from discarded filth.
An ecology based on our indifference and ignorance in the “cradle of
civilisation” where our species is said to have originated. Here amid
the pestilence I saw Armageddon. Here the end of the world is not a
prophecy but a condition. A demented herd chewed polystyrene cud. Sows
fed their piglets in the bilge. Gloomy shadows split the sun as marabou
storks, five foot in span with ragged labial throats, swooped down. My
mate Nik said he had to revise his vision of hell to include what he’d
seen.
Kibera in Kenya. Photo: Getty
Here and there, picking through this unending slander, children
foraged for bottle tops, which had some value, where all is worthless.
For a while when I returned to my sanitised house and my sanitised
state of mind I guiltily thumbed bottle tops for a moment before I
disposed of them; temporarily they were like crucifixes for these kids,
sacrificed that I may live in privilege. A few weeks later I was in
Paris at a Givenchy fashion show where the most exquisite garments
cantered by on underfed, well-bred clothes horses. The spectacle was
immaculate, smoke-filled bubbles burst on to the runway. To be here in
this gleaming sophistication was heaven. Here starvation is a tool to
achieve the perfect perpendicular pelvis.
Now, I bow to no one in my appreciation of female beauty and fancy
clobber but I could not wrench the phantom of those children from my
mind, in this moment I felt the integration; that the price of this
decadence was their degradation. That these are not dislocated ideas but
the two extremes are absolutely interdependent. The price of privilege
is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is
“not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its
pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met,
we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented
through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
To have such suffering adjacent to such excess is akin to marvelling
at an incomparable beauty, whose face is the radiant epitome of
celestial symmetry, and ignoring, half a yard lower down, her abdomen,
cancerous, weeping and carbuncled. “Keep looking at the face, put a
handbag over those tumours. Strike a pose. Come on,
Vogue.”
Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners
of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth.
Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems
are all due to the lack of relevant myths. That we are trying to sustain
social cohesion using redundant ideologies devised for a population
that lived in deserts millennia ago. What does it matter if 2,000 years
ago Christ died on the cross and was resurrected if we are not
constantly resurrected to the truth, anew, moment to moment? How is his
transcendence relevant if we do not resurrect our consciousness from the
deceased, moribund mind of our obsolete ideologies and align with our
conditions?
The model of pre-Christian man has fulfilled its simian objectives.
We have survived, we have created agriculture and cities. Now this
version of man must be sacrificed that we can evolve beyond the reaches
of the ape. These stories contain great clues to our survival when we
release ourselves from literalism and superstition. What are ideologies
other than a guide for life? Throughout paganism one finds stories that
integrate our species with our environment to the benefit of both. The
function and benefits of these belief matrixes have been lost, with good
reason. They were socialist, egalitarian and integrated. If like the
Celtic people we revered the rivers we would prioritise this sacred
knowledge and curtail the attempts of any that sought to pollute the
rivers. If like the Nordic people we believed the souls of our ancestors
lived in the trees, this connection would make mass deforestation
anathema. If like the native people of America we believed God was in
the soil what would our intuitive response be to the implementation of
fracking?
Little wonder then that these myths, these codes for our protection
and survival, have been aborted and replaced with nihilistic narratives
of individualism, peopled by sequin-covered vacuous heroes. Now we only
riot and roar in hot summers or at football scores or when our dead are
desecrated by the vile publications that convey this corrosive,
corrupting, deceitful narrative.
I deplore corporate colonialism but not viscerally. The story isn’t
presented in a way that rouses me. Apple seems like such an affable
outfit; I like my iPhone. Occasionally I hear some yarn about tax
avoidance or Chinese iPhone factory workers committing suicide because
of dreadful working conditions but it doesn’t really bother me, it seems
so abstract. Not in the same infuriating, visceral, immediate way that I
get pissed off when I buy a new phone and they’ve changed the fucking
chargers, then I want to get my old, perfectly good charger and lynch
the executives with the cable. They make their own product, which
they’ve already sold me, deliberately obsolete just to rinse a few more
quid out of us.
