Electrified Thought Fences - Narcissism: Real And Imagined

Media Lens

David Edwards

20 November 2013

 
One of the great tasks of the state-corporate commentariat is to install electrified thought fences between the public and rare voices attempting to challenge the status quo.

Dissidents are attacked from ostensibly noble positions opposing fascism, genocide, sexism and selfishness. The smears are empowered by the fact that they target an opponent's reputation with ugly-looking labels that nobody really understands.

For example, no-one in fact knows at what point (if any) honest disagreement morphs into the Thought Crime 'genocide denial'. But if enough pundits shriek with sufficient conviction and disgust that they know, many will believe them.

The mix of feigned outrage and genuine confusion deters neutrals from challenging the smear for fear of appearing foolish, or of being tarred with the same brush. They may instead step back from supporting, or even mentioning, the work of someone that 'everyone knows' is a 'genocide denier', a 'sexist', or a 'narcissist'.

Last month, Joan Smith of the Independent wrote of Russell Brand:

'I don't think you would have to be a passionate feminist to conclude that this guy is (a) a sexist idiot and (b) a narcissist whose ideas about politics are likely to be only slightly more coherent than those of a 13-year-old boy.'

Smith's comment was provoked by Brand's opening sentence in a long article for the New Statesman:

'When I was asked to edit an issue of the New Statesman I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me.'

Numerous commentators denounced this as an unacceptable, sexist remark. But does anyone believe that Brand was seriously claiming he had chosen to edit a national political magazine - incorporating his own impassioned, 5,000-word, political/spiritual essay - in response to a sexual urge? Brand, a comedian, was clearly mocking the all too human tendency to be at least in part guided by 'lower' urges as we pursue 'higher' ideals (classic comedic fare). He was surely also firing a shot at his own ego, at the idea that he was setting himself up as some pompous political leader.

As even Smith observed, 'the "beautiful woman" who asked him is, I assume, the paper's associate editor and current Brand love interest (for want of a better phrase), Jemima Khan'.

Describing Khan as merely the 'current Brand love interest' is itself dismissive and patronising. Perhaps Brand is the 'current Khan love interest'. Or perhaps she is Brand's soul-mate and they are desperately in love. In which case, Brand's comment could be viewed as a loving gesture in her direction, rather than an example of crazed sexual Pavlovianism. One can imagine that if a Clinton or an Obama had delivered a comparable reference to Hillary or Michelle, the press corps would have smiled at this 'human touch' and shifted admiringly in their seats.

Again, most people are unsure exactly what Brand has said, meant and done in his life, just as they are unsure where reasonable references to sexuality end and sexism begins. They are also unsure when comments and actions justify someone being permanently branded (indeed) as thoroughgoing 'sexists'. But Smith seems to know. Many will have deferred to her fierce certainty, particularly given that she describes herself as a feminist, a label which suggests a depth of understanding on these issues which she may or may not in fact possess.

In the New Statesman, Laurie Penny (formerly of the Independent) also took Brand to task for being 'clearly a casual and occasionally vicious sexist'. This sexism, 'It's everywhere' on the left, Penny claimed: 'It's Julian Assange and George Galloway...'

In fact the evidence justifying such damning criticism of Brand, Assange and Galloway is pitifully thin and even fabricated. Consider, after all, that Penny commented:

'Brand is hardly the only leftist man to boast a track record of objectification, of harassment and of playing cheap misogyny for laughs.'

The serious claim that Brand boasts a 'track record' of sexual 'harassment' came with an embedded link to an August 3, 2012 blog on a website called 'Jezebel – Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing,' which reported that Brand had refused to begin filming a musical, 'What About Dick?', 'until he convinced a wardrobe assistant to flash him [her breasts]. He actually delayed production for two hours, haranguing her the entire time'.

The blog continued: 'co-star and comic Billy Connolly took him [Brand] aside for a stern talking-to. So, yup, Hollywood is full of professionals and no breasts are safe. Good Lord, imagine what Brand might have requested from a PA?'

Jezebel's source for the story, to which it linked, was Murdoch's Sun newspaper. Easy to understand why the author of the 'Penny Red' blog chose not to link to the Sun as some kind of credible source.
Worse still, in December 2012, the Independent published this comment by Connolly:

'"That [widely reported] story," says Connolly evenly, "is a total invention. A complete fabrication. It's total bollocks. It never happened. Russell was very well-behaved, and I found him very interesting."'

We wrote to Penny, asking whose account of the story was accurate. She replied on November 6:

'I understand that Connolly refuted the claims - amended the copy 4 days ago to reflect that.'

But '4 days ago' was close to one year after the refutation had been published by the Independent! We pointed out that the claims had not been amended in the version posted on ZNet (where we read them). 

Penny answered:

'Znet isn't my responsibility - I wasn't consulted before they published.'

A curiously passive reaction from someone who portrays herself as a tub-thumping 'activist'. Penny commented in her New Statesman/ZNet piece:

'The left, because we like to fight from the moral high ground, is particularly bad at confronting its own bullshit.'

Suzanne Moore wrote in the Guardian of Brand:

'He may indeed be a sexist. Or, as he put it earlier this week in these pages, in his most imitable style, may "suffer from the ol' sexism".'

Brand, it seems, is also guilty of unbearable 'braggadocio'.

Moore has previously described Julian Assange as 'the most massive turd'.

In the Sunday Times, Katie Glass described Brand as 'an exhibitionistic narcissist obsessed with celebrity'. (Katie Glass, 'The ultimate Marmite Brand,' Sunday Times, September 22, 2013)
Arguably, one could search long and hard before finding a 'mainstream' politician of whom this could not be said. But of course no corporate journalist would ever dare heft such a ferocious smear in the direction of an Obama, Cameron or Blair.

Glass continued:

'If you did not find his drugtaking, philandering or humour off-putting, you should try him now he has reinvented himself as a yogaaddicted, transcendentalmeditating vegan hippie, and a modern prophet with a Jesus complex.

'We suspect his arrogant bravado, his over-the-top narcissism, even his sex addiction are signs that he is deeply fragile.'

While accusations of 'sexism' are used to smear high-profile dissidents, feigned concern for women's rights is also deployed as a weapon in the propaganda arsenal promoting 'humanitarian intervention'. This played a crucial role in the 2001 demonisation of the Taliban as targets for Western attack.

In 2007, we conducted a Lexis media database search for the terms 'Taliban' and 'women's rights'. 

Since 1995, there had been 56 mentions in the Guardian. Of these, 36 had appeared since the September 11, 2001 attacks. There was the same number of mentions (nine) in the last three and a half months of 2001 as in the previous three years combined. 90 per cent of the mentions in 2001 occurred after September 11. We found a similar pattern of reporting on gay rights in Afghanistan.

