Regenerative Revolutions

On not quite giving up on humanity

I guest-edited Purple Magazine’s new “Revolutions” issue. This is my essay for the issue, which you can find sandwiched between glamorous fashion spreads. Please let me know what you think in the comments.

I have a terrible yet relatively common confession to make: over the last six to eight years, I lost faith in humanity. I gave up.

I convinced myself that we were inevitably headed for extinction in the very near future: 50 years, give or take. I felt that nothing mattered; the jig was up. And that was even before AI happened, with its incipient threat to turn all matter in the universe into paperclips, annihilating us accidentally.

How did I reach such a somber conclusion?

Previously, I had been a visionary optimist with an esoteric bent. I had written a number of books: the first, Breaking Open the Head (2002), on psychedelic shamanism, preceded and helped to inspire the psychedelic renaissance of the last decades. My second, Quetzalcoatl Returns (2006), explored the prophecies of indigenous and ancient cultures around the world as they relate to our time. It was, briefly, a New York Times bestseller; I had the honor of introducing ayahuasca and iboga to Stephen Colbert on late-night TV. Rolling Stone ran a long, quite nasty profile of me. While this hurt my feelings, it seemed a good sign: my radical ideas were unsettling the establishment, which needed to organize a preemptive strike.

Then my third book didn’t come out for another decade. Fearing the approaching apocalypse, I made a determined effort to put my ideas (about prophecy, anarchism, ecology, and social change) into practice. I undertook this as a kind of intentional martyrdom, driving myself mildly insane in the process.

I started a Web magazine and a nonprofit, helped to build a global network of local communities — the basis for revolutionary social change — linked together through an alternative media infrastructure. We had 60 local groups at its zenith, but the project collapsed after some years due to funding and personality issues. I was devastated.

Finally, in How Soon Is Now (2016), I offered a full-spectrum scheme — a systemic action plan — to avert ecological collapse and create a cooperative, emancipated “utopia.” Sting and Russell Brand wrote introductions, which I hoped would ensure popular interest. But the book fell through the cracks. Trump and Brexit sucked the oxygen out of the culture. I felt most people preferred to wallow in dystopia or nihilism, rather than work toward — fight for — alternatives.

I fell into yet another personal abyss. It took me a number of years to climb back out of it. I think, now, I am out of it, finally.

By nature, I am a voracious researcher. As a college dropout, I am an autodidact. When I started How Soon Is Now — partly why it took so long — I had to dive into many areas that were completely foreign to me. I pored over gloomy reports on the environmental megacrisis, read political philosophy, economic theory, plans for renewable energy implementation, and so on.

One of my inspirations was the American design scientist Richard Buckminster Fuller (creator of the geodesic dome, among other wonders). Fuller believed that modern civilization was cursed by overspecialization. A scientist might spend an entire career tinkering with one fragment of a chromosome, ignoring the larger context.

What we needed were “comprehensive generalists” to draw connections between diverse phenomena, Fuller proposed. I took it upon myself to become such a generalist, tasking myself with defining a meta-level overview of humanity’s current plight, in order to find a way out of it.

I realize the topic of this essay (and issue) is “Revolutions.” Don’t worry: I will get to it.

With the help of many (too many) psychedelic trips over many years, I tried to bear witness to our situation on Earth: I envisioned myself as a long-living extraterrestrial observing us, over many centuries, from his base on a distant moon. That wise, ancient entity would see small-scale communities aggregate into larger civilizations, track our wars and conquests, trade routes and innovations. The alien would witness as our human world meshed itself together into one planetary whole via shipping lines, highways, flight patterns, fiber-optic cables, and satellites. It would be a bit like watching the brain of a baby developing synaptic connections, slowly becoming aware of its own agency.

That ancient watcher would also see how, in our rush toward technological progress, we poisoned our air and water, drove millions of species to extinction, and broke the climate. It would note how once useful systems and ideologies outlived their usefulness, perpetuating themselves via inertia, causing damage and confusion. It would register the masses of humans caught in obsolete beliefs and ideologies.

These obsolete ideologies — I believed back then — include our current model of capitalism, nationalism, and also our enshrined ideals of monogamy and romantic love. Reductive scientific materialism that leaves no space for a soul or anything that transcends this reality is outmoded — but so are the ossified religious structures that unleash fanatics and zealots hypnotized by ancient scriptures. I tried to strip away layers of social conditioning and programming, to reach some essence of understanding upon which we could build a new, better world.

Obviously, in this single essay, I can’t explore all of those topics, so let’s take just one of them: capitalism.

Many of us now understand that the intrinsic flaw of capitalism is that it only values financial exchanges. A publicly traded company is forced to maximize short-term profits for its shareholders: that is its fiduciary responsibility. This means it must ignore “externalities” of all kinds, such as the integrity of local communities or healthy ecosystems. There are efforts from within the global financial system to address these systemic issues, by compelling companies to address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Soon, there will also be biodiversity development goals. But these seem to be coming too late and too slow to address the ecological emergency.

Perhaps it is taboo to mention this in a magazine largely supported by the fashion system, but part of the problem with capitalism is that it continually pushes excess consumption via media and engineered peer pressure (easy to manufacture: humans are herd animals). “Planned obsolescence” and “conspicuous consumption” are built into its DNA. Capitalism must create “false needs” and fads, as well as new products to satisfy those insatiable desires. The entire “culture of cool” is, in itself, a mechanism for moving product.

Considering a larger historical cycle, corporate globalization and neoliberalism (which, C.J. Hopkins noted, is a machine for “decoding” all values) seem to have crested. The promise of neoliberalism was a unified world market, what historian Francis Fukuyama envisioned as “the end of history” in the triumph of liberal democracies. Instead, we have seen a global shift toward authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in many parts of the world, most notably China, Russia, and other BRIC countries. It turns out that capitalism, technocracy, and totalitarianism can work very well together — and one great danger of artificial intelligence is that it can be used to institute airtight systems of social and even thought control.

From where we are now, it is very difficult to envision a successful “revolution” in the old sense of the term. Could “we, the people” — distracted, depressed, and alienated as we are — take to the streets in such vast numbers that we overthrow the current government, then supplant it with a new regime? And how would that “new regime” be substantively different from the old one?

Often, revolutions end up cycling back to the same oppressive situation (or worse!) from where they began. Ultimately, the Communist revolutions in Russia and China can be viewed as the means for bringing about an inevitable transition from feudalism to industrialization, costing untold millions of lives in the process. They didn’t lead to a collective emancipation.

And yet, “revolution” of some sort is, I believe, still inevitable. I also believe we all possess crucial agency at this time (which is why I write such essays). And
I no longer believe we are headed for imminent extinction, given a bit of luck.