Manifesto for World Revolution: Excerpt

The Metameme Revolution

Donella Meadows, the environmental scientist who co-authored The Limits of Growth, urged us to burrow below the surface. In her iceberg model of systems thinking, the events that make the news are only a small part of what’s going on.

One level down lie trends. Repeating patterns. Beneath that are structures, systems, paradigms, forms. The deeper you go, the more leverage you have. It takes pressure applied at the bottom — the level of our most ingrained values, norms, assumptions and beliefs — to bring about meaningful, lasting, systemic change.

We are now waking up to the fact that the world runs on a handful of well-entrenched, largely unquestioned precepts. Most of us take it for granted that economists know what they are 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 move freely across borders but people can’t. That advertising is harmless. That secrecy is a normal part of democracy. That arms trading cannot be stopped. That no matter how heinous a crime a corporation commits, it’s untouchable.

But now, caught in an existential crisis with no obvious way out, we begin to question these hidden coordinates of our reality and start thinking about a new operating system for Planet Earth.

We hatch a new grand narrative, a set of ideas so fundamental, so systemic, so profound that a sane sustainable future is unthinkable without them.

And then we deploy them.

We crack the global mind on seven critical fronts:

On the ecological front, we get Adam Smith’s invisible hand working for us instead of against us. We lay a plan for a capitalist reformation — a painful but necessary move towards a new kind of global marketplace, a bioeconomy — in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth.

On the corporate front, we launch the mother of all boycotts against one of the most criminal corporations in the world and wipe it out. Once the mightiest has fallen, the rest will follow, and a Corporate Charter Revocation Movement will be born.

On the financial front, we force our leaders to eliminate all tax havens. We march worldwide for a 1% Robin Hood Tax on all stock market and currency transactions. We push for new rules to cool down insanely feverish bot-run trading. We propose the simple idea that you must hold a stock for 24 hours after its purchase before selling it.

On the economic front, we set up subversive cells in the economics departments of universities around the world, and start disrupting classes, popping posters in the corridors and nailing manifestos on professors’ doors. We expose the current science of economics as a hindering profession, disastrously out of tune with planetary biorhythms. We seed a revolutionary leap in economic thinking — a paradigm shift toward a new bionomic model that works in the real world.

On the political front, we push to rewrite the constitutions of nations, recalibrating the role of humans in the ecological chain. We make secrecy taboo in all but the most sensitive areas of national security. We clamp down on the arms trade. In nation after nation, we propose a constitutional amendment for global adoption, calling for national referendums requiring 50 percent of voters to assent to any war.

On the psychological front, we expand our concept of human rights beyond our physical bodies into the digital realm; your data becomes part of your new hybrid self. Then we launch the Mental Liberation Front (MLF) and start reclaiming our mental space — hacking into the networks and monkeywrenching the algorithms that are manipulating us and undermining our individual and collective will.

On the aesthetic front, we call on architects, artists, designers and creatives to transform the ambient tone of the world. The way it feels to walk around our cities; the mood of watching television; the knack and smack of navigating the internet; the emotional valence of money and status; the way it feels to be alive today. We step off the godless and immoral straight line we’ve been stuck on for the past century and learn how to wobble again.

We are a new norm-setting force. With these metamemetic transformations as our playbook, we can jolt this experiment of ours on Planet Earth back onto a sane, sustainable path.

At this point some of you are no doubt thinking this is crazy, impossible stuff. Monumental social, political and cultural heaves like this take generations, sometimes centuries, to kick in, if they ever do. I hear all the time from critics about pretty much every one of these metamemes: “It’ll never fly.”

And I always respond: “It’ll never fly in your world.” The business-as-usual world. But that world will soon be gone.

The only thing that can save us now is a massive change in the way we think about living on this rock — a quick and mighty swerve toward common goals and shared resources and long horizons.

As our ecosystems crash, as our minds become muddled, as the center gives way and we start spiraling into a new dark age, millions of us will embark on a revolutionary adventure of social transformation. Our mission: to demolish corpo-consumercapitalism as we know it.

Isn’t it ironic? Once we realize we’re doomed if we do nothing, that puts us in an oddly liberating place. It means we have nothing to lose. Anything and everything suddenly becomes possible, and all the homilies, banalities, and precepts we’ve taken for granted for centuries begin to crumble.

We’re in a geopolitical power-shift moment. The hierarchical, top-down power structures that have ruled the world for thousands of years are collapsing before our eyes. The street now holds unprecedented sway. We know what we want. After centuries of rule by kings, emperors, tyrants, mad men, fascists, communists, military dictatorships and mega-corporations, We the People of the world are now ready to take charge of our own destiny and start calling the shots from below.

And if the leaders, politicians, intellectuals and pundits of the old-world order refuse to listen to us, then, armed with our metamemes, we rush into the streets and get the job done by the sheer power of enraged swarms of humanity howling for deliverance from a future that does not compute.

We are the Third Force.

We will spark the first ever global revolution and win the planetary endgame.

I’m about to give you the codes.

Are you ready?