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Revolution, by Russell Brand
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER
We all know the system isn’t working. Our governments are corrupt and the opposing parties pointlessly similar. Our culture is filled with vacuity and pap, and we are told there’s nothing we can do: “It’s just the way things are.”
In this book, Russell Brand hilariously lacerates the straw men and paper tigers of our conformist times and presents, with the help of experts as diverse as Thomas Piketty and George Orwell, a vision for a fairer, sexier society that’s fun and inclusive.
You have been lied to, told there’s no alternative, no choice, and that you don’t deserve any better. Brand destroys this illusory facade as amusingly and deftly as he annihilates Morning Joe anchors, Fox News fascists, and BBC stalwarts.
This book makes revolution not only possible but inevitable and fun.
- Sales Rank: #41561 in Books
- Published on: 2014-10-14
- Released on: 2014-10-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.05" w x 6.41" l, 1.20 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Review
"A delight to read ... Revolution is a text that will help politicise a generation." Independent "Revolution is funny, full of charm, and engaging." -- Owen Jones Guardian "Brand puts forward a logical and witty argument ... in a shifting world where political disillusionment is the norm, Brand offers a hopeful handbook of new ways of thinking." -- Twiggy Garcia Guardian "A compelling and authentic voice ... Brand writes and speaks with verve, words flowing effotlessly and musically ... refreshingly distinctive in his analysis of what is wrong about the way modern Britain is run." Independent "Facts, fun and a reminder that inequality is manmade and what we make we can unmake." Jeanette Winterson
About the Author
Russell Brand is a British comedian, actor, radio host, and author. He has had a number of major film roles including parts in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek. His most recent stand-up show was the critically acclaimed Messiah Complex, which included his views on Malcolm X, Jesus, Che Guevara, and Gandhi. He was selected by the Dalai Lama to host the Buddhist leader’s 2012 youth event in Manchester, England.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
9781101882917|excerpt
Brand / REVOLUTION
1
Heroes’ Journey
The first betrayal is in the name. “Lakeside,” the giant shopping center, a mall to Americans, and “maul” is right, because these citadels of global brands are not tender lovers, it is not a consensual caress, it’s a maul.
After a slow, seductive drum roll of propaganda beaten out in already yellowing local rags, Lakeside shopping center landed in the defunct chalk pits of Grays, where I grew up, like a UFO.
A magnificent cathedral of glass and steel, adjacent, as the name suggests, to a lake. There was as yet no lake. The lake was, of course, man-made. The name Lakeside, a humdrum tick-tock hymn to mundanity and nature, required the manufacture of the lake its name implied, just to make sense of itself.
For me, though, as a teenager, this was no time for semantic pedantry but one of inexplicable rapture. I couldn’t wait for Lakeside to descend, to make sense of the as-yet-empty lake, to fill my life as surely as they’d fill that lake, to occupy my mind as surely as they’d occupy that barren land. I couldn’t wait to go to Lakeside. The fact that I had no money was no obstacle to my excitement at the oncoming Mardi Gras of consumerism. Lakeside seemed like the answer, that’s for sure, but what was the question?
What kind of void can there be in the life of a thirteen-year-old boy that requires a shopping center to fill it? Why would a lad growing up in Essex in the eighties have a yearning to shop that would be a more probable endowment of one the gals from Sex and the City?
Joseph Campbell, the cultural anthropologist who I’ll be banging on about a lot in this book, said, “If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.” In medieval societies, the biggest buildings were its churches and palaces; using Campbell’s method, we can assume these were feudal cultures that revered their leaders and worshipped God. In modern Western cities, the biggest buildings are the banks—bloody great towers that dominate the docklands—and the shopping centers, which architecturally ape the cathedrals they’ve replaced: domes, spires, eerie celestial calm, fountains for fonts, food courts for pews. If you were to ask the developers of Lakeside or any shopping center what they are offering consumers (formerly known as “people”) they’d say, “It’s all under one roof”—great, a ceiling, and, more importantly, “choice.” Choice is the key. Apparently, then, what excited me as a bulimic Smiths fan and onanist was the possibility of choice, and for anybody to be stimulated by the idea of choice, the precondition must be a lack of choice. Which is a way of saying a lack of power, a lack of freedom.
