Tough question to answer for me for the simple reason that I never fully researched the scope of the problems your country faced during that financial crisis. I realize there were arguments for and against, but what I can say, from what I can remember, is that the bailouts were wrought with lucrative payouts to many of the very people responsible for the crisis.
This is ludicrous if indeed I have this correct.
im fucking sure you be very correct
these assholes been fuckin everyone over for a real long time
they be gettin paid, the big shots do... mmmhhmmmm
Tough question to answer for me for the simple reason that I never fully researched the scope of the problems your country faced during that financial crisis. I realize there were arguments for and against, but what I can say, from what I can remember, is that the bailouts were wrought with lucrative payouts to many of the very people responsible for the crisis.
This is ludicrous if indeed I have this correct.
im fucking sure you be very correct
these assholes been fuckin everyone over for a real long time
they be gettin paid, the big shots do... mmmhhmmmm
Then this is a blatant case that demonstrates how rank has its privileges: the 'elite' are beyond reproach. It's criminal.
I'm arguing to fight poverty and inequity, but here's a thought that was expressed in a similar conversation a few days ago: if we were indeed able to solve global poverty... could the planet sustain the new demands placed upon it by a dramatically heightened consumer base?
I don't think we need a situation where everyone consumes as much as we in the West do, but a situation where we in the West consume less, and everyone kind of meets in the middle.
Though maybe even that will be too much for the Earth to handle, as there are too may people in the World.
I expect for things to really change, Mother nature will need to deliver some serious blowback.
Personally, I'm turning my back on the whole rat race next year, and heading out into the World. Not sure how that will work out.
I'm arguing to fight poverty and inequity, but here's a thought that was expressed in a similar conversation a few days ago: if we were indeed able to solve global poverty... could the planet sustain the new demands placed upon it by a dramatically heightened consumer base?
I don't think we need a situation where everyone consumes as much as we in the West do, but a situation where we in the West consume less, and everyone kind of meets in the middle.
Though maybe even that will be too much for the Earth to handle, as there are too may people in the World.
I expect for things to really change, Mother nature will need to deliver some serious blowback.
Personally, I'm turning my back on the whole rat race next year, and heading out into the World. Not sure how that will work out.
I don't think Mother Nature discerns. While we help with population checks such as when we wage war, she depends on big ticket items such as droughts, famine and disease. Even with our most generous reforms... if everyone became even moderately 'comfortable'... I'm afraid the results would be disastrous.
Any way you slice it... we're damned. Our population is out of control and our methodology to support our burgeoning numbers is unsustainable as it is. It might be best to make everyone who is here as comfortable as possible until... who knows what?
Any way you slice it... we're damned. Our population is out of control and our methodology to support our burgeoning numbers is unsustainable as it is. It might be best to make everyone who is here as comfortable as possible until... who knows what?
A good excuse to get drunk and enjoy iy while we can.
Pretty much. Will be traipsing around S.E Asia for the forseeable future. Heading across Indonesia to some unexplored places. I anticipate tribes, volcanoes, beaches, jungles, and psychedelic squeegeeing of my third eye.
Any way you slice it... we're damned. Our population is out of control and our methodology to support our burgeoning numbers is unsustainable as it is. It might be best to make everyone who is here as comfortable as possible until... who knows what?
A good excuse to get drunk and enjoy iy while we can.
Pretty much. Will be traipsing around S.E Asia for the forseeable future. Heading across Indonesia to some unexplored places. I anticipate tribes, volcanoes, beaches, jungles, and psychedelic squeegeeing of my third eye.
Good call. Really cool. A 'time out'. It will almost assuredly be some of the best times of your life.
A massive redistribution of wealth.
Heavy taxation of corporations.
A massive responsibility for energy companies.
How do we get these items done?
I agree that the 'vote' is overrated. Vote for who? And how will that make a difference? In the end, it all comes out the same. People are truly powerless. It will take a selfless, great leader to correct the wrongdoings of the current system. The problem is that these types are never promoted and usually laughed off by a public that is tricked into thinking they are idiots. Give me someone with a vision for a better country and world and I will vote for them. Place two greedy, spoiled assholes for me to decide who I like better and that is tough to do. Hmmm. Satan? Or Hitler? Hmmm. In the bigger picture, it's probably better that I don't drive to the polling station and burn fossil fuels doing so.
I liked one of the comments: sometimes I think the war has already been fought and the good guys lost.