But profit is not a dirty word. I hate big banks and banking and
bankers but when they rip us off and do us down with derivatives and
foreclosures and bundles, I roll my eyes. However when I see that I’m
getting a £3.50 surcharge at a cash machine I want to put their fucking
windows through. This is the selfish impulse the right expertly engages
but ought to belong to the left. We have to see that all these things
are connected. We have succumbed to an ideology that is 100 per cent
corrupt and must be overthrown. The maintenance of this system depends
on our belief that “there’s nothing we can do”; well, the government
seemed pretty shook up during those riots. They snapped out of their
Tuscan complacency quick enough then, and that was for a few pissed-off
kids.
Those kids weren’t apathetic either. They felt impotent because they
are given no status, structure or space. Perhaps in a system where
legitimate, peaceful protest was heard that may have been an appropriate
option for them, but Stop the War marches don’t stop wars, at the top
of the pyramid larceny is rewarded with big bonuses. They may have been
misdirected but they certainly had some vim. How beautiful it would be
to see their passion utilised and directed at the source of their
grievances.
The system is adept at turning our aggression on to one another. We
condemn the rioters. The EDL condemns immigrants. My new rule for when I
fancy doing a bit of the ol’ condemnation is: “Do the people I’m
condemning have any actual power?” The immigrant capacity to cause
social negativity is pretty slender. Especially if you live in luxury in
Hollywood and the only immigrants you meet are Gabby, my Mexican second
mother, and Polo who looks after the garden. It probably seems more
serious if you’re in a council flat in Tower Hamlets. Still the fact
remains that an immigrant is just someone who used to be somewhere else.
Free movement of global capital will necessitate the free movement of
an affordable labour force to meet the demands that the free-moving
capital has created. The wrath is directed to the symptom, not the
problem.
We British seem to be a bit embarrassed about revolution, like the
passion is uncouth or that some tea might get spilled on our cuffs in
the uprising. That revolution is a bit French or worse still American.
Well, the alternative is extinction so now might be a good time to
re-evaluate. The apathy is in fact a transmission problem, when we are
given the correct information in an engaging fashion, we will stir.
The hypocrisy – me, working for MTV with my fancy shoes – is a
problem that can be taken care of incrementally. I don’t mind giving up
some of my baubles and balderdash for a genuinely fair system, so can we
create one? We have to be inclusive of everyone, to recognise our
similarities are more important than our differences and that we have an
immediate ecological imperative. This is not a job I’d place in the
hot, clammy, grasping palms of Cameron and Osborne. I shook George
Osborne’s hand once, by accident, it was like sliding my hand into a
dilated cow.
We require a change that is beyond the narrow, prescriptive
parameters of the current debate, outside the fortress of our current
system. A system predicated on aspects of our nature that are dangerous
when systemic: greed, selfishness and fear. These are old, dead ideas.
That’s why their business is conducted in archaic venues. Antiquated,
elegant edifices, lined with oak and leather. We no longer have the
luxury of tradition.
Cameron, Osborne, Boris, all of them lot, they went to the same
schools and the same universities that have the same decor as the old
buildings from which they now govern us. It’s not that they’re
malevolent; it’s just that they’re irrelevant. Relics of an old notion,
like Old Spice: it’s fine that it exists but no one should actually use
it.
We are still led by blithering chimps, in razor-sharp suits, with
razor-sharp lines, pimped and crimped by spin doctors and
speech-writers. Well-groomed ape-men, superficially altered by
post-Clintonian trends.
We are mammals on a planet, who now face a struggle for survival if
our species is to avoid expiry. We can’t be led by people who have never
struggled, who are a dusty oak-brown echo of a system dreamed up by
Whigs and old Dutch racists.
We now must live in reality, inner and outer. Consciousness itself
must change. My optimism comes entirely from the knowledge that this
total social shift is actually the shared responsibility of six billion
individuals who ultimately have the same interests. Self-preservation
and the survival of the planet. This is a better idea than the
sustenance of an elite. The Indian teacher Yogananda said: “It doesn’t
matter if a cave has been in darkness for 10,000 years or half an hour,
once you light a match it is illuminated.” Like a tanker way off course
due to an imperceptible navigational error at the offset we need only
alter our inner longitude.
Capitalism is not real; it is an idea. America is not real; it is an
idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate,
Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice
ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though,
cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.