I’m not inferring that we need to revert to a medieval culture, by the way, all bubonic and snaggletoothed with shabbily bandaged hands, chewing on a turnip, genuflecting in a ditch as a baron sweeps by on horseback. If we’ve learned anything from Blackadder, it’s that history was a shit-hole.
What I believe is that we’re only just beginning to understand the incredible capacity of human beings, that we can become something unrecognizable, that we can have true freedom, not some tantalizing emblem forever out of reach. Not weary compromise and nagging fear.
I used to believe in the system that I was born into: aspire, acquire, consume, get famous and glamorous, get high and mighty, get paid and laid. I saw what was being offered in wipe-clean magazines and silver screens, and I signed up. I wanted choice, freedom, power, sex, and drugs, and I’ve used them and they’ve used me.
“Why would you be satisfied with the scraps of fame and fortune, of sex and distraction?” asked a fellow recovering drunk that I was chatting to in New Orleans. He was well tanned—in an overly literal way, the way leather is tanned—his skin coarse and lined, his beard gripped his face like a furry fist. His shirt had faded stains and rings, like coffee-cup marks on an old map. He looked like a man who had lived, who’d had long nights and fistfights, but his eyes were as clear as his words.
“Money, fame—those are the crumbs,” he said, brushing the words away with his thick forearm. “I want to be at the banquet.” At this last he looked up and smiled. Then he strolled off with brutish majesty to do volunteer work with the plentiful New Orleans homeless. In retrospect, his departure was melodramatic, like a grass in a police drama swanning off after a midnight subterranean confab with his cop handler, maybe grinding out a fag, then leaving—why don’t they ever say, “Well, I better be off, then; toodle-oo,” like normal people?
The most positive thing about being a drug addict is that it calcifies your disillusion; someone else, also a drunk—I’m starting to think I spend too much time listening to these lushes—said to me, “Drugs and alcohol are not our problem, reality is our problem; drugs and alcohol are our solution to that problem.” That’s a very smart way of putting it.
The same impulse that made Lakeside seem a good idea to me also made heroin seem like a good idea. That might seem like a radical corollary to offer, but it isn’t. When I was a kid in Grays I was aware of an emptiness, a sadness, a nameless sense of disconnection, so when it was suggested by a local paper, a local politician, a mayor or whatever, that Lakeside might be the answer, I suppose I thought, “Yes, Lakeside might be the answer.” Given that I subsequently went on to become addicted to anything that could be cooked, snorted, or swallowed, it seems Lakeside’s palliative qualities were at best limited. Perhaps I’m an extreme case. But isn’t that all addiction really is, “an extreme case”?
Aren’t we all, in one way or another, trying to find a solution to the problem of reality? If I get this job, this girl, this guy, these shoes. If I pass this exam, eat this pizza, drink this booze, go on this holiday. Learn karate, learn yoga. If West Ham stay up, if my dick stays up, if I get more likes on Facebook, more fancy cookbooks, a better kitchen, cure this itchin’, if she stops bitching.
Isn’t there always some kind of condition to contentment? Isn’t it always placed in the future, wrapped up in some object, either physical or ideological? I know for me it is, and as an addict that always leads me to excess and then to trouble.
Do you feel like that? Are you looking for something? It’s not just me, is it? Do you sometimes feel afraid, self-conscious, lonely, not good enough? I mean, you’re reading this, so you must want to change something.
Don’t leave me out on a limb, all vulnerable and exposed. Are you reading this on a yacht, through your Ray-Bans with, I dunno, a pair of glistening Russian sisters and a gob oozing with lobster juice as the sun shines down on you and the sisters smile up at you? And even if you are, especially if you are, is it working? Behind the salty tang and priapic pang, is it real, is it real, is it like God is holding your hand?
I mean, I’ve tried decadence too. I lived in a Hollywood mansion, I went to the Oscars, I hosted big dos.
In 2002, at two weeks clean, in a Bury St. Edmunds B&B on Christmas Eve, watching TV, perched on a single bed with my mum, both of us with the glum cordiality of an A&E waiting room—shell-shocked smiles and no hope—if some twinkling superficial fairy had flown in and said, “You’ll be taking your mum to the Oscars in a few years, don’t worry,” I’d obviously’ve been surprised (I mean, a fairy), but what would’ve been incomprehensible to me would’ve been the veracious addition from the ethereal intruder that “Oh, by the way, you’ll both find the Oscars fucking boring.”
Lakeside is a local parish; Hollywood is the Vatican. I wondered how the other parishioners had fared when I went back to Grays recently. I wondered whether Lakeside had delivered for the people I grew up with, the people I left behind, the people I was running from; I wondered if they got their choice, freedom and opportunity.
I fare-dodged my way out of Grays on the Fenchurch Street train, which primarily transports commuting city workers from Essex to the City of London. Stopping at Chafford Hundred—the new estate they built opposite the street where I grew up—Purfleet, Lakeside, Rainham, Dagenham Dock, Barking, and Limehouse. I’d hide in the toilet under my gelled quiff, with my own “Out of Order” sign on the door, a cross between Del Boy and Matt Goss, puffing skunk, counting stops.
Now I glide in the back of Mick’s Mercedes. Mick would be “my driver” if I employed possessive determiners before people and if he exhibited a modicum of professionalism. Instead, he is my mate, who drives me. It is still, of course, in reality a long way from where I am from—child of a single mum, on benefits, drug addicted—as we journey down the A13 past the disused Ford factory where my nan’s husband, Bert, worked, past the marshes where there was talk of building Euro Disney. I was naturally devastated when they went for Paris instead—I mean, fucking Paris?! Walt must be spinning in his grave, or cryogenic chamber, or wherever the hell it is they keep his brilliant Nazi corpse.
The reason for this trip down memory lane—or memory pain as I tend to call it, because my past is soaked in misery and rejection; it rejected me, then I rejected it—is that my schoolfriend Sam asked me to open a Mind shop. Mind is the a mental-health charity that he works for, and I, with my history of mental illness, plus the fact that he’s a mate and the irresistible pun “open your Mind (shop), man,” feel it’s worth risking a visit to the scene of the crime. The crime of being born, which is the manner I regarded my birth as a troubled and troubling adolescent.
Grays wasn’t great when I grew up, but a lot of that might’ve been because I was looking at it from inside my head and I reckon I could’ve been reared in Tuscany and rendered it a tragedy, the way my nut operated. I had a tendency for misery. What Grays is and was—and as the name suggests, aside from my self-aggrandizing melancholy—is a normal town. You could say a normal, suburban, Essex town; you could say a normal British town, or a normal northern European town, or even a normal town in a secular, Western democracy.
When I was a kid, that meant the town center, where I was due to “open your Mind, man”, had a market, chain stores, and local businesses. People did their shopping there, hung out—you know, normal stuff. When I disembarked from my tinted capsule of privilege, I was shocked to see how much Grays has changed. I mean, we’re not describing the sacking of Rome here, not the desecration of the sacred treasures of a glorious city-state, it was always a bit of a dump, but the chain stores were gone, the local businesses were gone, and the market had shut down.
Now there were pound shops, betting shops, charity shops, and off-licenses. The people of the town I’d left twenty years ago were different: More of them were drunk; more of them were visibly undernourished—more than that, though, I could feel that there was a despondency among the fifty or so folk assembled with listless anticipation around the barrier outside the Mind shop.
The more callous among you might say that was as a result of my impending visit, you swines, but it wasn’t that. Something had been taken from them, and I could feel its absence. More shocking though than this sad deterioration is that Grays, this lesser, depleted Grays with its food banks, Wonga loans, and escalating addiction problem, is still normal.
This is happening everywhere. The richest 1 percent of British people have as much as the poorest 55 percent. Some people like me were in the 55 percent and are now in the 1 percent, but, mostly, normal people are getting poorer. Globally it’s worse. Oxfam say a bus with the eighty-five richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the earth’s population—that’s three and a half billion people.
Though I can’t imagine they’d be getting on a bus with that kind of money or be hanging out together, I bet there’d be a lot of tension, jealousy, and petty bickering on that bus:
“My corporation is bigger than your corporation.”
