Authors: Russell Brand
Two uncomfortable certainties, though, loiter like bailiffs manacling the bonhomie: 1) taking care of mentally ill people is not the job of a charity but the state; and 2) this charity shop isn’t going to fucking work anyway. We already have charity shops. One of the few areas in which we are well catered for is charity shops; they’re cropping up everywhere, like zombies rising from the graves of the dead proper shops.
We keep our chins up as we plod through the ritual; scissors come out, applause, people bowl in, mill about, pick up a tragic jumper, weigh up a porcelain duchess in the palm of the hand. A councillor says something, a mentally ill person on the long road to sanity says something, I say something—I’m a few paces further down the road.
A church-fete-type lady rosily thrusts a pair of women’s jeans at me: “These’ll do for you, Russell.” I buy them and we laugh. Really, though, I’d like to scratch the record off, to rake the needle across the grooves and say, “What the fuck are we all doing?” What gravity is this that holds us down, who installed this low, suffocating sky? I get that feeling a lot, like I want to peer round the corner of reality, to scratch the record off, to say I know there’s something else, I know it.
I know this isn’t the best use of our time here. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” sang Leonard Cohen. You can see it; just behind reality, there is a light, you can feel it.
Just behind your thoughts there is a silence. He knew the answer was there, that’s why he became a Buddhist and fucked off to live in them mountains. Either that or it was because his management nicked all his money.
I was particularly attuned to these ideas whilst frolicking in indigenous poverty because I was guest-editing a British political magazine called the
New Statesman
. They’d asked me what the theme of the issue would be. “Revolution,” I said. So they pulled together a variety of journalists, philosophers, and activists to contribute on aspects of the subject. Naomi Klein’s article described an ecological conference where the requirement for radical action was spelled out.
Brad Werner, a complex-systems researcher (which sounds like a job that would be hard to monitor for a supervisor—“Oy, Werner, are you researching that complex system or are you dickin’ around on your phone?”) speaking at last year’s American Geophysical Union (which must surely use pornography on the invitation to have any hope of luring trade), said that our planet is fucked. He researched our complex system—the earth, I suppose, is a complex system—and concluded that we, the people who live on it, are fucked. I’m not even joking: His lecture was titled “Is Earth Fucked?” so the American Geophysical Union isn’t as square as its name implies. They do swear words and everything.
What Brad Werner said, though, is that the capitalist system is so rapacious in its consumption of earth’s resources and the measures that have thus far been imposed so ineffectual, that the only hope we have of saving the planet is for action to come from outside of the system.
They are not going to do anything to prevent ecological meltdown; it contravenes their ideology, so change has to be imposed from the outside.
That means by us. All that Kyoto stuff—reduce carbon emissions by “x” by year “y”—is not worth a wank in a windsock. It’s a bullshit gesture, the equivalent of the salad they sell in McDonald’s. Too little, too late.
It’s like giving Fred West a detention.
We know we can’t trust these fuckers to behave properly. Look at the tobacco industry: They knew they were killing their customers for decades before they coughed up the carcinogenic truth; they’d be blagging us to this day if they thought they could get away with it.
You can bet we’ll go on a similar journey with mobile phones. That hot tingle in your ear is not a sign that all is hunky-dory on the lughole front.
James Lovelock, the bloke who came up with Gaia theory, that the earth is one symbiotic, interrelated organism where harmonious life forms support or regulate each other, says we shouldn’t bother with recycling, wind turbines, and Priuses. It’s all a lot of bollocks, he says—not literally, though he might’ve if he’d been at that crazy, hang-loose festival of cursing, the American Geophysical Union.
Now, I don’t reckon Lovelock is saying sit back and enjoy the apocalypse, I think he’s saying we require radical action fast and that radical action will not come from the very interests that created and benefit from things being the way they are. The one place we cannot look for change is to the occupants of the bejeweled bus. They are the problem, we are the solution, so we have to look inside ourselves.
