Revolution

by Russell Brand

  Commodity fetishism is the application of fulfillment to an object that can be acquired through the market. We know, don’t we, in our little hearts, in our clearer, truer selves, that a Ferrari—whilst superficially, geometrically pleasing and aesthetically titillating, with its curves and pulsating scarlet haunches—is just a bloody dumb lump of potential travel. A swift little electronic cart.

  We know, don’t we, in the place in our hearts where we felt connected to our first friend, or first noticed that the grass in the garden was beautiful to touch or smell, that a pair of calf-high, Cuban-heeled, pointy-toed, zip-up, black Dior boots are just clods to plod the pavement with. We know, don’t we—do we, Russell?—that they cannot, will not, shall not give us relief or sanctuary or love.

  Do we really want to end our lives without discarding these lies? Do we want to hunker down into our earthy cradle, never having been released from the grip of the anxious mind, the ridiculous lie that material things can provide solutions, instead of the sublime?

  Do you want those boots if the true cost is God? If the true cost is family? If the true cost is that most American of dreams, freedom?

  Well, Guy Debord and his clever-clog chums thought it had to go. They cooked up this idea called “the Spectacle” to help us understand what was going on, a philosophical tool that provided a story to deliver to our pickled brains the troubling truth that we were now experiencing a secondhand, approximate reality.

  They demonstrated this by creating “situations” that exposed the absurdity of our reality—the unquestioned reality which we all accept. The movement was inherently political, and people still use it to make a point—like by nicking some valuable paintings from a museum and using them on barricades in a neighborhood where there’s a lot of argy-bargy—to demonstrate that the authorities, when reclaiming the artworks, are more concerned about the preservation of heirlooms than about people.

  Dom Joly, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Jackass in a way do stuff derived from this tradition, because their crazy public antics make us question the nature of customary, consensual behavior. Mostly for a laugh, though. At its inception, situationism was politically motivated.

  These ideas were influential in the uprisings that took place all over the world in the sixties, particularly in Paris; as you know, the French are never truly happy unless chopping someone’s head off or having it off with someone else’s missus. I suppose the perfect scenario would be to have some petrified aristo genuflecting at the altar of the guillotine God while, just out of sight, Jacques (or whatever) carries on with his wife. But let’s not get bogged down in senseless xenophobia. The point is that fetishism, whether religious, sexual, or commercial, is a diversion from the source.

  This idea is not dissimilar to Radhanath Swami’s observation that “All desire is the inappropriate substitute for the desire to be at one with God” or the desire to live in harmony with the whole, in union with truth.

  The truth. The truth is: there is on this frequency, from our human perspective, a planet, some beings, some resources; would it not be sensible to employ systems that benefit the planet, the beings, and the resources?

  Not needlessly revere artificial constructs that benefit only a few people? Dave now, the beatnik rabble-rouser that he is, explains some of the economic dimensions to our current absurd situation.

  “Distribution and profits are at an all-time high. Instead of this dramatic increase in wealth creation delivering a healthier standard of living to everyone, it has been consolidated within a mere fraction of the global population.

  “In the United States, 95 percent of income gains since the recession began have gone to the top 1 percent.”

  Phew, I’m glad to find a statistic about extreme wealth that doesn’t include me. As you know, one of the techniques to negate the ideas in this book, or the stuff I say, is to harp on about the fact that I’ve made a load of wedge. Well, I’m not in that problematic 1 percent, so that’s good. Also, I’m not averse to giving up wealth in circumstances determined by the collective will.

  To contra-paraphrase New Labour architect and vandal of British socialism, Peter Mandelson, I’m “seriously comfortable with society getting extremely equal.”

  Now let’s give Dave back the cudgel to browbeat us into supplicant acceptance of his version of contemporary finances:

  “In the U.S., the 400 richest people have as much as 185 million people, over 60 percent of the population. As absurd as that is, on a global scale, the richest 85 people have as much as 3.5 billion people, half of humanity!”

  We are well aware of the fun-bus statistic, but it’s nice to hear it from a variety of sources; it’s the sort of information that ought be more prominent, promoted ahead of Kim and Kanye or even football. The more we think about this statistic, the more likely that we’ll be moved to act on the peaceful establishment of a fair global alternative, some of the tenets of which are becoming apparent to us: self-governance, decentralization of power, cancelation of unfair debt, removal of corrupt global trade agreements, a return to local responsible agriculture, the removal of the physical and psychological tools of the powerful, and portraits of me in every living room. I added the last one for a laugh.

  Dave reckons, a bit like economist Thomas Piketty (French of course), that this is not a glitch, a blip, or a hiccup; this is the intended result of our economic system.

  “This is not happening by mistake or inevitability. During the bailout of Wall Street, $30 trillion in support and subsidies went to the most powerful players on Wall Street. That was the greatest theft of wealth in history. Throughout the entire world, the Federal Reserve, IMF, World Bank, ECB, and BIS carry out genocidal economic policies. Just because that sounds hyperbolic and incredibly harsh doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  I don’t recognize a lot of those acronyms. I know IMF—International Monetary Fund—but ECB and BIS are a mystery to me.…“Russell, you could google them in the time it took to write this sentence.” No, I couldn’t. I turn the Internet off when I write; otherwise I get distracted looking at pointless balderdash, trying to claim it’s research.

