Whoever Pretends to Be a Ghost

will eventually turn into one: More thoughts on Russell Brand

Russell Brand’s fraudulent conversion to Christianity and cynical embrace of the Right reminds me of the behavior of certain insects that mimic the space around them, not just for survival, but potentially due to a form of schizo-mimetic “depersonalization.” Roger Callois writes of this behavior in schizophrenics: “He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar.”

“Climate Week NY” makes me seriously uneasy. I will try to explain why this is so. But first, I keep thinking about Russell Brand, who has become a complete fink. Yesterday I watched his recent appearance at Tucker Carlson’s gathering in Phoenix, Arizona. I continue to be horrified and disgusted by my former “friend,” to an extreme degree. I admit there is a bit of obsessive fascination in my disgust and horror, watching someone with so much talent descend to the nadir.

Here is a man with great intelligence (if a shallow form, more mimetic than generative) and charisma, who knows better. Russell wrote an introduction for my book How Soon Is Now on the ecological crisis, on how we must radically redesign civilization to prevent meltdown. He is fully aware that anthropogenic warming, biodiversity loss, is real — that we are in a critical time. Instead of helping his followers to deal with what’s coming, he is grifting relentlessly.

An admitted narcissist, Russell is consciously choosing to do evil. At this point, by driving his 6.85 million “awakening wonders” toward Christian nationalism and the Trump-ian grotesque, he actively works for humanity’s degeneration and our possible extinction (since Trump plans to intensify ecological collapse via extractivism). I find something astonishing about this: It is nihilistic in the extreme. It is nihilism as an extreme sport.

On some level I feel sorry for Russell: It is pathetic to see him pretending to be a born-again Christian, to see him groveling for the friendship of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, opportunists who, like Russell himself, are utterly full of shit. In the Carlson interview, Russell confesses to “mental illness” with a weird sheepish grin. When I look at his face, I find his physiognomy, his features, have changed, rigidifying into something grotesque. This is not how he looked back in 2014, when we were hanging out, or even 2018. What happened?

I don’t entirely agree with the great Leftist journalist George Monbiot that Russell’s Rightward swerve is simply due to monetary greed, although that certainly plays a part. Russell’s descent goes deeper, into profound pathology. If we can understand it, perhaps we will find clues to our current human predicament as a whole.

Russell’s disintegration reminds me of Roger Caillois’ fantastic essay, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," on insect mimesis and sympathetic magic, which starts with a curious injunction: “Beware: whoever pretends to be a ghost will eventually turn into one.” Seeking to mimetically absorb Neo-Fascism for personal gain, Russell has turned into a ghost of himself: A depraved, monstrous phantom stalking Trump-landia, inciting zombie pandemonium.

A Twentieth Century French intellectual whose interests included Surrealism and anthropology, Caillois wrote about schizophrenics who, like those insects that imitate their environment, lose the ability to separate themselves from the space around them:

Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession.”

All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species.

I find it possible this—absorption or “convulsive possession” by space—has happened in Russell’s case, which doesn’t mean I absolve him of personal responsibility for his disgraceful descent. He willfully chooses to confuse an internal process of depersonalization/nihilism (a.k.a. “midlife crisis”) with some kind of religious awakening. The Internet media-sphere is also a kind of “space,” a psycho-cognitive Topos, and Russell’s ravenous, constant effort to assimilate whatever issue or “hot take” boosts his instant engagement and revenue have led to schizop-mimetic “depersonalization,” his “becoming-ghost,” now on sad display.

There is precious little sanity in our cultural landscape: There is, instead, an unbelievable deluge of noise and distraction.