Revolution (24 page)

Here again the possibility for a truly direct democracy is raised. Why are we pretending that we don’t live in a culture where, in spite of record-low voter turnouts in political elections, millions of people every Saturday night demonstrate their democratic right to vote for who they want to progress on
X Factor
? I’ve never voted in that either, but its success infers that the technology exists and an engaged populace will vote for something they care about. We can be all snooty if we like, but TV talent shows engage people emotionally in a way that politics doesn’t.

People are affected by the stories and the songs and will dial in at a quid a time. Of course, they’d do the same if we lived in an inclusive, truly democratic society, where we all participated in the conversation to organize a fair and reflective society.

Daniel, the mushroom-guzzling space cowboy, shows his true psychedelic colors here:

“We are already learning that science and mysticism are not opposites but can be integrated. The study and exploration of the infinite dimensions of consciousness and mind–body states can be part of a post-materialist society. A new spiritual and religious impetus that embraces science and technology can become a unifying force.”

I see that as a rational choice as we arrive at frontiers in the quantum world that seem to call into question even basic tenets of our understanding of the physical world: the nature of time, the nature of matter, the nature of space, the nature of nature.

The significance of consciousness itself as a participant in what we perceive as reality is increasingly negating what we understood to be objectivity. Our consciousness as observers at a subatomic level is influential, the quantum equivalent of “a watched pot never boils.” An observed electron behaves as a particle; an unwatched one behaves as indeterminate waves of possibility.

There are many outcomes for even the smallest components of material, and the interaction with consciousness affects outcome. These ideas that are emerging in quantum physics are outlined elsewhere in myth or religion. Your reality is the result of your attention and intention. We are, through both science and mysticism, on the precipice of new understanding and have the potential to create new worlds. This is the time to align and discard old ideas that have fulfilled their function.

Christ’s ascendance to heaven could be regarded as a symbol for the death of physical man, mortal man, carnal man, and the emergence of the man that is one with God. Man that embraces the heavenly realm, the divine realm of quantum interconnection to be manifest on this material plane. To harmonize these superficially distinct but connected dimensions.

But how do we get there, Daniel, you fathomlessly insightful, inter-dimensional pothead?

“In the short term, global civilization needs to make a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. This requires a new social contract, as a shift in energy paradigm is also a shift in political power.”

The priorities are reversing the current plan to “ditch the planet to save capitalism” and end the energy crisis. Once it is illegal for energy companies to profit by exploiting the planet, they’ll stop doing it. Global consensus is impossible as long as people are separated from true power by nation states that act as intermediary administrators for psychopathic corporations that pursue their legal obligation for profit into the jaws of Armageddon. Daniel says:

“The next industrial revolution is toward decentralized, autonomous, and resilient systems where individuals and communities control their own destinies. This requires a transformation of our
economic model from privatized control to co-operative models of ownership, which the social technologies of the Internet can facilitate.”

The agricultural revolution took thousands of years; the industrial revolution took hundreds; the technological, tens. The spiritual revolution, the Revolution we are about to realize, will be fast because the organisms are in place; all that needs to shift is consciousness, and that moves rapidly.

Visionaries like Daniel, inspired by mentors like Buckminster Fuller and Terence McKenna, can pull down new possibilities—conveniently, in Daniel’s case, by loafing around the jungle, chomping up drugs. Human cultures have always had on their peripheries thinkers like these; the challenge for the rest of us is the realization of these visions. Even this actually only requires us to act in union to achieve our mutual objectives.

I
N THE NEXT PART OF OUR BOOK WE ARE GOING TO DISCUSS HOW WE
bring corporations into line with common-sense thinking, how we the people can have authority and ownership of the organizations we work within, how we can end corporatization and end homelessness forever.

First, though, I’d like to boast about what I call “my time in the U.S. Marine Corps.” I hope the gravitas of the tale will not be diminished by my admission that the period that “my time” encompassed was about twenty-four hours.

