Revolution2.0

As America devolves into neo-Fascism, what radical alternatives are possible?

What follows is an excerpt from my 2016 book, How Soon Is Now? The book is available on Amazon in all formats, including audio. While it would be great to update How Soon Is Now? to reflect current developments, I believe the main thesis and ideas of the book remain entirely relevant. The book proposes we could redeploy social technologies to build the infrastructure for a regenerative society based on participatory democracy, while automation freed people from obsolete forms of drudgery. In some sense, what we are seeing with the rapid emergence of techno-feudalism — or neo-fascism — in the U.S. is an attempt to squelch the new revolutionary possibilities which could be realized by a humanity emancipated from the necessity of performing brute labor and boring drudgery or what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs.”

I propose we use technology to elevate or deepen the collective consciousness in order to supersede the domination-based patriarchal order we have inherited. We can build a new system based on cooperation and symbiosis in its place — and, for reasons I explore in How Soon Is Now?, this can happen very quickly. Despite the current turn in the U.S., I still believe this is possible, although it requires a level of capital investment (not enormous) as well as human resources, including technical skills and marketing / influence. Anyone interested in getting involved in this project who has capital or applicable skills, please feel free to reach out to me directly (danielpinchbeck1@proton.me)

Revolution2.0

When the spirit of revolution arises in the people, it promises to change not only the outer world but also the inner domain of thought, dream and desire. The desire for revolution is the yearning for the decisive event that separates dream and reality – the threshold when suffering is redeemed, when freedom is gained, here and now.

The wait has been a long one. ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed, back in the eighteenth century. ‘One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.’ Rousseau’s ideas ended up shaping the French Revolution.

The cry for freedom has been the persistent undertone in the music of the oppressed, those who sing for Kingdom Come, the rising of the new sun, for whom history is an unfinished melody or a call that awaits its response. The dream of revolution is a secular version of the monk’s desire for religious ecstasy, which erases the separation between subject and object, and, like fire, purifies as it scalds, transmutes as it consumes, creates as it destroys.

The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse found civilization haunted ‘by guilt over a deed that has not been accomplished’, the deed of ‘liberation.’ My psychedelic journeys made this so clear to me. We got trapped in an incessant tape loop of deferral and delay, an interminable ‘not yet,’ in our agreements about reality. We betrayed the promise of past revolutions by building new prisons around ourselves – banking systems, governments, malls, corporate structures. We lost ourselves in a labyrinth constructed by the human mind.

From past revolutions, we know that ‘we, the people,’have the power to remake or reinvent society when it no longer serves us. This remains a strange and dangerous idea. Our civilization seeks to maintain the illusion that it is solid and permanent. Architects decorate banks and government buildings with Doric columns, imitation Roman statues and friezes that convey the sense of an ancient pedigree. All of this display is designed to fool us into obedience and complacency. Revolution awakened the consciousness of mankind. People found, to their great surprise, that they were ‘the people,’ historical actors: the subjects of history, not its passive objects. ‘That all authority in the last analysis rests on opinion is never more forcefully demonstrated than when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a universal refusal to obey initiates what then turns into a revolution,’ wrote the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. That is the lesson of our past. We discovered it again in 1989, when the multitudes tore down the Berlin Wall, destroying at the same time an antiquated ideology.

Until the late eighteenth century, the vast majority of people believed in the Divine Right of Kings. They didn’t think of social systems as expressions of human intention, or as artifacts that could be changed or redesigned. The French and American Revolutions – deemed ‘the vindication of the honour of the human race’ by Alexander Hamilton, or ‘the grandeur of man against the pettiness of the great’ by Robespierre – were a shock to humanity. The people rose up to overthrow oppressive, corrupt, autocratic regimes. Through trial and error, the revolutionaries established the model of liberal democracy we know today – imperfect but a great advance over monarchy and feudalism.

Never-ending revolution remains our ideal in art, fashion and tech. Commercial society today requires continuous disruption, rebellion, the shock of the new. Capitalism is brilliant at absorbing anything that might threaten it. Che Guevara becomes a face on a T-shirt. The anguish of young black men is packaged as Gangsta Rap. Social outrage is turned into cultural product, more distractions to assimilate. The energy of dissidence and rebellion feeds the system and keeps it running.

The incessant onslaught of pop culture kitsch confuses and entrances people. We forget society is broken, that it needs to be changed, and we are the only ones who can change it. Made to believe we are powerless, we forfeit our power. It is easy to forget – until some problem leads to a crisis, and the crisis reveals a design flaw in the operating system that cannot be addressed by any reform.

Our society has revealed a number of severe design flaws that cannot be fixed within its current operating system. One is the grotesque, ever-growing increase in wealth inequality. Economists like Thomas Piketty have shown that the accelerated accumulation of capital by a few is built into the system. As the middle class collapses, we are experiencing something like the return of the ancien régime, a regression to a two-tier society of serfs and overlords.

