This is awkward for me because that is not my message. I don’t like dispatching trite little diatribes on behalf of an establishment that I despise, and often have to wrench the pendulum of my extreme nature back to equanimity before I tell kids to riot, or torch their exam papers or their school.
I have it in me, this extremist, destructive impulse. When the pie-eyed teens in the school hall, where I, decades before, had grasped the tendril with which I would swing out of Essex, like a tubby Tarzan, look to me full of X Factor ambition and Xbox distraction and tell me that they “want to be famous too,” I wince, but I want to tell them they’ve been swindled. That they are being horribly misled by the dominant cultural narratives.
In spite of the anguish my addiction to drugs and alcohol has caused me, I wouldn’t relinquish its lessons and I certainly wouldn’t tell other people, least of all young people, not to drink and take drugs.
The war against drugs, which is a war against drug addicts (about which Bill Hicks beautifully observed, “If there’s a war against drugs and we’re losing, that means that the drugs are winning.”), is a good example of the system’s disingenuity on an individual, legal, and global level.
Drug addiction is an illness. Criminalizing people that are ill is cruel, yes, but also insidious. It’s also bloody futile: no self-respecting drug addict is remotely dissuaded from pursuing their habit by the legal status of the drug that they are taking. All criminalization achieves is unsafe, unregulated drug use, the demonization of users, and the creation of an international criminal economy. You know this, I know this, and more worryingly the people who maintain this system know it, so why is it being maintained? Who benefits?
Well, on this I’m qualified to postulate. I may not have successfully overthrown a government or devised more productive, fairer, and more enjoyable social systems before, so there will be some conjecture in this book; what I have done, though, with considerable assistance, is navigated myself from one set of feelings where drinking and taking drugs were my only solution to a state where, one day at a time, I never drink or take drugs. What happened?
As a lost little boy in Essex, awaiting Lakeside, adoring the ambivalent beaming patriarch Ronald McDonald, I felt a discontentment. I loved my mother, was uncomfortable around my stepfather, and adored my absent dad. I felt disconnected, though, and frustrated. My mum was ill a lot, I was uneasy at home, unsettled and insecure. This feeling of irritability and alienation meant I was malleable. Have you ever tried to argue with someone who doesn’t want anything from you? It’s hard. Have you ever noticed in a row with someone that no longer loves you that you have no recourse? No tools with which to bargain. If you stroll up to a stranger and tell them that unless they comply with your demands they’ll never see you again, it’s unlikely that they’ll fling themselves at your feet and beg you not to go. They’ll just wander off.
When people are content, they are difficult to maneuver. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies. My intention in writing this book is to make you feel better, to offer you a solution to the way you feel.
I am confident that this is necessary. When do you ever meet people that are happy? Genuinely happy? Only children, the mentally ill, and daytime television presenters.
My belief is that it is possible to feel happier, because I feel better than I used to. I am beginning to understand where the solution lies, primarily because of an exhausting process of trial and mostly error. My qualification to write a book on how to change yourself and change the world is not that I’m better than you, it’s that I’m worse. Not that I’m smarter, but that I’m dumber: I bought the lie hook, line, and sinker.
My only quality has been an unwitting momentum, a willingness to wade through the static dissatisfaction that has been piped into my mind from the moment I learned language. What if that feeling of inadequacy, isolation, and anxiety isn’t just me? What if it isn’t internally engineered but the result of concerted effort, the product of a transmission? An ongoing broadcast from the powerful that has colonized my mind?
Who is it in here, inside your mind, reading these words, feeling that fear? Is there an awareness, an exempt presence, gleaming behind the waterfall of words that commentate on every event, label every object, judge everyone you come into contact with? And is there another way to feel? Is it possible to be in this world and feel another way? Can you conceive, even for a moment, of a species similar to us but a little more evolved, that have transcended the idea that solutions to the way we feel can be externally acquired? What would that look like? How would that feel—to be liberated from the bureaucracy of managing your recalcitrant mind. Is it possible that there is a conspiracy to make us feel this way?
If we were cops right now, we’d look for a motive. If our peace of mind, our God-given right to live in harmony with our environment and one another, has been murdered, who are the prime suspects? Well, who has a motive?