  Furthermore, it’s bloody obvious that they’re international financial institutions that were set up to deregulate trade conditions for global conglomerates and make it easier for marauding corporations to subjugate the rest of us into weary compliance.

  Look it up yourself or ask a grown-up. I’ve got to write 100,000 words here, and all so that at the end of it I get a ten-second warm consolatory glow—“Ooh, I got shit GCSEs, but, look, I’ve done a book”—then a bunch of cunts telling me I’m a hypocrite because I’m in love with a member of the aristocracy, who happens to be an extremely high-caliber individual, then probably someone’ll go through this book with a fine-tooth comb, find an example of me being a bit sexist or something, and try and dismiss the broader argument. You look it up, we’re all in this together and trying to get past the old ideas of exalted individuals solving problems.

  Here’s some more terrifying jargon from Dave.

  “In the last year, the Federal Reserve handed out another trillion dollars through their ‘Quantitative Easing’ (QE) program. Most all of that money, like the trillions during the bailout, went to the big six banks so they could dish out all-time record-breaking bonuses.”

  Let’s break this one minor Fed program down: With the trillion dollars they most recently handed out, you can give every unemployed person in America a $50,000-per-year job.

  Quantitative Easing is a typically euphemistic piece of imperialistic lingo. It does, however, have the advantage of poetically inferring the application of a lubricant before a shafting.

  Dave DeGraw here, like his Occupy cohort Dave Graeber, points out that resources are present, here in the abstract, symbolic form of dollars: “$.” This is a concept that refers to assumed wealth. Graeber said we could cancel the debts of everyone instead of just that of an elite. DeGraw says we could use the money to create employment for loads of people
and “ease” life for ordinary people, not just an elite.

  Both demonstrate that the system and its language, ideologies, and practices are volitional, not absolute. We are not discussing gravity here, a seemingly irrefutable law. It’s just an idea that works well for the people who say it’s the only idea there is. Like gravity for elites. If it was up to them the rest of us would be floating around or paying through the nose for lead booties.

  This is not a worthy humanitarian argument to aid the destitute, normal people; literally almost everyone is getting fucked.

  “As bad as unemployment is, even among workers, almost half of the working population earns less today than people making minimum wage did in 1968. A stunning 76 percent of the U.S. population is living paycheck-to-paycheck. While U.S. millionaires have $50 trillion in wealth, an all-time record number of people are toiling in poverty, hunger, prison, and severe debt. When you fully grasp the situation, you realize that this is the greatest crime against humanity in the history of civilization.”

  It’s important to note that this is not a problem for radicals, or lefties, or hippies. If you are a person who breathes air and are not reading this on a bejeweled bus with eighty-four other plutocrats then this corrosive, outmoded doctrine is affecting you.

  Even if you are a billionaire, a multibillionaire, if you are Roman Abramovich or a Hinduja or Dick Cheney or George W. Bush (only joking, he wouldn’t read a book, hahahahahahahahahahahaha), you are of course part of the whole of humanity, about to realize that individualism was an old, primitive idea, that materialism is a bric-a-brac concept for toddler brains, that we are at a moment of history where consciousness is going to coalesce, collectivize, return to the whole.

  Where the business of being human is going to become something wonderful, unrecognizable, so we must relegate the mundane to its rightful place; the practical, fair allocation of resources and the preservation of the planet must naturally be prioritized so we can all get on with the exciting stuff: communing in unknown realms, summonsing new ideas into our reality.

  The answers are all around us, cluttering up the culture like a magical amulet ignored in a junk shop.

  16

  On Earth, As It Is In Heaven

  IF YOU GREW UP IN A SECULAR BUT PREVIOUSLY CHRISTIAN CULTURE, like I did, then these ideas were blandly recited in assembly, draped in antiquated code like a verbal doily, making it seem like some tiresome ol’ crud at a fete. The Lord’s Prayer:

  Our Father, who art in heaven …

  The first word is “our”: We have a shared provenance; we come from the same place. We have one father. Clearly not biologically, but they didn’t have words like “biology” then. I wonder what words we lack now. What label-less realms evade us for want of a consensual symbol.

  Right. So we all come from the same entity, or “father.” Now, where is this guy? He’s in “heaven.”

  Is that a place in the clouds, a place of silent reflection within all of us, a gay nightclub on Charring Cross Road in the nineties? The answer is yes to all three, but more importantly it implies a realm or dimension that is “not here,” not knowable but from where we as children of this father emanate.

  Perhaps it’s a subtler electromagnetic realm beyond our understanding, from which all tangible phenomena is emitted. In Sanskrit, all characters are connected by a single line; the individual “letters,” “words,” “sentences,” and “concepts,” therefore, demonstrably have the same genesis. They all come from the pure line, the total, unimpeded form.