In 2011, concocted tales of Viagra-fuelled mass rape were also used to target the Libyan government for 'intervention' and destruction amid widespread concern about the security of women's rights under Gaddafi. Notice, we are not here for one moment challenging the merits of feminism, but the abuse of feminism by state-corporate propagandists.

The Herd Behaviour Of Media Parrots

 

The focus on the 'narcissism' of leading dissidents is a recurring theme across the corporate media. Bloomberg Businessweek featured an article entitled, 'The Unbearable Narcissism of Edward Snowden.'

Jeffrey Toobin condemned Snowden in the New Yorker as 'a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison'.

On CBS, Bob Schieffer commented:

'I think what we have in Edward Snowden is just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us.'

Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

'Everything about Edward Snowden is ridiculously cinematic. He is not paranoiac; he is merely narcissistic. He jettisoned a girlfriend, a career and, undoubtedly, his personal freedom to expose programs...'

Cohen detected no cognitive dissonance in the idea that a narcissist would be willing to sacrifice his girlfriend, career and personal freedom to expose political corruption. In reality, this is exactly what narcissists are not inclined to do.

Similarly, Seumas Milne protested in the Guardian that, despite not having been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime: 'as far as the bulk of the press is concerned, Assange is nothing but a "monstrous narcissist", a bail-jumping "sex pest" and an exhibitionist maniac'.

Sir Harold Evans commented in the Observer: 'I have not been impressed by the blather about "freedom of the press" surrounding the narcissistic Edward Snowden...'

Glenn Greenwald who, unlike most of the above critics, has met Snowden and worked closely with him, observed:

'One of the most darkly hilarious things to watch is how government apologists and media servants are driven by total herd behavior: they all mindlessly adopt the same script and then just keep repeating it because they see others doing so and, like parrots, just mimic what they hear... Hordes of people who had no idea what 'narcissism' even means - and who did not know the first thing about Snowden - kept repeating this word over and over because that became the cliche used to demonize him.

'The reason this was darkly hilarious is because there is almost no attack on him more patently invalid than this one. When he came to us, he said: "after I identify myself as the source and explain why I did this, I intend to disappear from media sight, because I know they will want to personalize the story about me, and I want the focus to remain on the substance of NSA disclosures."

'He has been 100% true to his word. Almost every day for four months, I've had the biggest TV shows and most influential media stars calling and emailing me, begging to interview Snowden for TV. He has refused every request because he does not want the attention to be on him, but rather on the disclosures that he risked his liberty and even his life to bring to the world.'

But according to the Daily Banter blog, none of this should be taken seriously. Why?

'Glenn Greenwald has been looking to take down Obama and feed his own depthless narcissism for years now. He just managed to accomplish one of these goals in spades...'

Further ironies afflict these many casual denunciations of Assange, Brand, Snowden and Greenwald as 'sexists' and/or 'narcissists'.

Most commentators – including many on the left - appear to have little or no understanding of what these terms actually mean.

As the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm noted, narcissism in fact is characteristic of individuals 'who are preoccupied with themselves and who pay little attention to others, except as echoes of themselves' (Fromm, The Heart Of Man, American Mental Health Foundation, 2010, p.66). A narcissist is unable to see issues from the point of view of others and has 'a lack of genuine interest in the outside world'. (p.67)

But as Fromm (and Freud) also noted, 'even in the case of normal development, man remains to some extent narcissistic throughout his life'. Indeed, 'The "normal," "mature" person is one whose narcissism has been reduced to the socially accepted minimum without ever disappearing completely.' (pp.60-61)

In other words, rare corporate bodhisattvas aside, the critics damning Assange, Brand, Snowden and Greenwald as 'narcissists' are busy throwing stones in greenhouses. But this only scratches the surface of their hypocrisy.

Sexism, of course, is a prime example of 'group narcissism', the idea that: "'I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world – I am white"; or, "I am an Aryan".' (p.76) Or indeed, 'I am male.'

Group narcissism is so dangerous because it generates extreme distortions of rational judgement. Fromm commented:

'The object of narcissistic attachment is thought to be valuable (good, beautiful, wise, etc.) not on the basis of an objective value judgement, but because it is me or mine. Narcissistic value judgement is prejudiced and biased.' (p.70)

This, of course, is in direct collision with rational analysis, scientific method and simple common sense. Alas, Fromm concluded that despite some ameliorating impacts from higher education, 'it has not prevented most of the "educated" people from joining enthusiastically the national, racial, and political movements which are the expression of contemporary narcissism'. (p.81)

And this, indeed, is the great irony of so much criticism of Brand the 'narcissist'. Because Brand is a rare dissident precisely throwing off the corporate chains of 'contemporary narcissism' to point out 'the absolute, all-encompassing total corruption of our political agencies by big business'.

And:

'The planet is being destroyed. We are creating an underclass. We are exploiting poor people all over the world. And the genuine legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political class.'

These are some of the central truths and crises of our time that corporate journalists employed by the very system doing the damage will not and cannot discuss. Brand's willingness to discuss them in the face of intense pressure to do otherwise - the corporate system will continue to strongly punish him for speaking out – his empathy with victims of corporate power, are again the exact opposite of what one would expect from a narcissist.

On the other hand, the determination of corporate commentators to ignore the importance and truth of Brand's arguments, and to focus instead on his 'sexism', 'narcissism', and his relationship with Jemima Khan, are classic examples of group narcissism; of journalists prioritising their careers, their corporations, their class, 'not on the basis of an objective value judgement, but because it is me or mine'.

As for the people and planet being subordinated to power and profit - they barely even register.

Tom Secker on "The Russell Brand ‘Revolution’"

Comment: Personally, I think Russell Brand is sincere. He's funny and articulate and has a passionate message to impart. However, in the scheme of things he's small fry. So, what is going on here?  Why have the BBC and other media outlets given him so much air-time? 

Celebrities have been used by the Establishment to test the water of the public's reaction to certain ideas for decades. They are useful tools since they are 99.9% unaware that they are being used. They're even more clueless than politicians which is saying something. They are often passionate, narcissistic artists who want to be loved and needed and are more than willing to be given a "mission" and sent on an errand by someone who has whispered the relevant message in their ear...

It is highly likely that Brand is one of these. His talk of socialism and centralisation should be enough to see that he hasn't a clue about the structure and results of that revolution he so earnestly desires. Marxism has been a darling of the social engineers from the heart of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s to the Fabians and on to common purpose in the UK and the capitalist-collectivist thinking of the Anglo-American elite of today. Whether it is socialism or capitalism it's all the same to them. Whatever works to keep control. Once again, stoking up the revolution meme is something the Establishment wants as it will give them a chance to go to phase 2 in cracking down on dissent and introducing the next regime of "protections" for loyal subjects. 

However...

