The United States was a British colony, and a damn fine one. For some reason, around 1775, the Americans—or Brits abroad, as they rightly were, as America hadn’t been invented yet—decided that paying tax to the British for no discernible reason was no longer appropriate. It is interesting to me that what irked them ultimately was the geographical abstraction. “We’re not paying tax to that unresponsive entity that doesn’t represent our interests. Especially as they are distinguished from us by the Atlantic.”
The Atlantic allowed the emerging nation to see itself as separate. The same problem, of course, exists today: Unless you are the CEO of a major corporation, you too in 2014-15 are paying taxes to a government that doesn’t represent you; they represent the interests of big business. The only difference is, there isn’t a convenient and obvious distinction as demonstrated by the ocean. There is, however, an ocean of inequality that separates us, an Atlantic of indifference.
The geographic dislocation also enabled the—okay, I’ll call ’em it—Americans the advantage of being able to see that they could run things without their “leaders.” They already were—their leaders were thousands of miles away, wigging it up in Westminster. The same is true now. We are already running our own lives. The infrastructural duties carried about by big companies that run our energy networks or whatever are not in their hands because they possess some secret wisdom; it’s because they can make a profit from it.
Why are we giving all this money and power to Tesco’s? Or Walmart or El Corte Inglés? They are no different from the colonial masters of a bygone age: unresponsive and exploitative overlords. Where is the sacred text that says they are allowed to glean such profits from our land and farm our labor and our minds so that Tesco can take one pound in seven and the Walmart kids can have as much wealth as half of America? Show me where that’s written down and I will tear it up. It’s not serving us, it’s not serving the planet, it’s not even serving them. It’s time to wake up and take back authority.
Their commercials, their logos, their slogans all mimic familiarity, imitate the human emotions and connections that they have hijacked and drained. “Every Little Helps”? We’re taking the fucking lot.
They spend millions designing typefaces, symbols, and campaigns that eerily ape the local, informal economies that they bludgeoned into mush to achieve their towering monopolies.
These corporations do not believe in nation. They register for tax wherever it’s expedient, then drape themselves in patriotic slut garb during the World Cup. They are laughing at us, our traditions, our beliefs, our vulnerable human love. We are like a swarm of battered spouses, unable to believe that a better world is out there, because we’re cowering and flinching and reaching out for stinking trinkets. We can still have things. We can still have Xboxes, waxed jeans, football teams, magazines, and beauty queens, if we want them, but we might find that we don’t want them as much when we’re free.
After the British people that were in America beat the British people that worked for the king at fighting, many assumed that George Washington would appoint himself the new king, but he argued instead to have a constitutional republic. Which seems damn decent of him until you realize that all that really happened is one elite replaced another.
John Jay, who was the leader of the new constitutional convention, said, “The people who own the country should run the country.” Another squandered opportunity, then. Let’s make a promise to each other that if we ever find ourselves in a position where we throw off the shackles of oppression, we’ll leave them off and stay in charge of ourselves. Not just pick some new shackles with Nike on them and get on with our subjugation.
This requires diligence. As David Graeber said, any authoritative measures supposedly for our benefit must be resisted. We must insist on total self-governance.
The American constitution was designed to keep rich men in charge; the only significant change was the accent and crowns. They swapped a lion for an eagle and crowns for hair cream. The same people that were shafted then are shafted now. Any country that puts the word “United” in its title has got something to hide, and I would suggest that it’s conflict. In the United Kingdom, the Scottish want out, the Welsh want out, even the English want nothing to do with it. The United States is anything but. Descendants of slaves, Europeans of every description, Latino folk, forever condemned for crossing a line that didn’t used to be there. The nation state is a relatively modern idea, and I don’t think we’re getting a lot out of it except for flags and World Cups.
It’s odd that those in power condemn people who want change for being whimsical and impractical, but actually what is being demanded is pragmatism, systems that function. People get the resources they need, the resources are managed efficiently, and the conditions required to create resources are respected. None of that happens. It can’t, because they’ve prioitized a bizarre, selfish, and destructive idea over common sense.