Great post Thirty! All in all, we're fucked until some sort of messiah comes..... :corn:
what
Chadwick, I was referring to us waiting for a great leader. As in a messiah, to save our country. Unfortunately, those leaders just DNT EXIST.
Pretty much. Will be traipsing around S.E Asia for the forseeable future. Heading across Indonesia to some unexplored places. I anticipate tribes, volcanoes, beaches, jungles, and psychedelic squeegeeing of my third eye.
I know we're a little off topic here but Byrnzie, will you have internet access along the way? It would be fascinating to hear about your adventures!
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Pretty much. Will be traipsing around S.E Asia for the forseeable future. Heading across Indonesia to some unexplored places. I anticipate tribes, volcanoes, beaches, jungles, and psychedelic squeegeeing of my third eye.
I know we're a little off topic here but Byrnzie, will you have internet access along the way? It would be fascinating to hear about your adventures!
i thought the exact same thing today while swimming. i need.... we need byrnzie here
i was thinking also how amazing this adventure will be. this is a amazing quest for him. i would like to read about what he lives. i am a bit jealous & i never ever get jealous. my personal goal if it were me???? opium, hash & heroin.
some places it's illegal. some places it's full on. as long as i could be a meditating wanna-be monk relaxing on a cloud... i'm good to go. help farmers pull weeds & plow fields with buffalo to earn my keep... high as fuck writing my poetry
some of the best drugs on the planet are located right there.
Byrnzie, fucken awesome man! A trip I'd love to take myself. Good luck to you my friend and have a blast seeking your 3rd eye! So fucken jealous!!! Good for you man! Please keep us informed of your adventures. :thumbup:
Byrnzie, fucken awesome man! A trip I'd love to take myself. Good luck to you my friend and have a blast seeking your 3rd eye! So fucken jealous!!! Good for you man! Please keep us informed of your adventures. :thumbup:
although I have been saying the evils of corporations for years ... the real problem are the people ... what are you gonna do when the majority of the population are absolutely clueless? ... like i said on the scams thread ... biggest scam out there is the economy ... it's their biggest tool in manipulating people ...
i thought the exact same thing today while swimming. i need.... we need byrnzie here
i was thinking also how amazing this adventure will be. this is a amazing quest for him. i would like to read about what he lives. i am a bit jealous & i never ever get jealous. my personal goal if it were me???? opium, hash & heroin.
some places it's illegal. some places it's full on. as long as i could be a meditating wanna-be monk relaxing on a cloud... i'm good to go. help farmers pull weeds & plow fields with buffalo to earn my keep... high as fuck writing my poetry
some of the best drugs on the planet are located right there.
good luck, byrnzie
becareful as well
I'll do what I can.
Like Satan, I plan to 'go to and fro in the Earth, and walk up and down in it'.
i thought the exact same thing today while swimming. i need.... we need byrnzie here
i was thinking also how amazing this adventure will be. this is a amazing quest for him. i would like to read about what he lives. i am a bit jealous & i never ever get jealous. my personal goal if it were me???? opium, hash & heroin.
some places it's illegal. some places it's full on. as long as i could be a meditating wanna-be monk relaxing on a cloud... i'm good to go. help farmers pull weeds & plow fields with buffalo to earn my keep... high as fuck writing my poetry
some of the best drugs on the planet are located right there.
good luck, byrnzie
becareful as well
I'll do what I can.
Like Satan, I plan to 'go to and fro in the Earth, and walk up and down in it'.
I'll let you know what I find along the way.
Have fun man, it will be impossible not to.
I was lucky enough to hit the town with Byrnzie in Hong Kong (beers only ) and it was a good time
i thought the exact same thing today while swimming. i need.... we need byrnzie here
i was thinking also how amazing this adventure will be. this is a amazing quest for him. i would like to read about what he lives. i am a bit jealous & i never ever get jealous. my personal goal if it were me???? opium, hash & heroin.
some places it's illegal. some places it's full on. as long as i could be a meditating wanna-be monk relaxing on a cloud... i'm good to go. help farmers pull weeds & plow fields with buffalo to earn my keep... high as fuck writing my poetry
some of the best drugs on the planet are located right there.
good luck, byrnzie
becareful as well
I'll do what I can.
Like Satan, I plan to 'go to and fro in the Earth, and walk up and down in it'.
I'll let you know what I find along the way.
Have fun man, it will be impossible not to.