Bill Gates and other billionaires promulgate their belief that the world is getting better for everyone. Depending on how we look at the evidence, this belief seems hard to sustain. For instance, in the US the number of children living in poverty has increased in the last decades, to almost one-third of all children. Corporate rulers and financier plutocrats are the new aristocrats, floating above the rule of law, whether they gather in secretive meetings in Switzerland to determine the fate of the world or preen in Road Warrior-esque costumes and gobble psychedelics at the Burning Man festival.

It is true that living standards and life expectancy have gone up in some areas of the world, while poverty has increased in others. We’ve made significant gains in some areas, but this has come at quite a cost in others. We’ve managed only a few centuries of rapid industrial progress and we’ve accomplished this feat by over-exploiting the natural world, squandering finite resources that accrued over millions of years. At the same time, the advantages of our global industrial monoculture are somewhat ambiguous, at best. The desperate poverty we continue to see around the world is a direct result of industrial civilization and corporate globalization.

The second problem, of course, is that we are careening towards ecological meltdown. These design flaws are, I believe, linked. We can’t solve one without addressing the other. I agree with the social ecologist Murray Bookchin that ‘The private ownership of the planet by elite strata must be brought to an end if we are to survive the afflictions it has imposed on the biotic world, particularly as a result of a society structured around limitless growth,’ as he wrote in The Ecology of Freedom.

We therefore need some kind of revolution, but it can’t be anything like the revolutions we have seen in the past. We need one, to quote the visionary futurist Dieter Duhm, ‘whose victory will create no losers because it will achieve a state that benefits all.’ We must also make it a peaceful revolution – a gentle superseding of the current political-economic system, not an explosive insurrection against it. We need a revolution that is, at the same time, evolution and revelation.

The United States – guarding its global empire of disorder – has turned into a massive surveillance society, armed to the teeth, looking for opportunities to flex its police and military might. It has killer drones, biological weapons, neutron bombs, FlexiCuffs, Guantanamo Bay, ‘extraordinary rendition’, and myriad other forms of intimidation, torture and death at its disposal. Any effort to oppose this kind of force directly will only end in failure. With hindsight, we can see that many of the protest and radical movements that fought ‘against’ the system only ended up feeding and energizing it. A different approach is called for.

What we can do, instead, is use the current infrastructure to bring about a systemic transformation, much as the imaginal cells reprogram the cells that make up the body of the dying caterpillar. Later we will consider how this can be done in more depth. Despite its military might and seeming solidity, the empire is fragile. Our global economy is floating on air, as central banks create money out of nothing and debt skyrockets faster than gross domestic product, which is a terrible indicator in any case.

The Promise of Politics

What lessons should we take from the revolutions of the past? According to Arendt, human beings have an innate political ability which modern society – empire – actively suppresses. Arendt was one of the most celebrated political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born as a Jew in Germany, she studied with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was also her lover. A brilliant phenomenologist, Heidegger became a Nazi Party member. In 1941, Arendt immigrated to the United States, narrowly escaping the Holocaust. As a thinker, she was extremely subtle, astonishingly wise.

Arendt published her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in the early 1950s. She outraged left-wing critics by equating Stalinism and Nazism, seeing them as equally destructive expressions of modern society. She coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ while reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker. In her work, Arendt sought to rehabilitate the idea of political action as something that gives dignity and value to human life – action that is necessary, if we wish to have an ethical society.

Arendt changed my understanding of politics. She noted that the word ‘politics’ derives from the word ‘polis’, the city-state in Ancient Greece. In a polis free citizens gathered to deliberate, debate and make decisions together. Arendt believes that democracy – human freedom – needs a public place where it can be practiced, as the Occupiers demonstrated with the General Assembly in Zuccotti Park.

‘Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance,’ Arendt wrote:

To be sure it may still dwell in men’s hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called a demonstrable fact. Freedom as a demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter.

By seeming to separate freedom from politics, modern society plays a trick on us. As long as we think of freedom as a purely private and personal concern, we remain unfree.

Arendt realized that Western philosophy denigrated and rejected political thought and action. Over 2,000 years ago, Western thinking turned away from politics – from action in the world – when Socrates was accused of ‘corrupting’ the youth of Athens and executed because of his constant inquiry. The impact of this was profound for Western civilization. It was like an original trauma, causing the split between thought and action that continues. Today, we still conceive of personal liberty as freedom from politics, rather than freedom to participate as authentic political beings.

Jonathan Schell wrote on Arendt:

Among the difficult things she came to understand was that the great thinkers to whom she turned time and again for inspiration, from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche and Heidegger, had never seen that the promise of human freedom, whether proffered sincerely or hypocritically as the end of politics, is realized by plural human beings when and only when they act politically.

Philosophy became its own specialized realm, while politics became the path for those seeking power in the world.

What Arendt called the promise of politics begins when we understand that our power as political beings is a living force, rooted in our solidarity with one another. Electoral politics tends to be a sad spectacle of compromise and capitulation. But that is not the real essence of politics. It is a corrupt aberration. We are inherently political beings. Freedom is something we create, in collaboration and communion with each other.