With all that in mind, it doesn't mean that just because Brand is selling "a brand"  as Tom Secker mentions, and may have been programmed with suitable information by his Rothschild handlers, wound up like a clockwork device and set out to woo the public, that he cannot ignite something positive and true in the public - AGAINST the objectives of his masters. 

I have seen the reaction to Brand's interviews by many people who are not well versed in the mechanics of propaganda and PSYOPS as something really quite positive. It has promoted discussion, re-evaluation and soul-searching. Timing is everything here and we live in an age of unpredictability - something which the Elite despise because they cannot control it.  As Secker states in his interview he is not a good role model. But I think there have been many messengers of truth (conscious and unconscious) from some very unlikely paths who nonetheless contributed to a rise in collective awareness. To be fair, Brand has repeatedly stated that it is not about him and that there are people with alternatives and visions far more qualified to discuss.  He makes a logical point that he is taking the chance to exploit his position and point out the obvious. 

Why not? Whoever has put him up to it (if indeed they have) Truth is truth. That does not mean it is not important to know  the agenda. But what is more important is what you do with the information imparted. 

Of course, the fact that he has been given air-time to do that suggests that yes, there is an agenda there in the background. But the question is, has it tapped into a feeling far more powerful than anyone can imagine? Will it backfire?  Time will tell. Brand will fade and people will keep hold of that inspiration and energy in order to change their thoughts and thus their actions. 

It may just be a time where all kinds of possibilities can emerge. 

Regardless, Tom Secker gives a pretty good overview of the recent Russell Brand phenomena: 

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spyculture.com

"Following comic and actor Russell Brand’s recent emergence as a political celebrity I dissect his Newsnight interview and the reaction to it. I look at the valid criticisms being made of Brand’s interview and the social media phenomena swirling up around it before emphasising the few valuable, positive aspects of what he said. I finish up with a shortlist of lessons to be learned from the debacle, including the abandoning of political messiahs and the affirmation of the value and importance of real, ordinary people taking action themselves."

Stefan Molyneux: An Open Letter to Russell Brand - Let's Start a Revolution!

There is talk of revolution in the air

Comment: No amount of QE is going to fix what is a corrupt, cartel-based capitalism no matter how you try and interpret it. And to imagine that Britain and its government has handled severe austerity measures and the economy with "grace" while imagining that we can "leave it to parliaments" to spend the money is missing the point entirely. Revolution is deeper than that and is very painful when a new system based is required. 

"British institutions have worked." Oh please. It's because they haven't worked that we are where we are today. The Bank of England and the Corporation of London are a law unto themselves.

Evans Pritchard is just calling for little picture vision and a return to business that is open to the same bubbles and manipulations of yesteryear. Still, you can't expect a conservative man by nature to go too far out of the box - he's already done quite well by agreeing with Brand.
_________


The Telegraph
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Russell Brand is more right than wrong. Pre-revolutionary grievances are simmering in half the world, openly in France and Italy, less openly in Russia and China. 

The Gini Coefficient measuring income inequality has been rising for 25 years almost everywhere, thanks to the deformed structure of globalisation. 

Companies can hold down wages in the West by threatening to decamp to the East. “Labour arbitrage” boosts the profit share of GDP and eats into the share of workers. 

That is how Volkswagen extracted pay cuts at German plants in 2005. The German reforms now being exported to Club Med are why Germany’s Gini index has soared and why German life expectancy is falling for the poor. 

It is also why the Social Democrats are taking such a hard line in coalition talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Even Switzerland is stirring. Voters will decide this Sunday whether to cap top pay at 12 times the lowest rung. 

The US Congressional Research Service says the income share of the richest 1pc of Americans reached a record 19.6pc last year. 

It never rose above 10pc for the whole post-War era until the mid-1980s. The 1pc Club has bagged 95pc of all gains since the Lehman crisis. 

Such extremes must ultimately threaten political consent for market capitalism. Yet quantitative easing as conducted in the rich countries risks making matters worse. The money is leaking into asset booms, without much economic trickle down. 

The Bank for International Settlements says the credit markets are becoming unstable again. A hunt for yield is creating a stampede into high-risk assets, “a phenomenon reminiscent of exuberance prior to the global financial crisis”. 

The 10-year Shiller price-to-earnings ratio for Wall Street’s S&P 500 is 50.3pc above its historic average, and higher than before the 1987 crash. Yes, it can go even higher. But should the US Federal Reserve try to push it there by purchasing the $85bn of bonds each month? 

Even as stocks soar, world trade is becalmed, and the West is still stuck in a contained depression. 

Manufacturing output is still down 3pc from its pre-Lehman peak in the US, 6pc in Germany and the UK, 7pc in Japan and France, and 12pc in Italy. Compare that to the 60pc surge in US factory output over the same time lapse in the 1990s. It is another world. 

The US workforce shrank by 755,000 in October. The labour participation rate for men dropped to 69.2pc, the lowest since data began in 1948. Discouraged workers are dropping off the rolls. 

Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says the US is trapped in “secular stagnation”, a bad equilibrium where the interest rate needed to keep growth alive may be as low as minus 3pc. 

It takes fresh bubbles to keep the show on the road, and it threatens to become “chronic and systemic”. This is our brave new world. If Mr Summers is right, we need to go to the next stage of QE. Rather than relying on more bond purchases, the stimulus could be injected into the veins of the economy, or into the “income stream” in the words of the late Milton Friedman. 

“We can spend it on roads, railways, smart electricity grids, or anything we want,” said Lord Turner, ex-chief of the Financial Services Authority. “Or we can cut taxes, targeting employers’ national insurance so that it creates jobs here and does not leak out.” 

Professor Richard Werner, from Southampton University, suggests “Green QE”, a £50bn blitz of spending on wind turbines and solar panels with funds created out of thin air by the Bank of England. 

Exactly the same could be done by the Fed and the Bank of Japan. “There is a whole spectrum of things you can do,” he said. 

Or we might want to erect 300,000 homes on brownfield sites (not in my village, of course). This would help drive down ratio of house prices to incomes, rather than trying to drive it up. The point is that QE is versatile once you break free of central banks shibboleths. 

The constraint is that money should be used for “one-off” projects, aimed at raising the long-term dynamism of the economy. “Central banks are terrified of going into this space. They are afraid that it will be used to excess,” said Lord Turner. 

The authorities can mop up excess liquidity to avoid inflation when the time comes by restoring reserve requirements on lenders, in abeyance since the 1980s. You could go further. You could reverse QE bond purchases — deliberately forcing down asset prices — while offsetting this with a switch to fiscal spending covered by printed money. 

You might even raise interest rates, exactly the opposite of what the Fed is trying to do. 

As for the debt created by this quasi-fiscal putsch, it is an accounting fiction. The government can issue zero-interest consols. Past deficits can be monetised by shuffling the QE furniture. Britain can slash its debt from 95pc of GDP to nearer 70pc by legerdemain. If France, Italy, and Germany want to do it the hard way, they guarantee a lost decade. 