I was lucky enough to hit the town with Byrnzie in Hong Kong (beers only ) and it was a good time
That's sweet! I wouldn't mind hitting up the town with either of ya guys!
Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition”
But before we change the world, we need to change the way we think.
By Russell Brand Published 24 October 2013
'...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.
...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.
...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.
Here and there, picking through this unending slander, children foraged for bottle tops, which had some value, where all is worthless.
...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?
...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.
...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.
...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.
...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.
...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.
Of significant meaning to me were these words offered (after noting the astronomical discrepancy that existed between the slums of Kibera and a Givenchy fashion show in Paris):
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.
"We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning."
True. For me, at least, the novelty of accumulating stuff, and being distracted/entertained by other people, lost it's meaning for me a long time ago. I remember having a realization about 15 years ago when working a night shift in a plastics factory, that my existence, and society as a whole were completely devoid of meaning. I was no different from the machine that I was operating. Part of a production line, that had nothing to do with creativity, or meaning. We're all just a cogs in a huge wheel, generating more crap, and more machines, and more cogs.
I mean, when you realize that most of the people who allegedly represent 'us', are nothing but wankers, it's not a stretch to then begin questioning the whole basis of our way of life. Why should we accept the rightness of our Western, industrialized, consumerist lifestyle? How do we know that it's not fundamentally flawed?
As for politics, it's redundant. Wouldn't it be better for everyone to not vote, so that the politicians, and the system they represent, can be exposed for the obsolete facade that it is?
Our civilization, our species, is plundering the Earth, and destroying it, and ourselves, in the process. And for what? Not for any necessity, such as food, but for crap we don't need, but which distracts us, allows us to white-out, titillates our senses, and envelops us in a cozy shell that has nothing to do with the reality of our species living ephemeral lives on a planet with finite resources.
And they have the gall to make drugs illegal? :fp:
Byrnzie, thanks for the chopped up version you posted. The guy can write, that's for sure. There are a lot of good ideas in there, and on a broad-view level I agree with a lot of it. I find myself a little uncertain of what he really means by 'consciousness' and how it relates to the exactly to the humanitarian and ecological crises he describes. The problem, I think, is to unpack each idea and address the problems within our existing framework (because how the hell else could it be done?) without winding up with further conflict. How do we clean up the dumps (ecological) without wreaking havoc on the people who make their living by them (humanitarian). Of course this should and must be done, but how? There's a 'give a man a fish, teach a man to fish' colonialism wariness here that must be figured out. Even in the way I phrase it there's the 'us' and 'them' dichotomy that is at the center of the problem.
I really like the Billy Connolly quotes in the beginning about voting. It's interesting to think of the process as another means of control the few have over the many. It also makes me wonder, I know voter turnout in the US is incredibly low, even for Presidential elections overall it doesn't really reach into majority territory does it? And I think we all know that there's a LOT more people here than 'voters'. I won't pretend to know how this goes in the UK.
"revolution seems a bit french, or worse, american.."
make the planet a priority? revolution? corporate elite? myths? ... all concepts i espouse however, i think where he is wrong is the notion of extinction or annihilation ... the planet will always have life and humans will be around as long as the sun burns ...
the reason for preserving the planet is to to limit suffering ... the suffering of all kinds of life ... that is why we aim to preserve the planet ...
because all you need is food and water to survive ... all there needs to be for food to grow is the sun ... there will always be food and there will always be water ...
because all you need is food and water to survive ... all there needs to be for food to grow is the sun ... there will always be food and there will always be water ...
Or...... if you have read The Road, there will always be other peoples babies to eat.
Comments
another fact useless major change comes along
at this moment i don't want to vote
imagine not voting?
it has to happen
we need to reboot the system
it is a fact what this guy says
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
these assholes been fuckin everyone over for a real long time
they be gettin paid, the big shots do... mmmhhmmmm
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
Then this is a blatant case that demonstrates how rank has its privileges: the 'elite' are beyond reproach. It's criminal.
I don't think we need a situation where everyone consumes as much as we in the West do, but a situation where we in the West consume less, and everyone kind of meets in the middle.
Though maybe even that will be too much for the Earth to handle, as there are too may people in the World.
I expect for things to really change, Mother nature will need to deliver some serious blowback.
Personally, I'm turning my back on the whole rat race next year, and heading out into the World. Not sure how that will work out.
I don't think Mother Nature discerns. While we help with population checks such as when we wage war, she depends on big ticket items such as droughts, famine and disease. Even with our most generous reforms... if everyone became even moderately 'comfortable'... I'm afraid the results would be disastrous.