3
One Hand Clapping
BY THE TIME I WAS A JUNKIE, I NEEDED DRUGS.
Lakeside had been a letdown. Once you’ve walked round its three floors, clocked a few birds, mostly uninterested, maybe nicked a pen or a CD, or got threatened by some hard lads from Tilbury, what’s left to do? There’s stuff to look at on the other side of the glass; mostly you can’t afford it. That opened up the possibility that the problem was an economic one. If I could buy that stuff, everything would be alright. A brighter bloke would’ve given more consideration to that equation, but not me. I devoted myself to acquiring the means to solving the problem as presented.
Get money. I got money, I got the stuff on the other side of the glass, and it didn’t work. There’s a moment where a new pair of shoes or whatever can be a fetishized and satisfactory little trinket. Treading like a foot-bound geisha past perilous puddles. Keeping the Reebok pumps on indoors, whilst watching telly, looking down at them during the commercial break. But before too long these tootsie totems lose their luster: “Obviously I need a new pair of shoes; this anesthetic is wearing off.” Luckily there’s a new, improved Reebok shoe coming to a sports shop near you soon, so the carousel continues. Up and down the escalator in Lakeside, brushing past the fake ferns, gobbing in the fountain, bunking off from school, wondering quietly in some antechamber of my occupied mind what the fuss had been about but never stopping to reflect, “Why am I even going to Lakeside? This clearly isn’t working.” Making enough money to become an effective consumer takes time, dedication, devotion. The wait is miserable. It never occurred that the objective was flawed and the rules were skewed.
When in 2011 young people all over Britain seemingly spontaneously decided to break the glass and snatch the idols from the altar, it was condemned as nihilistic and antisocial. That may be the case, what is more antisocial and nihilistic is the imposition of such dubious idolatry.
The unrelenting bombardment of consumer imagery, the intoxicating message that you are not good enough. You are too fat, spotty, and wan. You are not as fit as David Beckham or Beyoncé, escape your life into this PlayStation, mask the stench of your failure with this fragrance, run from your debts in these gleaming new shoes. Don’t be you. Don’t be you. If it had occurred to me, and if I’d had the guts, I’d’ve reduced that treacherous temple to shards. I’d’ve torched that shrine and scarred the sky with a smog like the fugue like they’d glued to my mind.
Luckily I didn’t: My auntie Janet worked in John Lewis.
Adam Curtis in his revolutionary documentary series The Century of the Self delineated expertly how the theories of Sigmund Freud were deployed by his nephew Edward Bernays to create the profession of PR and generate the consumer boom of the fifties. Prior to the inclusion of psychological principles in sales, products were sold on the basis of utility: “Do you have feet? Why not try shoes?” Fair enough.
What they evidently realized was that once a consumer had a pair of shoes they were no longer a viable target, that they’d killed a customer—a bit like the tob
acco industry. The small but seismic interjection that Bernays, the nepotistic little villain, enacted was this: “Buy these shoes, they’ll make you feel sexy.” Then it doesn’t matter how many shoes you have, you can always purchase more. Who doesn’t want to be more sexy? It wasn’t just sexiness, though that was a lot of it. What Bernays established was the connection between consuming a product and feeling better. Of course, a shoe cannot make you feel sexy indefinitely, unless you fuck it. Even then I imagine there would be a subsequent period of guilt, and you’d get some askew glances in Foot Locker. No wonder they make people put that little pop sock on before they try ’em on.
A friend of mine, and, yes, I know that sentence makes me sound like a weirdo—I am a weirdo, and I’m a sucker for a swami: If you want me to pay attention to your opinion, put a curtain on before you tell me. I love a mystical costume. I once waited for about five hours with a Tibetan monk in LAX airport; his passport was yellow—not due to the passage of time; that’s how they print them. Yellow passports: Truly, Tibet is another country.