I went to their San Diego training camp to learn how people behave when their individual identity is forcibly subsumed into a group identity. My whole life, I have sought comfort in individualism. I escaped the banality of my background with the flamboyance of my haircut, the low expectations of my class with the grandiosity of my parlance, and the fear of being ordinary by becoming a professional weirdo. In a way, my success in show business represents little more than the harvesting of my psychosis. I made my idiosyncrasies and flaws beneficial by exaggerating them.

That is not how they do things in the U.S. Marine Corps. When we arrived at Camp Pendleton, me and my mates who were filming me—that’s how I made life bearable in the past, by filming it—I had already, at the first sign of barbed wire and barbed remarks, done an about-turn more deft than any military maneuver that I’d subsequently perform.

The thing with the Marines is, they don’t fuck about. That could
be a slogan for them, in fact: “The Marines—we don’t fuck about.” As I arrived at the camp, on the phone to my best mate and manager, the aforementioned Nik, I was demanding this macabre social experiment be canceled. I was a one-man Stanford experiment: I was the subject and the observer, and I wanted neither role. All I wanted, with burgeoning intensity with each camo-clad man I passed, was my mum.

Nik said I should stay, which incidentally has been his position whenever he’s received these phone calls from sex-addiction centers and drug rehabs. “Come on, pal, give it a go,” he intones in his Old Trafford bray. “Give the Marines a chance,” he said. “You’ll learn from it.”

I’ve always had the problem of being unable to envisage the nature of a situation prior to its commencement. This means I’m in a state of perpetual shock while doing things that I’ve agreed to.

The Marines is a pretty extreme example. When I came up with the idea to do it—or agreed to do it—I just had an image of myself as Rambo, with a dressing-gown belt round my head, doing something irresponsible and impressive with a knife. That’s it, a mental photograph of a moment. Reality doesn’t behave like that. Although sequential time as experienced by humans is likely an illusion contrived by our animalistic experience of an expiring anatomy, it don’t feel like that when you’re on an obstacle course getting coated off by a drill sergeant.

There was no warm-up time. You know when you go to a fancy hotel? (If you don’t, don’t worry; these are the very kind of privileges that will be collectivized or banned come the great day.) Well, when you arrive, there are some protocols: Someone’ll give you a drink, maybe you’ll get shown round and given a little cold wet flannel in a packet to refresh you from your drive. These niceties ease you into your new environment. There’s none of that in the Marines. Within ten seconds of Nik hanging up on me, I was in the barracks, surrounded by hard-looking fuckers doing Marine shit.

They shouted hello and gave me a rucksack that was as big as I was and pointed to a car-boot sale’s worth of khaki crap that I was expected to pack.

I’d been greeted—if that’s the word; it was more like a well-drilled ambush—by five double-tough-looking skinheads in combat fatigues, who I was informed were to be my instructors, and the only reference for comprehension that I could reach for in my head was the five martial-art animals that teach the Kung Fu Panda. “It’s okay,” I thought. “I’m just in the film
Kung Fu Panda
.”

The first thing I was commanded to do—addressed by my surname, which I’ve never liked having bellowed at me—was put the giant pile of stuff, including three sleeping bags and a shovel, into the big but annoyingly not big enough for the job rucksack.

I squatted on the floor with the most Nazi-looking of the furious five looming over me, shouting encouraging slogans like “Move it, you maggot.” To give you some idea of the physical dimensions of this hollering cyborg, I give you Dolph Lundgren from the film
Rocky IV
, or simply a wet dream of Adolf Hitler. He was so blond and tough, like an evil Milky Bar kid gone buff.

Now, I don’t like packing at the best of times; I have existential problems with the concept. It involves for me a perspicacious sorcery with which I am ill at ease.

In my room prior to a trip, case open on my bed, possessions strewn about the room, I am confronted with an unknowable conundrum:

I can’t see into the future—I just told you, I can’t envisage stuff. I can barely see into the present.