Any way you slice it... we're damned. Our population is out of control and our methodology to support our burgeoning numbers is unsustainable as it is. It might be best to make everyone who is here as comfortable as possible until... who knows what?
You're going into the wild?
A good excuse to get drunk and enjoy iy while we can.
Pretty much. Will be traipsing around S.E Asia for the forseeable future. Heading across Indonesia to some unexplored places. I anticipate tribes, volcanoes, beaches, jungles, and psychedelic squeegeeing of my third eye.
Good call. Really cool. A 'time out'. It will almost assuredly be some of the best times of your life.
Chadwick, I was referring to us waiting for a great leader. As in a messiah, to save our country. Unfortunately, those leaders just DNT EXIST.
i was saying to you, hello, you rang. i am here
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
I know we're a little off topic here but Byrnzie, will you have internet access along the way? It would be fascinating to hear about your adventures!
i was thinking also how amazing this adventure will be. this is a amazing quest for him. i would like to read about what he lives. i am a bit jealous & i never ever get jealous. my personal goal if it were me???? opium, hash & heroin.
some places it's illegal. some places it's full on. as long as i could be a meditating wanna-be monk relaxing on a cloud... i'm good to go. help farmers pull weeds & plow fields with buffalo to earn my keep... high as fuck writing my poetry
some of the best drugs on the planet are located right there.
good luck, byrnzie
becareful as well
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
I'll do what I can.
Like Satan, I plan to 'go to and fro in the Earth, and walk up and down in it'.
I'll let you know what I find along the way.
Probably. But I'm hoping to try and give it a wide berth for a while.
We'll miss you for sure but have a great journey, Byrnzie! Keep us posted when you fell like doing so.
Cheers. Won't be until next year anyway.
Have fun man, it will be impossible not to.
I was lucky enough to hit the town with Byrnzie in Hong Kong (beers only
That's sweet! I wouldn't mind hitting up the town with either of ya guys!
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/20 ... revolution
Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition”
But before we change the world, we need to change the way we think.
By Russell Brand Published 24 October 2013
'...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.
...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.
...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.
Here and there, picking through this unending slander, children foraged for bottle tops, which had some value, where all is worthless.
...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?
...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.
...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.
...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.
...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.
...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.
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.
True. For me, at least, the novelty of accumulating stuff, and being distracted/entertained by other people, lost it's meaning for me a long time ago. I remember having a realization about 15 years ago when working a night shift in a plastics factory, that my existence, and society as a whole were completely devoid of meaning. I was no different from the machine that I was operating. Part of a production line, that had nothing to do with creativity, or meaning. We're all just a cogs in a huge wheel, generating more crap, and more machines, and more cogs.
I mean, when you realize that most of the people who allegedly represent 'us', are nothing but wankers, it's not a stretch to then begin questioning the whole basis of our way of life. Why should we accept the rightness of our Western, industrialized, consumerist lifestyle? How do we know that it's not fundamentally flawed?
As for politics, it's redundant. Wouldn't it be better for everyone to not vote, so that the politicians, and the system they represent, can be exposed for the obsolete facade that it is?
Our civilization, our species, is plundering the Earth, and destroying it, and ourselves, in the process. And for what? Not for any necessity, such as food, but for crap we don't need, but which distracts us, allows us to white-out, titillates our senses, and envelops us in a cozy shell that has nothing to do with the reality of our species living ephemeral lives on a planet with finite resources.
And they have the gall to make drugs illegal? :fp:
I really like the Billy Connolly quotes in the beginning about voting. It's interesting to think of the process as another means of control the few have over the many. It also makes me wonder, I know voter turnout in the US is incredibly low, even for Presidential elections overall it doesn't really reach into majority territory does it? And I think we all know that there's a LOT more people here than 'voters'. I won't pretend to know how this goes in the UK.
"revolution seems a bit french, or worse, american.."
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the reason for preserving the planet is to to limit suffering ... the suffering of all kinds of life ... that is why we aim to preserve the planet ...
How do you figure that?
Because we are as resourceful and adaptive as any species on this planet. Outside of cockroaches... we'll likely be the last species to make an exit.
because all you need is food and water to survive ... all there needs to be for food to grow is the sun ... there will always be food and there will always be water ...
Or...... if you have read The Road, there will always be other peoples babies to eat.
i will draw the line at cannibalism ...