I left Grays in luxury this time, climbing back into the cradle of Mick’s car. A Mercedes. The anesthetic of privilege, the prison of comfort. People want departing photographs and autographs, more scraps, more crumbs. A bloke around my age, clutching a baton of super-strength cider, puts his arm round me. I used to drink White Lightning. I am mugged by his breath as our eyes momentarily meet. I shut the door on my past and the present.
I was a little winded by what I’d seen. Going back to the place where you are from is always fraught, memories scattered like broken glass on every pavement, be careful where you tread. I meditated, feeling a little guilty that I have the space to.
A space for peace, to which everyone is entitled.
“It’s alright for you in the back of a car that Hitler used to ride in,” I imagined that drunk bloke saying. I’d have to point out that it
wasn’t literally Hitler’s car, that would be a spooky heirloom, but it is all right for me. I do have a life where I can make time to meditate, eat well, do yoga, exercise, reflect, relax. That’s what money buys you. Is it possible for everyone to have that life? Is it possible for anyone to be happy when such rudimentary things are exclusive?
They tell you that you ought eat five fruit and veg a day, then seven; I read somewhere once that you should eat as much as ten, face in a trough all day long, chowing on kale.
The way these conclusions are reached is that scientists look at a huge batch of data and observe the correlation between the consumption of fruit and veg and longevity.
They then conclude that you, as an individual, should eat more fruit and veg. The onus is on you; you are responsible for what you eat.
Of course, other conclusions could be drawn from this data. The same people that live these long lives and eat all this fruit and veg are also, in the main, wealthy; they have good jobs, regular holidays, exercise, and avoid the incessant stress of poverty. Another, more truthful, more frightening conclusion we could reach then is that we should have a society where the resources enjoyed by the fruit-gobbling elite are shared around and the privileges, including the fruit and veg, enjoyed by everybody.
With this conclusion the obligation is not on you as an individual to obediently skip down to Waitrose and buy more celery, it is on you as a member of society to fight for a fairer system where more people have access to resources.
A
Newsnight
producer calls. “I think it’s really interesting that you’ve never voted,” she says. “You should talk about that tomorrow with Paxman.” I agree, bemused that it is regarded as unusual.
The idea that voting is pointless, democracy a façade, and that no one is representing ordinary people is more resonant than ever as I leave my ordinary town behind. Amidst the guilt and anger I feel in the back of the Führer-mobile, there is hope. Whilst it’s clear that on an individual, communal, and global level that radical change is
necessary, I feel a powerful, transcendent optimism. I know change is possible, I know there is an alternative, because I live a completely different life to the one I was born with. I also know that the solution is not fame or money or any transient adornment of the individual. The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.
W
E HAVE FOUND OURSELVES IN AN INSANE SITUATION; THAT IS
irrefutable. How is this unfair, exploitative system maintained? Quentin Crisp, the English fop, wit, and subject of Sting’s song “Englishman in New York,” said, “Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.” Well, David Cameron, Donald Rumsfeld, and Rupert Murdoch must, in spite of their dish-face, dishrag, anodyne-plus appearances, be packing like Elvis Presley to hold this carnival of inequality together.
There is no logic in adhering to an unfair, destructive system unless it’s at the sizzling behest of the inconceivably sexy. The most potent tool in maintaining the status quo is our belief that change is impossible. “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Winston Churchill quoted this on being informed he’d been voted out of office in spite of Britain’s victory in the Second World War.
Supposedly he said it in the bath, which is a tough environment to conjure up epigrams from, especially if you’re also trying to keep a cigar dry. How convenient for the elites that thrive in this hegemony that there is no viable system but the one that places them in a tower of ineffable privilege. How fortunate that there is no possibility of change. How extraordinary that any alternative that is offered is either studiously ignored or viciously discredited.
Coming to believe that my life could be different, that I could be restored to sanity, was an integral step in my recovery from addiction. I believe it is vital too on a social scale.