He was having a hard time getting through customs: the post 9/11 policy was draconian and all-encompassing. I mean, for a Buddhist monk to be suspected of terrorism requires a pretty radical misinterpretation of the nature of Buddhism. Given their doctrine prevents them eating sausages, it’s unlikely they’d endorse a policy of hijacks and tower toppling. I always have a hard time getting into the United States too, due to my ancient and somewhat trivial criminal record. That don’t prevent me from marching into secondary immigration with the escorting official like a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Lil Wayne.
Once I was sent all the way back to England by U.S. customs—that was mad. I’d done a whole transatlantic flight and was promptly turned round and sent straight back home, like the grand old Duke of York (who sounded like a general whose methods were in need of investigation: “So you’ve been marching the men up and down the hill, have you? For days now? And have you found any weapons of mass destruction?”).
When they escorted me back to the plane—honestly, this sounds like a lie, but it isn’t—they cuffed me between two guards and led me back to my seat. It was like Con Air, in my mind I pretended I was an international Mr. Big who was an enemy of the system. Then I just got on the plane and watched films and got fussed over by hostesses. It’s odd the way that, in spite of the exuberant appurtenances of fame, the undeniable and, let’s face it, enjoyable tokens granted by success, I’ve always had one foot in the gutter. In secondary immigration, as I await processing, I sit with people for whom I imagine the experience is less of a novelty. To be blunt, non-white people.
Mexican and Arabian people, mostly—I assume, I don’t look at their passports; they don’t have them, they’re behind the desks with the border police, equally trapped and obese, behind the counter, often the same color as the people they’re casually harassing. “Who does this notion of nation most suit,” I wonder as I sit there, unable to use my phone. Proper rich people don’t encounter these rooms, these borders, these problems. For them the world is as it is when seen from space, without boundary, without limitation, full of fluid possibility and whispering wonder. Often the principles that need to be employed for the majority are already enjoyed by the elites: They support one another; they sell state assets to the businesses their friends own; when their banks collapse because of irresponsibility or misfortune, they bail their pals out. They know it’s the right thing to do; it’s how they treat their friends and family; they just don’t want it for the rest of us.
I’m aware that now, due to my good fortune, I am a member of the 1 percent. That now I am a tourist in poverty, when on occasion I’ve found myself in cuffs or in cells or cowed by authority, I know I can afford lawyers, I know I am privileged now. I know too with each word I type I am building a bridge of words that leads me back to the poverty I’ve come from, that by decrying this inequality, I will have to relinquish the benefits that this system has given me. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t frighten me.
Anyone who’s been poor and gets rich is stalked by guilt and fear. Guilt because you know it isn’t fair, that life hasn’t changed for everyone, and fear because you feel like a fraud, that one day there’ll be a knock on the door or a tap on the shoulder or a smack in the mouth and they’ll take it back. It’s not like I’m gonna pay voluntary tax to our corrupt government, as suggested by that honey-glazed chump Boris Johnson; donations aren’t the answer, especially not to that cartel of Etonian skanks.
Systemic change on a global scale is what’s required, and because I know that is happening, that it is inevitable, that we are awakening, I will, when I know how, sever the gilded chains. “Oh, yeah, mate? When?” you could crow with legitimate suspicion. Well, I suppose, like every aspect of this project, we’ll work that out together.
Anyway. I’m in an airport with a monk, remember? I felt he was a powerful dude. Like he had a connection to a light far more powerful than the strip lights that bleach you into inhumane subservience in LAX. But again, that could be because he was dressed in a curtain. I admit I’m highly suggestible. (Isn’t he the king of the Rastas? Sorry. Probably racist, as is the whole curtain thing.) If Nigel Farage kept up all his xenophobic chumminess and gin-blossomed hate but did it dressed like Aladdin, I’d vote for him at the drop of a hat.
I wonder, with this monk, had he been done up in an Adidas tracksuit and a pair of Crocs if I’d’ve been so keen to hang out in customs for an additional few hours after I’d been processed. I was carrying his bag and doing translations between him and the cops—even though I don’t speak Tibetan. He’d say something, then I’d just say what I reckoned he’d said while looking all holy. We got out eventually, I took him to his taxi. He didn’t even seem that grateful. I think I was getting on his nerves. “Who is this bloke that looks like Charles Manson who keeps bugging me? I’m pretty sure he’s not a qualified interpreter.”