  “In the beginning there was the word” is how a very popular, relatively recent book commences. All came from the vibration, the vibration of unrealized infinite possibilities. Tap any physicist you like on the shoulder and they’ll tell you that we are made of stardust, that the component elements of everything on our planet and in our bodies are made of nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. So is the sun. So are all stars. In their “give us one miracle and we’ll describe the rest” version of events, there was a big bang, or a giant vibration, or a sound, or a word, then all things came into being. This to me still sounds divine.

  So we all came from one place, an unknown dimension that is loving, or at least benevolent, like a father. Now, there’s a bit of patriarchy thrown in there to subjugate the evident superior power of feminine creative energy. Anything that gives birth to something by our understanding is feminine, but let’s give the people who wrote the prayer a break; they were probably men and were following orders. Also, at some point it would be nice to get beyond dualistic concepts like “masculine” and “feminine,” because they’re a bit old-fashioned.

  The prayer, or “thought code,” continues:

  hallowed be thy name.…

  “Hallowed” is a word that really hasn’t made the cut into the contemporary lexicon. It’s probably the most antiquated word in the prayer. Whoever says “hallowed” now? No one. It might be in the title of a Harry Potter film, is it? Deathly Hallows? Is that one of ’em? I dunno.

  Either way, it just means worthy of reverence and is a bit hard to grasp by the individualistic, repressed, unevolved, sense-bound consciousness. It’s special and pure. Fine. Even the name of this father in heaven is radiant, with some magical, ethereal, tricky-to-comprehend quality. Got it.

  Thy kingdom come …

  This realm, where the creative force is, where we came from, that’s all “hallowed,” is coming here.

  Bloody hell, look alive—God’s on his way. It might be an incantation, like we’re inviting this realm to be realized in us, through us, through our bound consciousness. So don’t panic.

  Thy will be done, on earth,

  As it is in heaven.…

  Yes, it was that, an incantation. Don’t worry, God’s not on his way in a fiery chariot of judgmental rage. We can manifest God, this divinity, this creative vibration, here in this dimension and make it correlate with its subtler original frequency. We can download it. Really all that means is, stop fucking about with things that don’t have meaning, like money, Dior boots, and blowjobs, because it’s stupid and detached from original intention. Not bad, just compartmentalized; do it if you want, you have free will, but if your intention is contentment, you’re wasting your time with all that.

  Give us this day, our daily bread …

  So we do need food. I mean, we have bodies, so some bread would be nice, or pasta or veg—anything, really, I’m not fussy, but I will need some grub at some point. Interesting that it is “us,” all of us. We are a community of people, and we would like some bread. It’s not “give me some bread and fuck the immigrants.” We ask on behalf of everyone.

  Also, we only need the bread today, in the moment, in the present. The future and the past are only relevant to the limited, animalistic, reductive view of reality that we indulge in to our detriment. We don’t need ten years’ worth of bread, either, “in case”; just our daily bread will do.

  And forgive us our trespasses …

  We will fuck up; we’re just people, expressions of a higher consciousness, permutated through a physical dimension. I mean, we need bread and everything; we’re flawed. Please be compassionate to us, divine creative power, within us, without us. It reiterates “us.”

  As we forgive those who trespass against us.…

  Ah, so there are conditions—we’ve got to be forgiving too; it’s not a one-way street, this compassion; it’s not perfect. We ourselves will have to let go of our perceived transgressions—or trespasses, which I saw in incredibly literal terms as a kid and thought referred to scrumping or hijinks.

  And lead us not into temptation

  But deliver us from evil.

  This is a bit confusing. After everything that’s preceded it, after all this righteousness, why would him “leading us” into “temptation” be likely?

  Perhaps it is at this point that we acknowledge that it is not an external, abstract entity that we are addressing but our own nature. In the past, I thought it a bit simplist
ic to consider hunger, lust, and aggression as inferior to grace, love, and service; by what barometer can we begin to measure? If all these qualities exist in our nature, how can we divide them up and apply tags like “good” and “bad” to them?

  Aleister Crowley and all the pagan, devil-worshipping types extol a far less challenging “Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law” philosophy. I gave it a whirl—hedonism, indulgence, animalism—and I believe there is an essential difference. Those impulses, when acted upon, create competitive and destructive conditions. Personally too, I found that those impulses were deviations from the source.

  Often I’d think, “I must have some heroin” or “I’d love an orgy,” then I’d act on that and be surprised by the lack of fulfillment. I believe natural instincts “go awry”; what was I really seeking when scoring and using heroin?

  Heroin is an opiate; opiates are painkillers. I was in spiritual pain. I have come to believe that the reason I was using drugs was to treat a spiritual malady.

  A flailing, disconnected tendril searching for connection and, failing to find it, I had to be sedated. When I began my life in abstinence-based recovery, living one day at a time without the use of drugs and alcohol, the impulse that drove me to seek out oblivion remained.

  I believe it is the impulse for union that is denied by our atomized and secular culture. The flailing tendril then took on a somewhat obvious and visually apposite course of action to fulfill this longing for connection.

  It’s kind of transparent: The symptoms of addiction are like the behaviors of caged, pacing animals, a response to an unnatural condition.