You’ve probably noticed by now that I keep alluding to God. Unless you’re that bloke on the yacht and are only paying cursory attention to this book as the sisters begin to squabble and the bubbly begins to flatten. To be honest, oligarchs are not the intended readership of this book. If you are one, I’d like you to gently place the book on the deck, for posterity, and leap into the briny.
The reason I keep mentioning God is because I believe in God. A lot of people are surprised by that, what with it being 2014 and this being a technologically advanced secular culture.
God is primarily regarded as the preserve of thick white people and angry brown people. Since Friedrich Nietzsche (deceased) declared, “God is dead,” we’ve been exploring the observation of British writer G. K. Chesterton, who said, “The death of God doesn’t mean man will believe in nothing but that he will believe in anything.”
I’m a good example of that: at thirteen a believer in Lakeside, at eight a believer in biscuits, at seventeen a devoted wanker, at nineteen a fanatical drug user, before winding up in the monastery of celebrity.
After the troubling Mind-shop epiphany I went back to my old school, to see if it was as bad as I remember it or if it had somehow managed to burrow downwards from the gutter. Whenever I’m in front of young people, I sense the authority figures present prodding me to deliver a kind of “Just Say No,” “If I can do it, you can,” “Pull yer’self up by yer’ bootstraps” monologue of individualistic triumph over adversity.
This is awkward for me because that is not my message. I don’t like dispatching trite little diatribes on behalf of an establishment that I despise, and often have to wrench the pendulum of my extreme nature back to equanimity before I tell kids to riot, or torch their exam papers or their school.
I have it in me, this extremist, destructive impulse. When the pie-eyed teens in the school hall, where I, decades before, had grasped the tendril with which I would swing out of Essex, like a tubby Tarzan, look to me full of
X Factor
ambition and Xbox distraction
and tell me that they “want to be famous too,” I wince, but I want to tell them they’ve been swindled. That they are being horribly misled by the dominant cultural narratives.
In spite of the anguish my addiction to drugs and alcohol has caused me, I wouldn’t relinquish its lessons and I certainly wouldn’t tell other people, least of all young people, not to drink and take drugs.
The war against drugs, which is a war against drug addicts (about which Bill Hicks beautifully observed, “If there’s a war against drugs and we’re losing, that means that the drugs are winning.”), is a good example of the system’s disingenuity on an individual, legal, and global level.
Drug addiction is an illness. Criminalizing people that are ill is cruel, yes, but also insidious. It’s also bloody futile: no self-respecting drug addict is remotely dissuaded from pursuing their habit by the legal status of the drug that they are taking. All criminalization achieves is unsafe, unregulated drug use, the demonization of users, and the creation of an international criminal economy. You know this, I know this, and more worryingly the people who maintain this system know it, so why is it being maintained? Who benefits?
Well, on this I’m qualified to postulate. I may not have successfully overthrown a government or devised more productive, fairer, and more enjoyable social systems before, so there will be some conjecture in this book; what I have done, though, with considerable assistance, is navigated myself from one set of feelings where drinking and taking drugs were my only solution to a state where, one day at a time, I never drink or take drugs. What happened?
As a lost little boy in Essex, awaiting Lakeside, adoring the ambivalent beaming patriarch Ronald McDonald, I felt a discontentment. I loved my mother, was uncomfortable around my stepfather, and adored my absent dad. I felt disconnected, though, and frustrated. My mum was ill a lot, I was uneasy at home, unsettled and insecure. This feeling of irritability and alienation meant I was malleable. Have you ever tried to argue with someone who doesn’t want anything from you? It’s hard. Have you ever noticed in a row
with someone that no longer loves you that you have no recourse? No tools with which to bargain. If you stroll up to a stranger and tell them that unless they comply with your demands they’ll never see you again, it’s unlikely that they’ll fling themselves at your feet and beg you not to go. They’ll just wander off.
When people are content, they are difficult to maneuver. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies. My intention in writing this book is to make you feel better, to offer you a solution to the way you feel.