There is such a thing as a free lunch. It is called QE in a deflationary world. Lord Turner says it may even be necessary to wipe out this debt openly — rather than in the underhand way happening now — in order to convince people that stimulus is for ever. 

To those who say this violates the Weimar taboo, the answer is that near anarchy in Germany under reparations in 1923 tells us nothing about our current predicament. 

We live in a deflationary age more akin to the 1930s. The apostles of orthodox economics at that time — Irving Fisher, and Chicago’s Henry Simons — floated just such plans for “overt monetary financing” in slumps. 

Japan’s Takahashi Korekiyo carried out a live experiment from 1931-1936. The fiscal and monetary double shock achieved “escape velocity” within two years. Japan was the first major country to recover from the Depression. 

If you are worried about central bank independence, the bank could have the same powers to calibrate fiscal stimulus as it enjoys over monetary stimulus. It could leave it to parliaments decide how to spend the money. None of this is beyond the wit of man. 

To Russell Brand I would say, you are too harsh on British leaders. Tories and Liberal Democrats have responded to the national crisis with grace and impressive discipline, as Labour would undoubtedly have done too. British institutions have worked. And please, stop talking down the vote. Democracy is our sword

Russell Brand: we deserve more from our democratic system

Comment: Whatever you think about the persona that is Brand he IS articulating something vital and which touches a nerve with so many. Sure, the vocabulary is nothing new, but we are living in potentially very unique times and that's what makes it pertinent and worthwhile.

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The Guardian

Following his appearance on Newsnight, the comedian explains why he believes there are alternatives to our current regime

I've had an incredible week since I spoke from the heart, some would say via my arse, on Paxman. I've had slaps on the back, fist bumps, cheers and hugs while out and about, cock-eyed offers of political power from well intentioned chancers and some good ol' fashioned character assassinations in the papers.

The people who liked the interview said it was because I'd articulated what they were thinking. I recognise this. God knows I'd love to think the attention was about me but I said nothing new or original, it was the expression of the knowledge that democracy is irrelevant that resonated. As long as the priorities of those in government remain the interests of big business, rather than the people they were elected to serve, the impact of voting is negligible and it is our responsibility to be more active if we want real change. Turns out that among the disenchanted is Paxman himself who spends most of his time at the meek heart of the political establishment and can't summons up the self-delusion to drag his nib across the ballot box. He, more than any of us is aware that politicians are frauds. I've not spent too much time around them, only on the telly, it's not pleasant; once you've been on Question Time and seen Boris simpering under a make-up brush it's difficult to be enthusiastic about politics.

The only reason to vote is if the vote represents power or change. I don't think it does. I fervently believe that we deserve more from our democratic system than the few derisory tit-bits tossed from the carousel of the mighty, when they hop a few inches left or right. The lazily duplicitous servants of The City expect us to gratefully participate in what amounts to little more than a political hokey cokey where every four years we get to choose what colour tie the liar who leads us wears.

I remember the election and Cameron didn't even get properly voted in, he became prime minister by default when he teamed up with Clegg. Clegg who immediately reneged (Renegy-Cleggy?) on his flagship pledge to end tuition fees at the first whiff of power.

When students, perhaps students who had voted for him, rioted they were condemned. People riot when dialogue fails, when they feel unrepresented and bored by the illusion, bilious with the piped in toxic belch wafted into their homes by the media. The reason these coalitions are so easily achieved is that the distinctions between the parties are insignificant. My friend went to a posh "do" in the country where David Cameron, a man whose face resembles a little painted egg, was in attendance. Also present were members of the opposition and former prime minister Tony Blair. Whatever party they claim to represent in the day, at night they show their true colours and all go to the same party.

Obviously there has been some criticism of my outburst, I've not been universally applauded as a cross between Jack Sparrow and Spartacus (which is what I'm going for) but they've been oddly personal and I think irrelevant to the argument. I try not to read about myself as the mean stuff is hurtful and the good stuff hard to believe, but my mates always give me the gist of what's going on, the bastards. Some people say I'm a hypocrite because I've got money now. When I was poor and I complained about inequality people said I was bitter, now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want inequality on the agenda because it is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

It's easy to attack me, I'm a right twerp, I'm a junkie and a cheeky monkey, I accept it, but that doesn't detract from the incontrovertible fact that we are living in a time of huge economic disparity and confronting ecological disaster. This disparity has always been, in cultures since expired, a warning sign of end of days. In Rome, Egypt and Easter Island the incubated ruling elites, who had forgotten that we are one interconnected people, destroyed their societies by not sharing. That is what's happening now, regardless of what you think of my hair or me using long words, the facts are the facts and the problem is the problem. Don't be distracted. I think these columnist fellas who give me aggro for not devising a solution or for using long words are just being territorial. When they say "long words" they mean "their words" like I'm a monkey who got in their Mum's dressing up box or a hooligan in policeman's helmet.

As I said to Paxman at the time "I can't conjure up a global Utopia right now in this hotel room". Obviously that's not my job and it doesn't need to be, we have brilliant thinkers and organisations and no one needs to cook up an egalitarian Shangri-La on their todd; we can all do it together.

I like Jeremy Paxman, incidentally. I think he's a decent bloke but like a lot of people who work deep within the system it's hard for him to countenance ideas from outside the narrowly prescribed trench of contemporary democracy. Most of the people who criticized me have a vested interest in the maintenance of the system. They say the system works. What they mean is "the system works for me".

The less privileged among us are already living in the apocalypse, the thousands of street sleepers in our country, the refugees and the exploited underclass across our planet daily confront what we would regard as the end of the world. No money, no home, no friends, no support, no hand of friendship reaching out, just acculturated and inculcated condemnation.

When I first got a few quid it was like an anaesthetic that made me forget what was important but now I've woken up. I can't deny that I've done a lot of daft things while I was under the capitalist fugue, some silly telly, soppy scandals, movies better left unmade. I've also become rich. I don't hate rich people; Che Guevara was a rich person. I don't hate anyone, I judge no one, that's not my job, I'm a comedian and my job is to say whatever I like to whoever I want if I'm prepared to take the consequences. Well I am.

My favourite experiences since Paxman-nacht are both examples of the dialogue it sparked. Firstly my friend's 15-year-old son wrote an essay for his politics class after he read my New Statesman piece. He didn't agree with everything I said, he prefers the idea of spoiling ballots to not voting "to show we do care" maybe he's right, I don't know. The reason not voting could be effective is that if we starve them of our consent we could force them to acknowledge that they operate on behalf of The City and Wall Street; that the financing of political parties and lobbying is where the true influence lies; not in the ballot box. However, this 15-year-old is quite smart and it's quite possible that my opinions are a result of decades of drug abuse.