“Yeah? I’ve got my own media network!”
“YEAH!? I’ve got an elite organization that controls global politics.”
“Stop this bus. I want to return to my subaquatic palace with my half-fish brides and sing a song about the supremacy of marine life.”
The last example might be from the Disney film The Little Mermaid. Walt’s frozen noggin is definitely on that bus.
In America, a country that, let’s face it, has really run with this whole capitalism thing, the six heirs to the Walmart fortune have more wealth than the poorest 30 percent of Americans. There’s six of them! They can’t even form a football team, how are they going to stop a revolution when we act on the unfairness of that statistic? Unless the entire system is rigged to maneuver wealth to an elite group of people, then ensure that it remains there.
What you just read is crazy. Insane. Unbelievable but true. As real as your hands that are holding this book (Kindle/tablet/ intra-neural-brain hologram, if it’s really far in the future), that information is as real as the breath that you are inhaling.
Six people whose dad was “good at supermarkets” have more money than hundreds of millions of struggling Americans. A bus full of plutocrats, royals, and oligarchs have as much money as every refugee, war child, and potbellied, rough-sleeping person on the planet.
You can hear that is crazy, you can see that it’s wrong, you feel that this is beyond disturbing. We’re told there’s nothing we can do about it, that this is “the way things are.” Naturally, of course, that verdict emanates from the elite institutions, organizations, and individuals that benefit from things being “the way they are.”
More important, perhaps, than this galling inequality is the fact that we have a limited amount of time to resolve it. The same interests that benefit from this—for brevity I’m going to say “system”—need, in order to maintain it, to deplete the earth’s resources so rapidly, violently, and irresponsibly that our planet’s ability to support human life is being threatened. This is also pretty fucked up.
I mean, if someone said they had a socio-economic system that creates a hugely wealthy elite at the cost of everyone else but it was ecologically sound, we’d tell them to fuck off. What we’ve got is one that is systematically inflating the wealth of the elite, rapidly suffocating everybody else, and it’s destroying the planet that we all live on. I know you already know this. I know. We all know. But it’s so absurd—psychopathic, in fact—that we obviously need to reiterate it.
These elites, these loonies on the diamond-encrusted fun bus, they live on the planet with us, they’re basically the same as us. So they’re in trouble too—unless this bus is equipped for space travel and they plan to wait until the earth is a scorched husk, then blast off to a moon base.
As I perused the new shelves bearing secondhand goods in a charity shop in the run-down town where I’m from, I thought about this stuff. The hymen ribbon that I’m supposed to cut is slung unsliced across the door. The volunteers have half-empty glasses of supermarché champagne, collectively willing it to be a good day.
Two uncomfortable certainties, though, loiter like bailiffs manacling the bonhomie: 1) taking care of mentally ill people is not the job of a charity but the state; and 2) this charity shop isn’t going to fucking work anyway. We already have charity shops. One of the few areas in which we are well catered for is charity shops; they’re cropping up everywhere, like zombies rising from the graves of the dead proper shops.
We keep our chins up as we plod through the ritual; scissors come out, applause, people bowl in, mill about, pick up a tragic jumper, weigh up a porcelain duchess in the palm of the hand. A councillor says something, a mentally ill person on the long road to sanity says something, I say something—I’m a few paces further down the road.
A church-fete-type lady rosily thrusts a pair of women’s jeans at me: “These’ll do for you, Russell.” I buy them and we laugh. Really, though, I’d like to scratch the record off, to rake the needle across the grooves and say, “What the fuck are we all doing?” What gravity is this that holds us down, who installed this low, suffocating sky? I get that feeling a lot, like I want to peer round the corner of reality, to scratch the record off, to say I know there’s something else, I know it.
I know this isn’t the best use of our time here. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” sang Leonard Cohen. You can see it; just behind reality, there is a light, you can feel it. Just behind your thoughts there is a silence. He knew the answer was there, that’s why he became a Buddhist and fucked off to live in them mountains. Either that or it was because his management nicked all his money.
I was particularly attuned to these ideas whilst frolicking in indigenous poverty because I was guest-editing a British political magazine called the New Statesman. They’d asked me what the theme of the issue would be. “Revolution,” I said. So Jemima Khan, who is the editor, pulled together a variety of journalists, philosophers, and activists to contribute on aspects of the subject. Naomi Klein’s article described an ecological conference where the requirement for radical action was spelled out.
Brad Werner, a complex-systems researcher (which sounds like a job that would be hard to monitor for a supervisor—“Oy, Werner, are you researching that complex system or are you dickin’ around on your phone?”) speaking at last year’s American Geophysical Union (which surely must use pornography on the invitation to have any hope of luring trade), said that our planet is fucked. He researched our complex system—the earth, I suppose, is a complex system—and concluded that we, the people who live on it, are fucked. I’m not even joking: His lecture was titled “Is Earth Fucked?” so the American Geophysical Union isn’t as square as its name implies. They do swear words and everything.
What Brad Werner said, though, is that the capitalist system is so rapacious in its consumption of earth’s resources and the measures that have thus far been imposed so ineffectual, that the only hope we have of saving the planet is for action to come from outside of the system.
They are not going to do anything to prevent ecological meltdown; it contravenes their ideology, so change has to be imposed from the outside.
That means by us. All that Kyoto stuff—reduce carbon emissions by “x” by year “y”—is not worth a wank in a windsock. It’s a bullshit gesture, the equivalent of the salad they sell in McDonald’s. Too little, too late.
It’s like giving Fred West a detention.
We know we can’t trust these fuckers to behave properly. Look at the tobacco industry: They knew they were killing their customers for decades before they coughed up the carcinogenic truth; they’d be blagging us to this day if they thought they could get away with it.
You can bet we’ll go on a similar journey with mobile phones. That hot tingle in your ear is not a sign that all is hunky-dory on the lughole front.
James Lovelock, the bloke who came up with Gaia theory, that the earth is one symbiotic, interrelated organism where harmonious life forms support or regulate each other, says we shouldn’t bother with recycling, wind turbines, and Priuses. It’s all a lot of bollocks, he says—not literally, though he might’ve if he’d been at that crazy, hang-loose festival of cursing, the American Geophysical Union.
Now, I don’t reckon Lovelock is saying sit back and enjoy the apocalypse, I think he’s saying we require radical action fast and that radical action will not come from the very interests that created and benefit from things being the way they are. The one place we cannot look for change is to the occupants of the bejeweled bus. They are the problem, we are the solution, so we have to look inside ourselves.
I left Grays in luxury this time, climbing back into the cradle of Mick’s car. A Mercedes. The anesthetic of privilege, the prison of comfort. People want departing photographs and autographs, more scraps, more crumbs. A bloke around my age, clutching a baton of super-strength cider, puts his arm round me. I used to drink White Lightning. I am mugged by his breath as our eyes momentarily meet. I shut the door on my past and the present.
I was a little winded by what I’d seen. Going back to the place where you are from is always fraught, memories scattered like broken glass on every pavement, be careful where you tread. I meditated, feeling a little guilty that I have the space to.
A space for peace, to which everyone is entitled.
“It’s alright for you in the back of a car that Hitler used to ride in,” I imagined that drunk bloke saying. I’d have to point out that it wasn’t literally Hitler’s car, that would be a spooky heirloom, but it is all right for me. I do have a life where I can make time to meditate, eat well, do yoga, exercise, reflect, relax. That’s what money buys you. Is it possible for everyone to have that life? Is it possible for anyone to be happy when such rudimentary things are exclusive?
They tell you that you ought eat five fruit and veg a day, then seven; I read somewhere once that you should eat as much as ten, face in a trough all day long, chowing on kale.
The way these conclusions are reached is that scientists look at a huge batch of data and observe the correlation between the consumption of fruit and veg and longevity.
They then conclude that you, as an individual, should eat more fruit and veg. The onus is on you; you are responsible for what you eat.