The reality is we have a spherical ecosystem, suspended in, as far as
we know, infinite space upon which there are billions of carbon-based
life forms, of which we presume ourselves to be the most important, and a
limited amount of resources.
The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally
serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly,
bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently
without alternatives. This is why I believe we need a unifying and in -
clusive spiritual ideology: atheism and materialism atomise us and
anchor us to one frequency of consciousness and inhibit necessary
co-operation.
In 2013 (another made-up imaginary concept) we cannot afford to
giggle, drivel and burp like giant, pube-covered babies about quaint,
old-fashioned notions like nation, capitalism and consumerism simply
because it’s convenient for the tiny, greedy, myopic sliver of the
population that those outmoded ideas serve. I will never vote because,
as Billy said, “It encourages them.” I did a job with Billy Connolly and
Eddie Izzard not long ago and the three of us shared a dressing room.
Eddie believes in democracy and spoke sincerely of his political
ambitions. “One day I’d like to be a politician . . .” he said. I spoke
of my belief that change could only come from within. “I’d like to be a
spiritual orator . . .” I said grandly.
Billy eyed us both, with kindly disapprobation. “I’d like to be a
nuisance,” he said. “I want to be a troublemaker, there in the gallery
in parliament shouting RUBBISH and PROVE IT.” Who am I to argue with The
Great Trickster Connolly? I will never vote and I don’t think you
should, either.
To genuinely make a difference, we must become different; make the
tiny, longitudinal shift. Meditate, direct our love indiscriminately and
our condemnation exclusively at those with power. Revolt in whatever
way we want, with the spontaneity of the London rioters, with the
certainty and willingness to die of religious fundamentalists or with
the twinkling mischief of the trickster. We should include everyone,
judging no one, without harming anyone. The Agricultural Revolution took
thousands of years, the Industrial Revolution took hundreds of years,
the Technological Revolution took tens, the Spiritual Revolution has
come and we have only an instant to act.
Now there is an opportunity for the left to return to its vital,
virile, vigorous origins. A movement for the people, by the people, in
the service of the land. Socialism’s historical connection with
spiritual principles is deep. Sharing is a spiritual principle,
respecting our land is a spiritual principle. May the first, May Day, is
a pagan holiday where we acknowledge our essential relationship with
our land. I bet the Tolpuddle martyrs, who marched for fair pay for
agricultural workers, whose legacy is the right for us to have social
solidarity, were a right bunch of herberts if you knew them. “Thugs,
yobs, hooligans,” the
Daily Mail would’ve called them. Our
young people need to know there is a culture, a strong, broad union,
that they can belong to, that is potent, virile and alive. At this time
when George and Dave pilfer and pillage our land and money for their
oligarch mates, at this time when the Tories are taking the EU to court
to stop it curtailing their banker pals’ bonuses, that there is
something they can do. Take to the streets, together, with the
understanding that the feeling that you aren’t being heard or seen or
represented isn’t psychosis; it’s government policy.
But we are far from apathetic, we are far from impotent. I take great
courage from the groaning effort required to keep us down, the
institutions that have to be fastidiously kept in place to maintain this
duplicitous order. Propaganda, police, media, lies. Now is the time to
continue the great legacy of the left, in harmony with its implicit
spiritual principles. Time may only be a human concept and therefore
ultimately unreal, but what is irrefutably real is that this is the time
for us to wake up.
The revolution of consciousness is a decision, decisions take a moment. In my mind the revolution has already begun.
Find Russell on Twitter: @rustyrockets . To subscribe to the New Statesman, click here . Watch Russell introducing the contents of the rest of his issue:
Puharich
made ELF waves change RNA and DNA, breaking hydrogen bonds to make a
person have a higher vibratory rate. He wanted to go beyond the psychic 8
Hz brainwave and attract psi phenomena. James Hurtak, who once worked
for Puharich, also wrote in his book The Keys of Enoch that ultra-violet
caused hydrogen bonds to break and this raised the vibratory rate.
“Brice Taylor is the pseudonym for Susan Ford, one of the highest level
MK Ultra mind controlled victims to ever come forward and reveal her
story. It took her nearly 13 years to recover the memories of the events
that she reveals in her book, 