I'm on tour so I've been with thousands of people every night (not like in the old days, I'm a changed man) this is why I'm aware of how much impact the Newsnight interview had. Not everyone I chat to agrees with me but their beliefs are a lot closer to mine than the broadsheets, and it's their job to be serious. One thing I've learned and was surprised by is that I may suffer from the ol' sexism. I can only assume I have an unaddressed cultural hangover, like my adorable Nan who had a heart that shone like a pearl but was, let's face it, a bit racist. I don't want to be a sexist so I'm trying my best to check meself before I wreck meself. The problem may resolve itself as I'm in a loving relationship with a benevolent dictator and have entirely relinquished personal autonomy.

Whilst travelling between gigs I had my second notable encounter. One night late at the Watford Gap I got chatting to a couple of squaddies, one Para, one Marine, we talked a bit about family and politics, I invited them to a show. Then we were joined by three Muslim women, all hijabbed up. For a few perfect minutes in the strip lit inertia of this place, that was nowhere in particular but uniquely Britain, I felt how plausible and beautiful The Revolution could be. We just chatted.

Between three sets of different people; first generation Muslims, servicemen and the privileged elite that they serve (that would be me) effortless cooperation occurred. Here we were free from the divisive rule that tears us apart. That sends brave men and women to foreign lands to fight their capitalist wars, that intimidates and unsettles people whose faith and culture superficially distinguishes them, that tells the comfortable "hush now" you have your trinkets. It seemed ridiculous that refracted through the power prism that blinds us; the soldiers could be invading the homeland of these women's forefathers in order to augment my luxurious stupour. Here in the gap we were together. Our differences irrelevant. With no one to impose separation we are united.

I realised then that our treasured concepts of tribe and nation are not valued by those who govern except when it is to divide us from each other. They don't believe in Britain or America they believe in the dollar and the pound. These are deep and entrenched systemic wrongs that are unaddressed by party politics.

The symptoms of these wrongs are obvious, global and painful. Drone strikes on the innocent, a festering investment for future conflict.

How many combatants are created each time an innocent person in a faraway land is silently ironed out from an Arizona call centre? The reality is we have more in common with the people we're bombing than the people we're bombing them for.

NSA spying, how far-reaching is the issue of surveillance? Do you think we don't have our own cute, quaint British version? Does it matter if the dominant paradigm of Western Capitalism is indifferent to our Bud Flanagan belief in nation? Can we really believe these problems can be altered within the system that created them? That depends on them? The system that we are invited to vote for? Of course not, that's why I won't vote. That's why I support the growing revolution.

We can all contribute ideas as to how to change our world; schoolboys, squaddies, hippies, Muslims, Jews and if what I'm describing is naive then you can keep your education and your indoctrination because loving our planet and each other is a duty, a beautiful obligation. While chatting to people this week I heard some interesting ideas, here are a couple.

We could use the money accumulated by those who have too much, not normal people with a couple of cars, giant corporations, to fund a fairer society.

The US government gave a trillion dollars to bail out the big five banks over the past year. Banks that have grown by 30% since the crisis and are experiencing record profits and giving their execs record bonuses. How about, hang on to your hats because here comes a naïve suggestion, don't give them that money, use it to create one million jobs at fifty grand a year for people who teach, nurse or protect.

These bailouts for elites over services for the many are institutionalised within the system, no party proposes changing it. American people that voted, voted for it. I'm not voting for that.

That's one suggestion for the Americans; we started their country so we owe them a favour now things are getting heavy.

Here's one for blighty; Philip Green, the bloke who owns Top Shop didn't pay any income tax on a £1.2bn dividend in 2005. None. Unless he paid himself a salary that year, in addition to the £1.2bn dividend, the largest in corporate history, then the people who clean Top Shop paid more income tax than he did. That's for two reasons - firstly because he said that all of his £1.2bn earnings belong to his missus, who was registered in Monaco and secondly because he's an arsehole. The money he's nicked through legal loopholes would pay the annual salary for 20,000 NHS nurses. It's not illegal; it's systemic, British people who voted, voted for it. I'm not voting for that.

Why don't you try not paying taxes and see how quickly a lump of bird gets thrown in your face. It's socialism for corporate elites and feudalism for the rest of us. Those suggestions did not come from me; no the mind that gave the planet Booky Wook and Ponderland didn't just add an economically viable wealth distribution system to the laudable list of accolades, to place next to my Shagger Of The Year awards.

The first came from Dave DeGraw, the second Johann Hari got from UK Uncut. Luckily with organisations like them, Occupy, Anonymous and The People's Assembly I don't need to come with ideas, we can all participate. I'm happy to be a part of the conversation, if more young people are talking about fracking instead of twerking we're heading in the right direction. The people that govern us don't want an active population who are politically engaged, they want passive consumers distracted by the spectacle of which I accept I am a part.
  If we all collude and collaborate together we can design a new system that makes the current one obsolete. The reality is there are alternatives. That is the terrifying truth that the media, government and big business work so hard to conceal. Even the outlet that printed this will tomorrow print a couple of columns saying what a naïve wanker I am, or try to find ways that I've fucked up. Well I am naïve and I have fucked up but I tell you something else. I believe in change. I don't mind getting my hands dirty because my hands are dirty already. I don't mind giving my life to this because I'm only alive because of the compassion and love of others. Men and women strong enough to defy this system and live according to higher laws. This is a journey we can all go on together, all of us. We can include everyone and fear no one. A system that serves the planet and the people. I'd vote for that.

 One of my favourites:

"Cameron, Osborne, Boris, all of them lot, they went to the same schools and the same universities that have the same decor as the old buildings from which they now govern us. It’s not that they’re malevolent; it’s just that they’re irrelevant. Relics of an old notion, like Old Spice: it’s fine that it exists but no one should actually use it."

When people wax lyrical about the next Prime Minister and which civil list parasite has married Lady Candida from Little Tossing - that's the vital point: it's the endless conveyor belt of a type that never changes - groomed to be there because their handlers know they'll deliver the same old authoritarian shite. It's desperately transparent and enough to send anyone into the arms of apathy or worse still, depression. SO many young people sense this and see it in the eyes of their peers who so often accept it as natural part of our pallid existence. Brand has really tuned into that and offered both a revamped "socialism", a spiritual impetus and something to laugh about  along the way - seriously.

One might say there's nothing new in this article but that would be missing the vital point of timing. We live in rarefied times of change where crucial choices must be made. Brand's writing is a welcome contribution to breaking that apathy and touching a positive nerve for all those who feel so tired of the aspiritual nature of divisive politics and the absence of hope. 

One of the funniest and disarmingly truthful articles of recent times as I'm sure Jeremy Paxman will agree...

Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition”

But before we change the world, we need to change the way we think.