Of course, other conclusions could be drawn from this data. The same people that live these long lives and eat all this fruit and veg are also, in the main, wealthy; they have good jobs, regular holidays, exercise, and avoid the incessant stress of poverty. Another, more truthful, more frightening conclusion we could reach then is that we should have a society where the resources enjoyed by the fruit-gobbling elite are shared around and the privileges, including the fruit and veg, enjoyed by everybody.
With this conclusion the obligation is not on you as an individual to obediently skip down to Waitrose and buy more celery, it is on you as a member of society to fight for a fairer system where more people have access to resources.
Jemima Khan calls. “I think it’s really interesting that you’ve never voted,” she says. “You should definitely write about that in your article.” I agree, as is to become the custom. “Also, you should talk about that tomorrow when you do Newsnight with Paxman.” Once more I consent.
The idea that voting is pointless, democracy a façade, and that no one is representing ordinary people is more resonant than ever as I leave my ordinary town behind. Amidst the guilt and anger I feel in the back of the Führer-mobile, there is hope. Whilst it’s clear that on an individual, communal, and global level that radical change is necessary, I feel a powerful, transcendent optimism. I know change is possible, I know there is an alternative, because I live a completely different life to the one I was born with. I also know that the solution is not fame or money or any transient adornment of the individual. The only revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.
Most helpful customer reviews
120 of 135 people found the following review helpful.
but a blog post I read recommended checking out his book
By Suzanne
Until I read about his book "Revolution", I had never heard of Russell Brand. Yes, I am older; don't watch t.v.; and don't follow pop culture, but a blog post I read recommended checking out his book. I am glad I did. I was taken with Russell Brand's honesty about his personal struggles and with his insights about our consumer driven culture which is creating more inequality along with destroying our planet. His criticisms of our current political parties also resonated with me. I have felt for some time now that our democracy continues to be sold at a faster and faster rate to the highest bidder unabated which only dilutes the "freedoms" we once had as citizens. I think corporate America, the media moguls and the military industrialized complex have successfully distracted us with trinkets, fear and other distractions with one hand while taking our democracy with the other. Even if you might not agree with all his ideas for "revolution", I would hope people might read this book and find some of ideas provocative enough to get you thinking, exploring and discussing how "we" as a collective can make positive changes for all.
Highly recommend...
96 of 113 people found the following review helpful.
It may take an insane person to bring sanity to our world
By Ex-Patty
If you only thought of Russell as a weird comic who married Katy Perry, like me until a few days ago, you may want to give him a second look. Always dirty and hilarious, he shakes down the current world order and obsolete economic system with comments from Thomas Piketty (economist), Helena Norberg-Hodge (anti-globalization campaigner - buy local products, etc.), Noam Chomsky, (and many others who if you're not familiar with, you will be) and a rollercoaster ride inside his own, very erudite and hyper-aware brain. There's also a lot of spiritual examination in this work. He's telling us if he can go from buying into the capitalist system as the only way to live, to a "new emergent strain of understanding that challenges the dogma of the time to re-contextualize the way we" understand ourselves and our planet. The crux of his message is that "we must immediately overcome our superficial differences of accent and lexicon and come together to organize society effectively." But don't let my clumsy review spoil the fun read Russell is in "REVOLUTION". My final comment: It may take an insane person to bring sanity to our world.
44 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant, Intricate, Non-Violent, and Optimistic
By Robert David STEELE Vivas
In relation to the 2,000 plus non-fiction books I have reviewed here at Amazon, this book is brilliant. Normally I would consider giving it four stars for lacking an index and endnotes, obviously needed for the poorly educated morons that cannot grasp the many (many) direct references to top authors and thinkers. For crying out loud, Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is received by the author in his home and cited in this book, as are so many others. So a solid five stars for impact and self-made erudition.
Let me state very clearly that the publisher has sodomized this author by not including an index, a bibliography, or endnotes. As the top Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reviewing books across 98 distinct non-fiction categories, I am blown away by the clever, poetic, and pointed manner in which the author has integrated a vast (vast) range of reading and personal conversations into this book.
Here are a few meta-observations, followed by some detailed notes. I found this book absorbing and moving. Those that say the author does not offer specific solutions are clearly illiterates who have not actually read the book.
