What would happen if we tried to create regional participatory democracy? What would happen if we tried this out in London, New York, or Barcelona? What would it be like?
What if in London we used the existing democratic structure to return power to the population of London?
Every major decision within the current jurisdiction of the mayoralty could be voted on directly by the people, like in Porto Alegre. In actual fact, the Mayor of London—thank God—has only limited power, but we could all vote on issues that would immediately change the vibe of the place, like:
• Should all development contracts given out by the mayor and the city of London be to nonprofit co-operatives, whose workers elect their bosses, and reinvest all the money they make in London, and guarantee the living wage?
One of the things the mayor could do—and the one London has now would never do—is only grant development contracts to ethical businesses that behave themselves. My feeling is that even with the above stipulations, like paying people properly, empowering your workforce, and responsible reinvestment, these exciting new enterprises could give snidey outfits like Boots, Starbucks, and Vodafone a run for their money.* We as a community might prefer to get our stuff from outlets that aren’t ripping us off and not contributing. I’d vote for it.
• Should all new housing developments be required by law to consist of at least 70 percent affordable housing?
London doesn’t have enough affordable homes. The Mayor of London could ensure that new developers addressed this by building some. It’d also go some way to alleviating the spiritual stain of urban homelessness. That’d be cool.
• Should we be arresting drug users?
The Mayor of London has power over the Metropolitan Police Force and could ask them to stop bugging casual drug users. In fact, all drug users. The War on Drugs has been lost. People take drugs, and that’s that. All we can do is create conditions that are as safe as possible and result in as little criminal activity as possible for something that remains illegal. Most police I’ve chatted to think it’s a ball-ache nicking drug users and would be glad to drop it. We could have a vote on that.
• Should we abandon stop-and-search and the harassment of the homeless?
This is another area where the mayor’s authority over the police could save a lot of aggravation for them and the community. Actually, given the mayoralty’s power over development contracts, how about a vote for the city’s residents on this subject:
• Should all businesses granted development contracts support a citywide fund to provide shelter for all?
Imagine that! No homelessness; an end to the inhumane twitch required to steel ourselves for the guilty march past street sleepers.
• Should we subsidize the creation of democratic media and an online dialogue with the electorate?
Even though 20 percent of Londoners don’t have Internet access, which seems mad to me in my bubble, it would be good if the relationship between city administrators and the electorate became complete and ongoing. In fact, given that one-fifth of the population are offline, how about:
• Citywide free Wi-Fi for all residents, subsidized by commercial and financial interests?
The advantage of using the preexisting infrastructure of a metropolis like London is, it gives us the opportunity to demonstrate a new politics. A politics that spreads power as widely as possible and represents people directly.
As we have seen from the United States’s treatment of any nation that tries to step outside of the capitalist paradigm, any attempt to reduce corporate influence and empower people is met by extreme external pressure. That would probably happen to any public official who sought to truly devolve power.
That’s why the chance this office gives to rally for wider change ought be exploited. Regular referenda could be held to form a powerful “people’s lobby” to pressure national government and international organizations to align with the needs of the people they claim to represent.
London could become a paragon of advancing consciousness, an awakened society that organizes a good, fair, empowered life for its citizens and campaigns for global change for everyone.
The ideas I’ve collated in this book are clear, simple, and necessary. This is continually obfuscated by the representatives of a dying system that requires our docility for their ludicrous prosperity.
The feeling you have of anger is real and just; the feelings of hopelessness and despair are not.
We all have a choice. We are the creators of our reality. All we have to do is make a decision to take collective responsibility for change. Do you really think that the Revolution is a ridiculous proposition? That we cannot engineer our own structures?
What’s ridiculous is the system we have now. If we were starting society anew, who among us would propose a monarchy, an aristocracy, a financial elite that exploits the earth and farms its population?
If at one of the local or regional meetings that we have to govern our community someone proposed that, instead of equality, that all of us, including the poorest among us, donated a percentage of our income to a super-rich family with a little old lady at its helm who would turn up annually in our parliament draped in jewels and finery to tell us that austerity had to continue, you’d tell them they were mental.
If someone said that we should give 64 percent of British land to 0.28 percent of the population, we would not vote for it.
If trade agreements were proposed that meant local businesses were shackled so that transnational corporations could create a farcical tyrannical economy where produce was needlessly transported around the world for their gain and to the detriment of everyone else, it would be forbidden.
If energy companies said they wanted to be run for huge profit, without regulation, whilst harming the environment, we wouldn’t allow it.
If pharmaceutical and food companies could run their own governing bodies, flood the world with inferior and harmful products that damage, and even kill the people that use them, we would not tolerate it.
Here is the truth that they fight so hard to suppress: To create a better world, the priority is not the implementation of new systems, though that is necessary; it is a refusal to cooperate with the obsolete and harmful structures that are already in place. The Revolution will be easily enacted and beneficial to all. It is time to wake up.