When I was asked to edit an issue of the New Statesman I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me. I chose the subject of revolution because the New Statesman is a political magazine and imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics.

When people talk about politics within the existing Westminster framework I feel a dull thud in my stomach and my eyes involuntarily glaze. Like when I’m conversing and the subject changes from me and moves on to another topic. I try to remain engaged but behind my eyes I am adrift in immediate nostalgia; “How happy I was earlier in this chat,” I instantly think.

I have never voted. Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites. Billy Connolly said: “Don’t vote, it encourages them,” and, “The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one.”

I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X-ing a little box.

Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that’s not on the ballot. Is utopian revolution possible? The freethinking social architect Buckminster Fuller said humanity now faces a choice: oblivion or utopia. We’re inertly ambling towards oblivion, is utopia really an option?

I heard recently Oliver Cromwell’s address to the rump parliament in 1653 (online, I’m not a Time Lord) where he bawls out the whole of the House of Commons as “whores, virtueless horses and money-grabbing dicklickers”. I added the last one but, honestly, that is the vibe. I was getting close to admiring old Oliver for his “calls it as he sees it, balls-out” rhetoric till I read about him on Wikipedia and learned that beyond this brilliant 8 Mile-style takedown of corrupt politicians he was a right arsehole; starving and murdering the Irish and generally (and surprisingly for a Roundhead) being a total square. The fact remains that if you were to recite his speech in parliament today you’d be hard pushed to find someone who could be legitimately offended.

I don’t want to get all “Call me Dave, I was chatting to my plumber, man of the people” here, but the fact is I’m a recovering junkie so that means I have to hang out with a lot of other junkies to keep my head together, some of whom are clean, others who are using. Hear you this, regular New Statesman reader, browsing with irritation that the culture of celebrity has just banjoed the arse of another sacred cow and a Halloween-haired, Sachsgate-enacting, estuary-whining, glitter-lacquered, priapic berk has been undeservedly hoisted upon another cultural plinth, but – young people, poor people, not-rich people, most people do not give a fuck about politics.

They see no difference between Cameron, Clegg, Boris, either of the Milibands or anyone else. To them these names are as obsolete as Lord Palmerston or Denis Healey. The London riots in 2011, which were condemned as nihilistic and materialistic by Boris and Cameron (when they eventually returned from their holidays), were by that very definition political. These young people have been accidentally marketed to their whole lives without the economic means to participate in the carnival. After some draconian sentences were issued, measures that the white-collar criminals who capsized our economy with their greed a few years earlier avoided, and not one hoodie was hugged, the compliance resumed. Apathy reigned.

There’s little point bemoaning this apathy. Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve. To me a potent and triumphant leftist movement, aside from the glorious Occupy rumble, is a faint, idealistic whisper from sepia rebels. The formation of the NHS, holiday pay, sick pay, the weekend – achievements of peaceful trade union action were not achieved in the lifetime of the directionless London rioters. They are uninformed of the left’s great legacy as it is dismantled around them.

Of the two possible reactions to the mechanised indifference and inefficiency of their alleged servants, not leaders – apathy or rage – apathy is the more accessible and is certainly preferable to those who govern.

Righteous rage surfaces rarely only in the most galling of circumstances, the riots or the Milly Dowler intrusion, where a basic taboo was transgressed, then we reach beneath the stagnant quotidian to the omnipresent truth within. In this case “respect for the dead”, the motif upon which Sophocles’s Antigone is founded.

Along with the absolute, all-encompassing total corruption of our political agencies by big business, this apathy is the biggest obstacle to change. We can’t alter the former without removing the latter. Can this be achieved? Obviously this is a rhetorical question and without wanting to spunk the surprise ending the answer is yes.

First, though, I should qualify my right to even pontificate on such a topic and in so doing untangle another of revolution’s inherent problems. Hypocrisy. How dare I, from my velvet chaise longue, in my Hollywood home like Kubla Khan, drag my limbs from my harem to moan about the system? A system that has posited me on a lilo made of thighs in an ocean filled with honey and foie gras’d my Essex arse with undue praise and money.

I once, during the early steps of this thousand-mile journey to decadent somnambulance, found myself embroiled in a London riot. It was around the bafflement of the millennium and we were all uptight about zeroes lining up three wide and planes falling from the sky and the national mood was weird.

At this point I’d attended a few protests and I loved them. At a Liverpool dockers march, the chanting, the bristling, the rippedup paving stones and galloping police horses in Bono glasses flipped a switch in me. I felt connected, on a personal level I was excited by the chaos, a necessary component of transition, I like a bit of chaos however it’s delivered. The disruption of normalcy a vital step in any revolution. Even aesthetically, aside from the ideology, I beam at the spectacle of disruption, even when quite trivial. As a boy a bird in the house defecating on our concept of domesticity as much as our settee, a signal of the impermanence and illusory nature of our humdrum comforts. The riot in question came when I was working at MTV and for the first time in my life had money, which to me was little more than regal letters to be delivered to drug dealers.

My involvement in the riot came without invitation or intention, I was in fact oxymoronically shopping (emphasis on the moron) with a stylist in the West End, at the expense of MTV, which is perhaps the planet’s most obvious purveyor of neurodross and pop-cultural claptrap – like a glistening pink pony trotting through your mind shitting glitter.

I was smacked up and gacked up and togged up in the nitwit livery of late-Nineties television, a crackhead Harlequin with Hoxton hair, when it came to my attention that Reclaim the Streets had a march on. On learning this, I without a flicker of self-awareness palmed off my shopping bags jammed with consumer treats and headed for the throng. Just before the kettling and boredom, while things were still buzzing, bongos, bubbles and whistles, I was hurt when a fellow protester piously said to me: “What you doing here? I’ve seen you, you work for MTV.” I felt pretty embarrassed that my involvement was being questioned, in a manner that is all too common on the left. It’s been said that: “The right seeks converts and the left seeks traitors.” This moral superiority that is peculiar to the left is a great impediment to momentum. It is also a right drag when you’re trying to enjoy a riot.

Perhaps this is why there is currently no genuinely popular left-wing movement to counter Ukip, the EDL and the Tea Party; for an ideology that is defined by inclusiveness, socialism has become in practice quite exclusive. Plus a bit too serious, too much up its own fundament and not enough fun. The same could be said of the growing New Age spiritual movement, which could be a natural accompaniment to social progression. I’m a bit of a tree-hugging, Hindu-tattooed, veggie meditator myself but first and foremost I want to have a fucking laugh. When Ali G, who had joined protesters attempting to prevent a forest being felled to make way for a road, shouted across the barricade, “You may take our trees, but you’ll never take our freedom,” I identified more with Baron Cohen’s amoral trickster than the stern activist who aggressively admonished him: “This is serious, you cunt.”

A bit too fucking serious, actually. As John Cleese said, there is a tendency to confuse seriousness with solemnity. Serious causes can and must be approached with good humour, otherwise they’re boring and can’t compete with the Premier League and Grand Theft Auto. Social movements needn’t lack razzmatazz.

The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism.

I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.

This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense. If you are naked and starving and someone gives you soup and a blanket your happiness will increase. That doesn’t mean that if you have 10,000 silken blankets and a golden cauldron of soup made from white rhino cum your happiness will continue to proportionately increase until you’re gouched out, swathed in silk, gurgling up pearlescent froth.

Biomechanically we are individuals, clearly. On the most obvious frequency of our known sensorial reality we are independent anatomical units. So we must take care of ourselves. But with our individual survival ensured there is little satisfaction to be gained by enthroning and enshrining ourselves as individuals.

These problems that threaten to bring on global destruction are the result of legitimate human instincts gone awry, exploited by a dead ideology derived from dead desert myths. Fear and desire are the twin engines of human survival but with most of our basic needs met these instincts are being engaged to imprison us in an obsolete fragment of our consciousness. Our materialistic consumer culture relentlessly stimulates our desire. Our media ceaselessly engages our fear, our government triangulates and administrates, ensuring there are no obstacles to the agendas of these slow-thighed beasts, slouching towards Bethlehem.

For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political. This, too, is difficult terrain when the natural tribal leaders of the left are atheists, when Marxism is inveterately Godless. When the lumbering monotheistic faiths have given us millennia of grief for a handful of prayers and some sparkly rituals.

By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.

Can this be achieved when we are enslaved by old ideologies, be they theological or economic? The absurdity of our localised consciousness and global ignorance hit me hard when I went on a Comic Relief trip to Kenya.

Like most of the superficially decent things I do in life, my motivation was to impress women more than to aid the suffering. “A couple of days in Africa,” I thought, “and a lifetime cashing in on pics of me with thin babies, speculate to accumulate,” I assured my anxious inner womaniser.

After visiting the slums of Kibera, where a city built from mud and run on fear festers on the suburbs of Nairobi, I was sufficiently schooled by Live Aid and Michael Buerk to maintain an emotional distance. It was only when our crew visited a nearby rubbish dump that the comforting buoyancy of visual clichés rinsed away by the deluge of a previously inconceivable reality. This rubbish dump was not like some tip off the M25 where you might dump a fridge freezer or a smashed-in mattress. This was a nation made of waste with no end in sight. Domestic waste, medical waste, industrial waste formed their own perverse geography. Stinking rivers sluiced through banks of putrid trash, mountains, valleys, peaks and troughs all formed from discarded filth. An ecology based on our indifference and ignorance in the “cradle of civilisation” where our species is said to have originated. Here amid the pestilence I saw Armageddon. Here the end of the world is not a prophecy but a condition. A demented herd chewed polystyrene cud. Sows fed their piglets in the bilge. Gloomy shadows split the sun as marabou storks, five foot in span with ragged labial throats, swooped down. My mate Nik said he had to revise his vision of hell to include what he’d seen.

Here and there, picking through this unending slander, children foraged for bottle tops, which had some value, where all is worthless.

For a while when I returned to my sanitised house and my sanitised state of mind I guiltily thumbed bottle tops for a moment before I disposed of them; temporarily they were like crucifixes for these kids, sacrificed that I may live in privilege. A few weeks later I was in Paris at a Givenchy fashion show where the most exquisite garments cantered by on underfed, well-bred clothes horses. The spectacle was immaculate, smoke-filled bubbles burst on to the runway. To be here in this gleaming sophistication was heaven. Here starvation is a tool to achieve the perfect perpendicular pelvis.

Now, I bow to no one in my appreciation of female beauty and fancy clobber but I could not wrench the phantom of those children from my mind, in this moment I felt the integration; that the price of this decadence was their degradation. That these are not dislocated ideas but the two extremes are absolutely interdependent. The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
To have such suffering adjacent to such excess is akin to marvelling at an incomparable beauty, whose face is the radiant epitome of celestial symmetry, and ignoring, half a yard lower down, her abdomen, cancerous, weeping and carbuncled. “Keep looking at the face, put a handbag over those tumours. Strike a pose. Come on, Vogue.”

Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths. That we are trying to sustain social cohesion using redundant ideologies devised for a population that lived in deserts millennia ago. What does it matter if 2,000 years ago Christ died on the cross and was resurrected if we are not constantly resurrected to the truth, anew, moment to moment? How is his transcendence relevant if we do not resurrect our consciousness from the deceased, moribund mind of our obsolete ideologies and align with our conditions?

The model of pre-Christian man has fulfilled its simian objectives. We have survived, we have created agriculture and cities. Now this version of man must be sacrificed that we can evolve beyond the reaches of the ape. These stories contain great clues to our survival when we release ourselves from literalism and superstition. What are ideologies other than a guide for life? Throughout paganism one finds stories that integrate our species with our environment to the benefit of both. The function and benefits of these belief matrixes have been lost, with good reason. They were socialist, egalitarian and integrated. If like the Celtic people we revered the rivers we would prioritise this sacred knowledge and curtail the attempts of any that sought to pollute the rivers. If like the Nordic people we believed the souls of our ancestors lived in the trees, this connection would make mass deforestation anathema. If like the native people of America we believed God was in the soil what would our intuitive response be to the implementation of fracking?

Little wonder then that these myths, these codes for our protection and survival, have been aborted and replaced with nihilistic narratives of individualism, peopled by sequin-covered vacuous heroes. Now we only riot and roar in hot summers or at football scores or when our dead are desecrated by the vile publications that convey this corrosive, corrupting, deceitful narrative.

I deplore corporate colonialism but not viscerally. The story isn’t presented in a way that rouses me. Apple seems like such an affable outfit; I like my iPhone. Occasionally I hear some yarn about tax avoidance or Chinese iPhone factory workers committing suicide because of dreadful working conditions but it doesn’t really bother me, it seems so abstract. Not in the same infuriating, visceral, immediate way that I get pissed off when I buy a new phone and they’ve changed the fucking chargers, then I want to get my old, perfectly good charger and lynch the executives with the cable. They make their own product, which they’ve already sold me, deliberately obsolete just to rinse a few more quid out of us.

But profit is not a dirty word. I hate big banks and banking and bankers but when they rip us off and do us down with derivatives and foreclosures and bundles, I roll my eyes. However when I see that I’m getting a £3.50 surcharge at a cash machine I want to put their fucking windows through. This is the selfish impulse the right expertly engages but ought to belong to the left. We have to see that all these things are connected. We have succumbed to an ideology that is 100 per cent corrupt and must be overthrown. The maintenance of this system depends on our belief that “there’s nothing we can do”; well, the government seemed pretty shook up during those riots. They snapped out of their Tuscan complacency quick enough then, and that was for a few pissed-off kids.