01 Poetry and philosophy. Will Durant's 1916 thesis, now available as Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition, fits easily with this author's panoramic book of both the problems and the possibilities.
02 If Russell Brand can be clean for 11 years, We the People can overturn our blind addictions to toxic corporations and absentee corrupt governments. There is a marvelous personal story woven throughout this book, the bottom line being that the author has chosen to be clean and deal with reality, something 80% of the public will not do -- their drugs of choice being slave wages, alcohol, gambling, and pornography.
03 We ALL want to be delivered from evil, including the 1%. I am charmed by a brief report from the author of his encounter with Lady Lynn Rothschild (who is originally from New Jersey) -- not mentioned in the book is the fact that she sponsored a May conference on Inclusive Capitalism, and together with the Mars Family (Mutuality Economics) and the "black sheep billionaires" (Redemptive Capitalism), represents the fraction of the 1% that "gets it" -- restore public agency or get a pitchfork up your ass.
04 Citing Fawzi Ibrahim, we have a choice: capitalism or the planet. Restoring community is how we cope. I am reminded of two books in particular, Lionel Tiger's The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System and Human scale.
05 Overall the author comes across as a loving conscious spirit who means no ill to the 1% but is sharply focused on achieving dignity and fairness for the 99%. He has completed his own Hero's Journey, has climbed out of the abyss, and is now a voice for public healing.
SPECIFIC SOLUTIONS
01 Control and hold accountable all corporations, scrapping the World Trade Organization (WTO) and creating the World Environmental Organization (WEO).
02 Re-localize food and farming (the UN just announced that this is the only sustainable agricultural solution)
03 Prioritize life over profit by rejecting Gross National Product (GNP) in favor of more community and life-affirming measures.
04 Individual debt jubilee.
05 Route around governments with autonomous community-based organizations
06 Get the money out of politics, participate instead of voting, move toward Liquid Democracy
07 Shift the energy paradigm to include shutting down all nuclear.
08 Make society, not economics, central to how we organize.
09 Open information, open eyes, open mind -- restore public power with transparency.
10 Demand 70% affordable housing from any development.
11 Direct most government funding to social enterprises.
12 Free Wi-Fi everywhere
MINOR NOTES
01 This book is hilarious.
02 Among key intellectual influences worth noting are Joseph Campbell and Sir James Goldsmith. I would add two recommended books, Peter Linebaugh's Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (Spectre) and Matt Taibbi's Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.
03 What US Government paid in bank bail-outs would have provided $50,000 a year to each homeless person in the USA.
04 60,000 of the homeless in the USA are veterans (independent fact check shows no fewer than 50,000).
05 Our attitude toward homelessness (obliviousness) is symptomatic of our attitude toward genocide, war, and general political and economic corruption.
06 Pedophilia is politics and politics is pedophilia. This is a nuclear grenade. Buy the book. I will certify that it applies in the USA as much as it may apply in the UK and across Europe.
07 Among the many corporations that should be killed (put out of existence) are Apple, Boots, Coca Cola, Disney, Exxon, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, Monsanto, Pfizer, and Time Warner.
08 The author lionizes Daniel Pinchbeck, whom I also worship, he was the publisher of my book in the signature line, and is a cultural and spiritual guru of the first order.
09 Among the most interesting elements of the book for me were sections deconstructing the Lord's Prayer, dismantling "Manifest Destiny," and sections throughout the book on the intersection between science, religion, and consciousness. There are so many books I would like to recommend, here I must limit myself to two: Quantum Jumps: An Extraordinary Science of Happiness and Prosperity and Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution.
10 I have MANY books annotated in the margins of this book, I mention this to make the point that anyone who demeans this author's erudite and poetic essay -- never mind the crap publisher screwing over the details -- is simply not well-read. With my two remaining links I offer Theresa Amato's Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny and the UK's only utterly genius Philip Allot of Cambridge, The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.
The author concludes with a strong statement, very detailed, on the need to migrate toward community-based social enterprises and self-governance -- a Nobel Prize was awarded to Elino Ostrom for her book on Governing the Commons that made many of these points.
I am very happy to stand with the author on the substance of this book. It serves us all.
Robert David STEELE Vivas
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust
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