He looked relieved when he shut the cab door and left me behind. That’s the problem with trying to be friends with Buddhists. They don’t get attached.
I later found out he’d served loads of time in prison for refusing to renege on his holy vows after the Chinese nicked him and he was in L.A. to attend the launch of a documentary about him. I got an invite but I didn’t go. I was still smarting from the rejection.
I only mentioned this monk to let you know that I am vulnerable to mystical-looking people. I actually want to recount a maxim passed on to me by my friend Radhanath Swami, which I’ve mentioned frequently but is irresistible in the context of this book: “All desires are the inappropriate substitute for the desire to be at one with God.” I like ruminating on that idea. To test its efficacy, let’s start with desires that are a considerable distance from rapture, or enlightenment or transcendence. Say, for example, you really want to smash a gâteau down your gob while gyrating in a rum-fueled frenzy through a bleak suburban orgy. That’s your desire—to eat cake, get drunk, and have loveless sex in an appalling flat in Croydon—where is God in that gray decadence?
Our survival impulses have gone awry. We no longer live in an environment where fat and sugar—the only bits of a gâteau worth having—are scarce; they are abundant, but our daft ol’ anachronistic brainbox doesn’t know that. That wouldn’t be a problem if you had a balanced life as part of a supportive, if not loving, community, like our species was designed to live in.
The moderation and regulation of these impulses is a challenge but not impossible—unless you live in a culture that continually stimulates these lower, atavistic desires. The booze becomes a necessary anesthetic in conditions like these. The natural desire for sex becomes distorted when we are abstracted from our social purpose, our reproductive function, our community values, and our interconnectedness.
We are living in a zoo, or more accurately a farm, our collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a power structure that needs us to remain atomized and disconnected. We want union, we wa
nt connection, we need it the way we need other forms of nutrition, and denied it we delve into the lower impulses for sanctuary.
We have been segregated and severed, from each other and even from ourselves. We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue our petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires.
When I was bulimic, I needed to fill myself up, there was a void to fill, I needed to purge, I felt poisoned. Why? I don’t buy any modern psychoanalytic diagnosis. I don’t buy ADHD or OCD; they have as much veracity as MTV and the WBC. I’ve heard that pharmaceutical companies lobby for conditions to be diagnosed for which they have the chemical solution.
I was disconnected, cut off from the source. When I was piping and chasing and fucking and faming, what I wanted was a connection, and with no map, no key, no code, I settled for sedation.
I want to tell that eager berk toddling from Lakeside to the Westside to check his compass, lost in naïveté. I want to tell him to sit still and breathe and ask him: “Do you really think that the answer lies on the other side of Simon Cowell’s smile? Or in the fairground ride of lacquered pride that won’t change you inside?” He wouldn’t’ve listened, though: he was very determined. And very high on drugs.
If you can’t escape the system, you’ve got to escape from yourself. If you’re looking for God, for salvation, for a connection, for sanctuary from the cuckoo self incubating in you, and there’s no map, no guide, no story, no folk memory of how to get there, sooner or later you’ll pick up a bottle, a pipe, or a brick.
In Maslow’s pyramid of needs, Abraham Maslow demonstrates the hierarchy of human requirements, most basic at the bottom, in a diagram. If you ask me, putting people’s most basic requirements in a pyramid is bloody exclusive in the first place: They’re extremely difficult to build, only pharaohs are allowed in ’em, and Indiana Jones was very nearly killed trying to get the treasure out. If Maslow really wants people to have a better standard of living, he should’ve used a tree, or a Primark, or something a bit more affordable. If you look at the pyramid, you’ll see that our most basic needs are not being catered to. Housing is on the bottom tier, and there are plenty of people whose accomodation is insecure. By the time you reach the second tier—security of body, employment, resources, housing, and health—pretty much everyone is fucked. The remaining tiers outline important but less tangible requirements, like self-esteem and spiritual and familial connection. God knows who’s getting access to the penthouse floor of Maslow’s pyramid, probably just the Queen and the leaders of the illuminati; that’s probably where the bejeweled fun bus of privilege is taking them.
Revolution Page 3