It was clear from Dolph’s phlegm-flecked imperatives that I was not only expected to pack but also to pack in a particular style, pertaining not to the contents but to the manner of my movements. I was obviously being too effete and ineffective, because he eventually began jamming stuff in himself. Gripping in his veiny claw one
of the three sleeping bags, he thrust it into the quickly decreasing chasm of the rucksack like rewound footage of a vet angrily delivering a calf.

My query as to the necessity for three sleeping bags didn’t even warrant a response, but really, why would you ever need three? Any camping trip that results in the loss of two sleeping bags ought be swiftly cut short to prevent further calamity—an argument that my Aryan orderly brushed off with the same cold-eyed indifference that he afforded the scratch he got on his knuckle from one of my many gem-spangled rings.

Our eyes met as the blood rose, but I curbed my nan-like impulse to go, “Ooh, are you okay, dear? Do want a plaster? That’ll sting,” as I thought it would be bad for morale.

I was loudly informed that the reason we were packing this bag seemingly designed to cater for a disastrous and repetitive holiday was that at three in the morning—or “oh three hundred hours,” as Dolph called it—we’d be getting up to do a ten-kilometer hike, carrying a 75-lb. bag, with seventy other trainee Marines. As well as being startled by the extraordinary distance and punishing baggage, I was concerned that one military maneuver contained both imperial and metric measuring systems. “Make yer mind up,” I thought.

The final futile instrument to be willed into the bulging knapsack was a collapsible shovel. “Do all the Marines carry shovels?” I asked. Dolph responded in the affirmative. “Then in the event that one is required, could I not borrow one of theirs?”

This inquiry, which some may have seen as indication that they were dealing with a strategic mastermind the likes of which we’ve not seen since Alexander the Great, barely warranted a grunt. Instead of being awarded a Purple Heart, I was sent off to a kind of broom cupboard to put on my fatigues.

I am at pains to point out that I was not granted the proper U.S. Marine uniform, which I was looking forward to wearing, but instead got a kind of “You forgot your PE kit so get something from the lost property” parody of a Marine uniform. I was well vexed.

I also had to tie my hair up in a bun, so gone too was my hope of
undertaking this rapidly growing nightmare as a kind of latter-day Cuban revolutionary. More Frank Spencer than Che Guevara.

I realized with a shudder how much of my sense of self I’d unwittingly invested in tight garments and rock-’n’-roll jewelry when I emerged from the broom cupboard in my lost-property uniform. I was trying to distance myself from the clothes while wearing them, like a cat resists a plunge towards a full bathtub. The revulsion is magnetic.

Blessedly, Pendleton is not bestrewn with mirrors or I may not have been able to proceed; as it was, the giant pointless knapsack was thrust onto my back and I was marched—that’s right, marched—to an obstacle course. The biggest obstacle being that I’d avoided PE as a kid.

My indulgent mum, a single mum of an only son, would let me skip games, pandering to my teary complaints as a former fat child herself. This, I suppose, is where a father figure would come in handy, a loving, authoritative strong male to affectionately shove you into adversity. As it was, notes were written and physical activity strenuously avoided, until I discovered that some exercise had an orgasm at the end of it. This syndrome of “fatherless” boys is a much-cited problem that military organizations effectively resolve: Personal identity put aside, a male ideal upon which to focus is provided and pursued.

Another word for obstacle course is “assault course,” and I can see how both terms have flourished, because, when I finally embarked on the horrific sequence of logs and fences and nets and ropes, assaulted is how I felt. They may as well’ve called it a “humiliation course.” The other Marines—that’s right, “other” Marines—hopped, zipped, and sauntered across each awful vicissitude like butch Nijinskys. Then came my turn.

I hate doing things I’m shit at, especially in front of people who are good at them. The only way that obstacle course could’ve been made more traumatic is if they’d brought along a girl I fancied to watch. With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless.