The Warriors

Life on Planet Earth has been bumbling
along quite nicely for a few billion years.

We’ve been through cataclysmic periods of lush growth . . . spent entire eras encased in ice . . . witnessed volcanic eruptions, clouds of ash that blocked the sun and choked all life out of the sky. And we saw the first magical inklings of life leap from cell to amoebae to frogs to crocs to monkeys. Then once Homo Erectus began strutting the Earth 200,000 years ago, a terrible “beauty” was born. From the earliest farms and settlements we saw the rise of towns, cities, nations, empires and with them, the birth of music, poetry, art, literature, philosophy . . . but also slavery, brutal revolutions, genocides, an unspeakable holocaust, and two savage world wars. Yet through it all, we’ve always bounced back — the human story just kept moving along.

But now the game intensifies. Two hundred years ago, we began pumping oil out of the Earth, burning it, and shooting carbon into the stratosphere. And now, every year the temperature rises, floods, droughts, storms and wildfires grow more vicious . . . and no world leader, no Nobel Prize winning scientist, no whiz kid Elon Musk has the faintest idea how to get us out of the fix we’re in.

On top of the climate crisis, we’re saddled with erratic stock markets . . . obscene inequality . . . corrupt, secretive bureaucracies . . . massive refugee migrations . . . and a wave of fascist-leaning strong men vowing to make their countries great again. If the temperature of the world suddenly lurches out of control, or if a 1929-style stock market crash hits us, or if nukes suddenly start flying in the Middle East, then this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth will plunge into total chaos.

We’re faced with a choice: Continue plummeting inexorably towards eco-collapse, a financial meltdown, World War 3 and the end of civilization as we know it . . . or morph into a species of metameme warriors hell-bent on pulling us out of the death spiral we’re in.

‍

The Hidden Coordinates of Reality

If you take a cold hard look at how our global system works, then you’ll see it runs on a foundation of well-entrenched precepts that we hardly ever question.

For example, most of us take it for granted that economists know what they’re doing . . . that toxic financial instruments like derivatives and credit default swaps are business as usual . . . that flash trading is an efficient way to run stock exchanges . . . that money can run freely across borders but people can’t . . . that secrecy is a normal part of democracy . . . that there will never be an end to arms trading . . . that no matter how heinous a crime a corporation commits, we cannot revoke its right to exist.

But now, caught in an existential crisis with no obvious way out, we must question these hidden coordinates of reality . . . and think about how to smash our way out of that reality and create a new one.

‍

The Insurrection

A meme is a unit of information – a catch-phrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics. Memes pass through a population in much the same way genes pass through a species.

Good strong memes can change minds, alter behaviour, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures.

In our information age, whoever makes the memes holds the power.

We get together on the internet and come up with a new story . . . a new grand narrative . . . a new set of micromemes, macromemes and metamemes — ideas so fundamental, so systemic, so profound that a sane and sustainable future is unthinkable without them.

Then we plot a metamemetic insurrection against the current world order on multiple fronts.

‍

On the Personal Front

The political right keeps on winning because they have a fuck-it-all attitude . . . even when they’re dead wrong, they come across
defiant, confident, charged up . . . whereas we on the left keep
mincing our words, wringing our hands, pointing our fingers.

We’ve been losing badly lately, and voters hate the smell
of failure. Time to take a cold hard look in the mirror . . .
figure what the fuck went wrong.

Our obsession with identity politics is a huge part of the problem.
It’s wonderful and essential that we on the left are empathetic
souls who care deeply for the downtrodden and fight with passion
for justice everywhere, but a self-righteous and finger wagging
brand of political correctness has now become the essence of who
we are and the spirit of much of what we do.

If we’re ever going to be enchanted again, if we’re ever going
to be mysterious, spell-binding and mythical again, then we’ll
have to loosen up . . . stop intellectualizing so much, trust our
instincts and learn how to play jazz.

Miles Davis once said: “The biggest challenge in jazz
improvisation is not to play all the notes you could play,
but to wait, hesitate- then play what’s not there.” . . . and
there’s some strange kind of wisdom there. Learning
how to be wilder, crazier, more fuck-it-all-shoot-from-the-
hip-spontaneous in everything we do, may well be
the secret — our way back into the planetary flow.

‍