In a survey that YouGov conducted among nonvoters (that we paid for and they still refused to skew, so it gave damned lying statistical answers), a third said they wanted outright Revolution, 54 percent said they didn’t vote because big businesses run Britain, and only 96 percent thought the voting public had no influence at all on the way the country was run.
Incredible that the vast majority of nonvoters have found their way to the truth, given that 70 percent of the UK press is controlled by just three companies and have a vested interest in ensuring that this truth only appears fleetingly, usually masked by tits and bingo.
Six corporations own 90 percent of all media in the United States. If you want the truth, you’re not going to get it there.
The people that own the means for conveying information, who decide what knowledge enters our minds, are on the fun bus.
My personal Revolution is to live by spiritual principles and to serve this wider change in any way I can.
It’s early in the process for me, but my infatuation with fame is waning, my need for external approval and the control of other people’s opinions is expiring.
Practically I’ve decided that profits from this book will go towards creating a place where recovering addicts like me can run a business based on the ideas in this book. A café and production company run to create community, not money, democratically managed by the workforce. No bosses. No profit. No bullshit.
Selling food sourced ethically, grown locally, and served by people who have had a Revolution in their own lives and are now able to learn and give back.
Supporting modest creative projects, building a commun
ity of people who want to be part of something other than the toxic hegemony.
We will start small but we will grow quickly because we have a limitless resource and we are providing an alternative to a dying system. There are no limits to what we can achieve if we behave collectively, responsibly, and humanely.
The world is changing and we are awakening. These statistics give us a numerical glimpse at the visceral dissatisfaction that most of us feel. Now is the time to express it. These corrupt structures cannot be maintained without our compliance. You could vote against them, if there was anything to vote for, but there isn’t, or you could stop paying your mortgage, stop paying your taxes, stop buying stuff you don’t need. When we, the majority, unite and demonstrate our new intention, we will be invincible. If we, who are complicit by our silence, become active and disobedient.
This is a pivotal time in the history of our species. We are transitioning from an ideology that places power and responsibility in the hands of the few to one where we all collectively have power. It is important that we clarify, in a manner accessible to all, which institutions and systems are beneficial and which ones have to go. It is important that we propose ideas and systems that will be advantageous, like the handful in this book, and ensure that they are presented properly. When they are inevitably disparaged by the fearful enemies of change, we must remain unified and insistent. At this climactic time, we have no choice but change.
This book, written by a twerp, with minimal interaction with brilliant thinkers and uncorrupted minds, demonstrates that.
Now, what are you going to do about it?
* * *
* I’m not saying their products are substandard, I don’t have a view on that. I’m saying that they in collusion with a compliant government avoid paying tax that pays for the social structures that allow their companies to profit.
Epilogue
For The Benefit Of The Tape
I WENT BACK TO LAKESIDE TO SEE IF ITS LUSTER REMAINED OR IF IT would be like meeting an old lover, the magic drained by time. Whilst it may architecturally resemble St. Paul’s Cathedral rebooted by a Kardashian, on arrival there’s very little to slap nostalgia on. For a place so dependent on superficial splendor and opulence, it’s peculiarly bleak, a barren edifice.
The process of parking the car is almost enough to get your gander up. By the time we’d ditched the vehicle in a gloomy, low-ceilinged, multi-storey-but-no-real-plot car park, I was so irritated by the lack of spaces and incessant checkpoints that I needed to have a fight or buy a pair of trainers, just to let off some steam.
True beauty binds you to it. Ugliness in art, architecture, or people makes you unwittingly recoil. When I watch a bit of shit theater, suddenly I’m painfully aware that I’m in a humid room, watching people gesticulate and gurn for no bloody good reason. “They’re just pretending,” I think, and feel a bit embarrassed for me and for them. Where do I situate my nostalgia on the pitiless and blank walls of Lakeside? No concession to the human is made. I bet the corporation that built Lakeside, and six malls just like it, could just as easily turn their hand to building prisons. It’s not a place for people, for public life; it’s a vacuum in a suburb that empties more than your pockets.
I ask one or two people why they’re there, and no one seems to know. There is no purposeful stride, no rolled-up-paper-under-the-arm, fag-on, tapping-the-hedge-as-you-go sense of civic participation. This is mass hypnosis. When a pigeon flies in, it seems obscene, like an unzipped fly in a wedding photograph. “What the fuck are you doing in here?” Here the birdsong is piped in; the plants are doing their best to synthetically photosynthesize, but their hearts aren’t in it as they pose in their Guantanamo urns.
I can see the absurdity of the wayward bird or the indentured flora, but, really, their presence is no more ridiculous than mine or any of the others interned in this fluorescent volt. How sparse must our hope be to come looking here.
What must I have been like to willingly subject myself to this context where nature itself seems superfluous, like pubes on a mannequin?
A wrist-slashing adolescent, escaped from pudgy and hysterical childhood until delivered into the secondary cradle of addiction.
As hapless as the pigeon and as forlorn as Wilde in Reading Jail, without even the little tent of blue sky, we are severed from ourselves, severed from God. The geometry that Lakeside mocks that’s found in every church and mosque is the material representation of the invisible connection that we’ve lost, only to walk these glistening yards. Later you will search “rice resonance” on YouTube and be shocked at the sublimely choreographed rice particles performing miraculous crop circles on top of a panel vibrating to a gradually increasing frequency.
You will see that the invisible waves that sound is made of form the shapes and patterns that define our world, that perfect geometry fills the spaces between us. The unknown is constantly addressing us; it doesn’t use our language, but it’s here, quite clear among us.
DMT—n, n-dimethyltryptamine—is a drug that, when administered in high doses, gives with eerie consistency, to those who take it, the experience of hidden realms where new consciousness is experienced. Beings are encountered that commune and reassure. DMT occurs naturally in many plants, all mammals, and in the human brain. No one knows its neurological function, but many assume it’s connected to dreaming. Dreams: more immersive and psychedelic than any drug and occurring whenever we sleep, unbidden, a nightly reminder that mystery reigns within.
Incrementally indoctrinated, we have forgotten how to dream; we have forgotten who we are. We have abandoned our connection to wonder and placed our destiny in unclean hands. Look closely next time a world leader is on your TV. Look at their face from deep within yourself. Is that the face of someone you can trust? Either a mask of Plasticine smugness, or wrought and befuddled sincerity, or smug bellicosity. Should we allow these men to govern?
On I went to Grays and was actually a bit embarrassed by how lovely the library was and how sweet the people were, as in my head I’d rendered it as a suburban South Central with myself as a white Ice-T. Nik, who was with me, on leaving the Thameside Aviation Museum judged it to be a “center of excellence,” an estuary Oxford. Harvard with a fake tan.
In fact, I must mention that I was interviewed by the police during the writing of this book, and the WPC who questioned me was so resolutely lovely, judicious, and kind, I nearly gave up on the whole revolutionary caper. There were cups of tea and codes of conduct and tales of public marches in her former life. In fact, though, this just confirms my thesis that people are beautiful and Revolution inevitable. We don’t need to grow compassion in a petri dish; everyone’s fine—we just have to scrape away a few repellent systems.
Thankfully, in Grays Park (once we’d passed the immaculately tended roses) I ran into the now-grown-up child of a girl I’d dated when I was a teenager. This child, now twenty, had a baby of her own (making my former paramour a grandmother and me inwardly wince), and she looked like she’d had a hard time.
In the short exchange between us, it was clear that in the intervening years she’d been subject to the ordinary tragedy that bludgeons normal people. Her mom—the girl I used to date, who I remember as being imbued with a powerful and adventurous spirit, the kind of girl who’s in grave danger in a small town (in Salem, she’d’ve been burned) was in a wheelchair now.
Administered the wrong drug at the wrong time by a knackered nurse during a routine visit, she’d never walk again. All around us, lives are squandered and dreams are unfulfilled.
We condition our children and ourselves to enter into this spectacle, confining ourselves to a prescribed path. My mate Matt says that when he takes his two-year-old son down to the park, he has to fight not to impose a predefined version of the experience onto the spontaneous boy, who, not knowing the script, may wander off after an ant or pick daisies when he’s supposed to be playing football. Is there a limited number of times that a child will insist on remaining
wedded to the moment? Do we eventually all become cowed and beat down and just sit in the swings like we’re supposed to?
Eckhart Tolle told me that to be free of suffering I must, in the moment of temptation, when I want to yield to anger, or jealousy, or self-pity, to recognize that the ego, that these fleeting interlopers serve, is an illusion.
When in conflict with a partner, I see myself as the sole defender of some superior truth, that I must impose this truth for some higher cause. I asked Eckhart why.
“We adopt a mental position,” he told me, then we identify with that mental position and it becomes invested with self. The self is a construction—some memories, some feelings, some opinions, a name, a bunch of photographs, real and imaginary. This conglomerate that we hold in our consciousness is temporary; it is an illusion.
The boundless energy, the hidden energy that invisibly performs its geometric dance, is real. The unified energy that is behind all diversity is real. The moment of conception, individual or universal, is real. Behind all phenomena, thoughts, things, animals, life itself, is an awareness. “Move into this awareness,” said Eckhart.
When you are in conflict or doubt, or are afraid, when you lose hope or lose people that you depend upon, move beyond the pain and fear; there is an awareness there. An awareness that has always been there. In your loneliness and suffering and darkness and fear, silently, behind it, the awareness is waiting for us to return. This awareness is the field of consciousness from which all life came, the absolute energy that precedes all and is beyond all and is within all. It is within you.
We all have this in common, but we have been convinced that we are alone. This energy, though, that compels one cell to become two, that heals wounds, that spins quarks and planets, is within us all. And all language can do is rest on top of it, or point to it, never really describing it. This force, this undeniable compulsion to come together—we all know that it’s there and we all know when it’s absent and we all know that we must be open to it now. And in spite of its ethereal and indefinable nature, we all know that it’s love.
Revolution Page 31
