Nature, Essence and Anarchy

My new book, Nature, Essence and Anarchy, is now out!

You can read all about it on the Winter Oak website, but I just wanted to say here that it addresses issues I feel are of fundamental importance.

If there is to be a turn-around in the history of humankind, a turn-around that pulls us back from the brink of destroying the planetary life-support system itself, then there has to be a huge change in our thinking.

We need to be imagining, holding in our hearts, an idea of what life could be, what life would be, without the violent global imposition of an insane civilization built on greed and the worship of power and money.

There is no point at all in claiming to be against this capitalist system if, in reality, you are unable to shake yourself free of its basic assumptions, if your thinking is still its thinking.

Too many contemporary dissidents, it seems to me, have fallen into the trap of trying to fight the system on its own terrain, using its language, its arguments, its ways of thinking and acting.

Because of this, their guiding philosophy remains as shallow, as rootless, as superficial as the culture of the modern capitalist world around them.

From that severely limited vantage point they can’t even begin to understand any voices that speak from outside their narrow self-referential “reality”.

How can we break through this blockage? How can we clear away all those accumulated layers of misunderstanding and forge a powerful and authentic resistance to this industrial capitalist nightmare?

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I do hope that what I have written will kick off a discussion that will create a crack in the concrete razor-wire-topped ideological wall that stands between us and a joyful, living future.