We’ve already, thanks to Helena Norberg-Hodge, had a cursory glance at the gluttonous absurdity of global trade agreements and the profligacy and inefficiency of industrialized agriculture, neither of which has any place in a world built on common sense. They are only advantageous to the elite organizations that implemented them. Anyone who tells you different is on the make. In fact, we are at the point where the catastrophic failings of the system are so gallingly obvious that anyone who supports it, or denies that change is needed, is verbally daubing themselves with the black cross of the damned. As soon as someone pipes up with “There ain’t no climate change” or “Compassionate capitalism could work,” we should just nod, smile, and lead them to the sanitarium to begin their reeducation.
Redemption is possible and compassion a prerequisite. If we don’t allow people to change, then how can we change the world?
My dad, Ron Brand, was an entrepreneurial Essex man, Del Boy’d up to the hilt on Thatcher’s creed. He was a self-made and self-destructive man and intermittently tumbled either side of the line. The prevailing mentality of the time, the eighties, was “every man for himself.” Unions were crushed, state interests were carved up and flogged, and council houses were sold back to the people whose efforts had built them. One of the great venture-capitalist heroes of this time, who epitomized this buccaneering spirit, was Sir James Goldsmith, Tory hero, Thatcher crush, scourge of Private Eye, and demon of the left. My dad and a lot of people from modest backgrounds admired him; there was something appealingly antiestablishment and daring in the aggressive and ingenious ways that James Goldsmith exploited the system. Now I am tribally obligated to loathe James Goldsmith, with his individualistic, asset-stripping, Thatcher-loving, poverty-exacerbating creed. However, recent events in my personal life have demanded I revise this disdain. In short, I was in love with his daughter.
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Conversion?
IF MY JAUNT TO HOLLYWOOD AND POP-STAR NUPTIALS REPRESENTED the penetration of one establishment, the show-business machine, then unavoidably I must address the alliance I have since been in. I occasionally have been in the company of people at the upper echelons of the British establishment. I met a Rothschild the other day—a Rothschild! I still go on websites that say they might be lizard illuminati. One website accused me of being illuminati—me, ol’ Russ! I was so flabbergasted, I squashed one of the eggs I was incubating.
Let me tell you now, if there is an illuminati (and I hope there is; it gives us a clear target), and they ask me to join, I will sprint out of that Masonic temple and announce it on the Internet. I can’t imagine the Rothschild lady I met was in it either; she seemed kind of sweet and erratic. That’s not to say other members of the family aren’t attending Bilderberg meetings and giggling at the back of the fun bus. My mate Gee says you can’t make love from hate. There is enough antipathy, judgment, and bile; pop Fox News on, they’re giving it away. Perhaps even the Bilderbergers, illuminati, and lizards can be guided back to humanity. My attitude to the establishment is comparable to my feeling toward the poli
ce. Of course I feel a visceral clench of antipathy when I encounter them, but if our objective is harmony, we must ensure its presence in the one place we can control, ourselves.
Usually, when I’ve met the people who are meant to be in a position of power, I’ve always made sure to give them a damn good soul stare—y’know, look right in their eyes, through the blackness of the pupils and into whatever conscious field exists within. Then lock the eyes on, but let them gently defocus so that the defined parameters of the visual physical go blurry and you can feel the energy behind it, the unseeable energy that isn’t made of photons. Then, if your mind is quiet, you will be informed of the quality of their essence, or at least of the manifest persona that they believe themselves to be.
Gordon Brown: kind, bewildered. Prince Charles: lost jocundity. George Osborne: naïve heat. Miliband: earnest angst.
I’m beginning to recognize a pattern here—in each case they seemed edgy, and they were all meeting me. If an observed electron alters its behavior when it interacts with the consciousness of the observer, how the fuck are we meant to get an honest reaction out of George Osborne? Impossible. Especially if you’re bogging at him like Derren Brown; that’d make anyone clammy.
My point is, of course, they are human beings, who were born and will die. All on a journey to oneness with the source, while dealing with varying degrees of distraction.
If, in my heart of hearts, I know the only productive attitude to have towards a pedophile is one of loving, inclusive, rehabilitative tolerance, how can I not afford the same stance to George Osborne? Well, he has fucked over more kids than the average nonce.
At some posh do that I recently attended—all the way there justifying it to myself, trying to find a way to say it wasn’t hypocritical—I discovered on arrival that Prince Andrew was in the house. What am I meant to do? Smack him in the mouth? Knock over a teapot and tell him he’s at the heart of an institution that’s responsible for the death and suffering of millions of normal people? Wipe my bum on a tenner, say, “That’s what I think of your old tit,” and throw it at him? What would my ex’ve said? Thank God, the answer lies in spirituality, an attitude of loving tolerance on our mutual journey to manifesting divine will.
I mean, if Gandhi can write a letter to Hitler, lovingly requesting that he step back from genocide (that went well!), then surely I can have a polite crumpet with Air Force Andy without wanking in the sugar bowl.
Here’s what I can tell you from the Establishment’s dark heart: They’re lost too. They’re as lost as me and you. Looking for love and redemption, waddling toddlers in their mum’s high-heeled shoes, trying to look like they know what to do. A lady went to the loo and left me and Andrew one on one, and we were both stumped; neither of us knew what to do.
Just scratch the record off—we’re naked under our clothes; we both know what it’s like to need to fart and hold it in, or not be able to get a hard-on, or worry that a bloke across the room might be looking at your bird and you might have to fight him but he looks well hard. Well, Andrew might not get the last one; he can call MI5 and get the bloke killed.
Who does a baby think he is before he can recognize his face in a mirror, before he’s taught his name, before he’s drummed into stagnant separation, cordoned off from the infinite oneness?
Love is innate. We must be taught to hate, and now we must unlearn it, as the Buddhists say; let it burn, that which needs to burn, let it burn.
The class system isn’t fair on them either, poor little sods—packed off to school, weaned on privatized maternity shopped in from a northern spinster. Trying to find love in the tangle of dismantled family. No one can be happy imbibing a poisoned brew. It’s poisonous for us all. They’ll gratefully sigh when we unlock them from their opulent penitentiaries, they’ll be grateful when their fallow lords and empty chambers feed the hungry and house the poor. They know contentment cannot be enjoyed when stolen. They need the Revolution as much as we do.
The whole of human history is nothing new, the whole of your personal story is nothing true, you can do with it whatever you want to do—flick a switch, scratch the record off, look behind the veil. Anything you don’t want, discard; anything that hurts, let go. None of it’s real, you know—all that pain, all that regret, all that doubt, not thin enough, not a good enough mum, not a good enough son, not a good enough bum. You are enough; you’re enough; there’s nothing you can buy or try on that’s going to make you any better, because you couldn’t be any better than you are.
Drag your past around if you like, an old dead decaying ox of what you think they might’ve thought or what might’ve been if you’d done what you ought. That which needs to burn, let it burn. If the idea doesn’t serve you, let it go. If it separates you from the moment, from others, from yourself, let it go.
Toward the end of James Goldsmith’s life, a life in which he mastered the game of capitalism—the only game in town for a self-determined alpha male—he realized that it was a broken system, dragging the planet toward destruction. In his book The Trap, he explains with perspicacity gained from a lifetime’s frontline experience how global free trade and transnational corporations would inevitably bring about a kind of economic and ecological Armageddon.
This is all the more pertinent because we’re hardly talking about Karl Marx here. I mean, this man had made capitalism work—he was the Pelé of capitalism—but in The Trap he disavows free-market economics as a suicidal system. He also explains that GNP—Gross National Product—which is the economic thermometer by which the health of a nation is assessed, is a profoundly flawed, in fact bloody stupid, instrument. GNP commends nations that have had disasters, like a hurricane or whatever, because that requires them to spend money on aid and reparation, which in GNP lingo is good.
It commends nations where crime and cancer are rife because dealing with those problems requires industry and expenditure. He explains that the qualities that GNP is measuring and evaluating as successful are not only divorced from but often detrimental to the happiness of the population.
In other words, the lenses of the glasses through which success is viewed are dirty. GNP is still the measure that we use. Goldsmith explains that the king of Bhutan eschews this system, favoring instead a measure that takes into account—get this—the happiness of the people who live in the country.
Goldsmith then dissects free trade, observing that a system that enables transnational corporations to flit around the world, exploiting labor, benefits only the corporations themselves and not the consumers, the purported beneficiaries. “When Nike moved its manufacturing from the U.S. to Asia shoe prices did not drop, instead profit margins rose. But the real cost to consumers is that they will lose their jobs, get paid less for their work and have higher taxes to cover the social cost of increased unemployment.”
Or as Flight of the Conchords put it: “They’re turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers. But what’s the real cost? ’Cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper. Why are we still paying so much for sneakers when you got them made by little slave kids? What are your overheads?”
This is globalization described by a man who knew the system inside out, explained from an informed and honest perspective.
We are given biased, censored information, and even when the consequences of their mad, greedy dabblings become apparent, they deny it.
Goldsmith describes the institutions that benefit from this doomed ideology as “winners of a poker game on the Titanic” and says that, unimpeded, this mentality will deeply wound our societies and lead to brutal consequences.
He expresses fears around the mass industrialization of agriculture, which aligns with what Helena Norberg-Hodge told us earlier, that we need to return to localized, organic farming. Everyone is saying the same thing, in fact—return to a more harmonious way of living. Since industrialization, we have moved rapidly out of synchronicity with nature and our own nature. We were told this would be a better way of life, and it is. I
t’s a better way of life for people that subscribe to the ideology that capitalist apostate James Goldsmith here attacks.
Mass production, synthesization, global trade arrangements are all brilliant ideas for concentrating power in the hands of a few. Well done—it worked; you fooled us. Now can we have our ball back please? Capitalism has brought us many useful tools and systems: the laptop I type this on, the money I bought it with, the fame that means you’ve heard of me and are reading this. We are nothing if not adaptive, and if these systems and tools have now fulfilled their function or have become a hindrance, we owe them no loyalty; we must move on. It’s not an unconditional commitment—we’re not talking devotion to West Ham United here, just a dumb affiliation that we’re just stuck with.
By the end of the book, Goldsmith, who I’d always regarded as a fundamentalist free marketeer, is mellifluously espousing paganism and environmentalism, quoting Buddhist tracts and Black Elk, the Native American chief who wrote a now-famous letter to President Franklin Pierce in 1854. This letter is a belated and, it turned out, utterly ignored appeal for “the white man” to recognize his role as a strand in “the web of life” to overcome our need to dominate and exploit the land and see all the earth’s resources merely as commodities for the advancement of the few.
This ideology is so antithetical to the business pursuits of Goldsmith or any powerful capitalist that his inclusion of the letter as the denouement to his book amounts to a deathbed conversion to the Revolution.
It is a shame that the means for achieving status and honor in this mercantile culture are so irrevocably entrenched within toxic structures that it is hard to find expression for that kind of dynamism in this mercantile culture.
I wonder if Donald Trump has any tingling epiphanies that he cudgels back to slumber as he goose-steps towards the grave.
I met Trump once and was surprised mostly by his daftness. He was peculiarly juvenile; I thought at the time that he was like a dimwit with a prodigious skill that happens to be highly valued—in his case, making money. He had no curiosity about consciousness, spirituality, interconnectivity, the micro or the macro, or anything, except in how it might relate to making money. It was odd that someone whose mind rattles around within such limited borders had made such a lot of money. It’s almost like being an athlete—ordinary but for one lucrative skill, irrelevant in a parallel world.
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