Those kids weren’t apathetic either. They felt impotent because they are given no status, structure or space. Perhaps in a system where legitimate, peaceful protest was heard that may have been an appropriate option for them, but Stop the War marches don’t stop wars, at the top of the pyramid larceny is rewarded with big bonuses. They may have been misdirected but they certainly had some vim. How beautiful it would be to see their passion utilised and directed at the source of their grievances.

The system is adept at turning our aggression on to one another. We condemn the rioters. The EDL condemns immigrants. My new rule for when I fancy doing a bit of the ol’ condemnation is: “Do the people I’m condemning have any actual power?” The immigrant capacity to cause social negativity is pretty slender. Especially if you live in luxury in Hollywood and the only immigrants you meet are Gabby, my Mexican second mother, and Polo who looks after the garden. It probably seems more serious if you’re in a council flat in Tower Hamlets. Still the fact remains that an immigrant is just someone who used to be somewhere else. Free movement of global capital will necessitate the free movement of an affordable labour force to meet the demands that the free-moving capital has created. The wrath is directed to the symptom, not the problem.

We British seem to be a bit embarrassed about revolution, like the passion is uncouth or that some tea might get spilled on our cuffs in the uprising. That revolution is a bit French or worse still American. Well, the alternative is extinction so now might be a good time to re-evaluate. The apathy is in fact a transmission problem, when we are given the correct information in an engaging fashion, we will stir.

The hypocrisy – me, working for MTV with my fancy shoes – is a problem that can be taken care of incrementally. I don’t mind giving up some of my baubles and balderdash for a genuinely fair system, so can we create one? We have to be inclusive of everyone, to recognise our similarities are more important than our differences and that we have an immediate ecological imperative. This is not a job I’d place in the hot, clammy, grasping palms of Cameron and Osborne. I shook George Osborne’s hand once, by accident, it was like sliding my hand into a dilated cow.

We require a change that is beyond the narrow, prescriptive parameters of the current debate, outside the fortress of our current system. A system predicated on aspects of our nature that are dangerous when systemic: greed, selfishness and fear. These are old, dead ideas. That’s why their business is conducted in archaic venues. Antiquated, elegant edifices, lined with oak and leather. We no longer have the luxury of tradition.

Cameron, Osborne, Boris, all of them lot, they went to the same schools and the same universities that have the same decor as the old buildings from which they now govern us. It’s not that they’re malevolent; it’s just that they’re irrelevant. Relics of an old notion, like Old Spice: it’s fine that it exists but no one should actually use it.

We are still led by blithering chimps, in razor-sharp suits, with razor-sharp lines, pimped and crimped by spin doctors and speech-writers. Well-groomed ape-men, superficially altered by post-Clintonian trends.

We are mammals on a planet, who now face a struggle for survival if our species is to avoid expiry. We can’t be led by people who have never struggled, who are a dusty oak-brown echo of a system dreamed up by Whigs and old Dutch racists.

We now must live in reality, inner and outer. Consciousness itself must change. My optimism comes entirely from the knowledge that this total social shift is actually the shared responsibility of six billion individuals who ultimately have the same interests. Self-preservation and the survival of the planet. This is a better idea than the sustenance of an elite. The Indian teacher Yogananda said: “It doesn’t matter if a cave has been in darkness for 10,000 years or half an hour, once you light a match it is illuminated.” Like a tanker way off course due to an imperceptible navigational error at the offset we need only alter our inner longitude.

Capitalism is not real; it is an idea. America is not real; it is an idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.

The reality is we have a spherical ecosystem, suspended in, as far as we know, infinite space upon which there are billions of carbon-based life forms, of which we presume ourselves to be the most important, and a limited amount of resources.

The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives. This is why I believe we need a unifying and in - clusive spiritual ideology: atheism and materialism atomise us and anchor us to one frequency of consciousness and inhibit necessary co-operation.

In 2013 (another made-up imaginary concept) we cannot afford to giggle, drivel and burp like giant, pube-covered babies about quaint, old-fashioned notions like nation, capitalism and consumerism simply because it’s convenient for the tiny, greedy, myopic sliver of the population that those outmoded ideas serve. I will never vote because, as Billy said, “It encourages them.” I did a job with Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard not long ago and the three of us shared a dressing room. Eddie believes in democracy and spoke sincerely of his political ambitions. “One day I’d like to be a politician . . .” he said. I spoke of my belief that change could only come from within. “I’d like to be a spiritual orator . . .” I said grandly.

Billy eyed us both, with kindly disapprobation. “I’d like to be a nuisance,” he said. “I want to be a troublemaker, there in the gallery in parliament shouting RUBBISH and PROVE IT.” Who am I to argue with The Great Trickster Connolly? I will never vote and I don’t think you should, either.  

To genuinely make a difference, we must become different; make the tiny, longitudinal shift. Meditate, direct our love indiscriminately and our condemnation exclusively at those with power. Revolt in whatever way we want, with the spontaneity of the London rioters, with the certainty and willingness to die of religious fundamentalists or with the twinkling mischief of the trickster. We should include everyone, judging no one, without harming anyone. The Agricultural Revolution took thousands of years, the Industrial Revolution took hundreds of years, the Technological Revolution took tens, the Spiritual Revolution has come and we have only an instant to act.

Now there is an opportunity for the left to return to its vital, virile, vigorous origins. A movement for the people, by the people, in the service of the land. Socialism’s historical connection with spiritual principles is deep. Sharing is a spiritual principle, respecting our land is a spiritual principle. May the first, May Day, is a pagan holiday where we acknowledge our essential relationship with our land. I bet the Tolpuddle martyrs, who marched for fair pay for agricultural workers, whose legacy is the right for us to have social solidarity, were a right bunch of herberts if you knew them. “Thugs, yobs, hooligans,” the Daily Mail would’ve called them. Our young people need to know there is a culture, a strong, broad union, that they can belong to, that is potent, virile and alive. At this time when George and Dave pilfer and pillage our land and money for their oligarch mates, at this time when the Tories are taking the EU to court to stop it curtailing their banker pals’ bonuses, that there is something they can do. Take to the streets, together, with the understanding that the feeling that you aren’t being heard or seen or represented isn’t psychosis; it’s government policy.

But we are far from apathetic, we are far from impotent. I take great courage from the groaning effort required to keep us down, the institutions that have to be fastidiously kept in place to maintain this duplicitous order. Propaganda, police, media, lies. Now is the time to continue the great legacy of the left, in harmony with its implicit spiritual principles. Time may only be a human concept and therefore ultimately unreal, but what is irrefutably real is that this is the time for us to wake up.

The revolution of consciousness is a decision, decisions take a moment. In my mind the revolution has already begun.