Dupes of Non-Physical

Politics unbound from the nation-state is the world that's after us, taking hold of our poetic imaginations in this century, but making claim to our political allegiances in the next. No escape except annihilation can protect us from this ancient Greek necessity, for all our efforts to avoid changing only seem to have thrust changes upon us.
It will not be in the rational forms of the Enlightenment that world political leaders will come together in some Planetary Constitutional Convention, for such conscious, volitional activity would require a relaxed openness to the future, and in the late 1970s humanity everywhere willed to reject transformation and reassert a new and more hysterical form of the fundamentalism of the past, from the Islamic fundamentalism of the Shiites to the industrial fundamentalism of the Reaganites. And so humanity has precipitated its collective unconscious into the world as the part of itself it sees as "other" and calls the environment. Of necessity, then, it will be in the form of a globally damaged ecology that the new world body politic will experience itself: not as the legalistic creation of patriarchal states, but as the unconscious manifestation of the planet; not the reactionary involutions of Ouranos that seek to abort all change, but the creative evolution of Gaia that emasculates old gods with new and subtle technologies. (In an earlier version of this book, published as a pamphlet by the Findhorn Foundation in 1982, I did rather naively imagine that some sort of Planetary Constitutional Convention was a possibility for the future. That pamphlet version was based upon lectures I gave at Findhorn in December of 1979, and so I focused on such current events as Jerry Brown's campaign for the American presidency and Zbigniew Brzezinski's leadership of the Trilateral Commission. In entirely rewriting From Nation to Emanation and doubling the length of the manuscript, I have changed my mind as I have watched the rise of Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms. I can see now that a Planetary Constitutional Convention is too ethnocentric a projection, too derivative from Western Enlightenment values. I have tried to darken my excessively bright New Age projections to bring the perspective more in line with the world of Khomeini's Iran, Thatcher's Great Britain, and Reagan's United States of America. I have also taken out some esoteric material that, in pamphlet form, was intended only for the specific context of the Findhorn Foundation's interest in the Western esoteric tradition.) PS-WT-1,2&32


Everybody looks at the King's Road in London and they see these punks, these people that are irresponsible, vulgar, living on the dole, parasites on the industrial system. Everybody looks at Concords and nuclear power and says this is a positive investment in developing the national or the European economy. Look at all the money that's put into products like Concords and nuclear power. If you really believe in nuclear power, hock your spouse and your mortgage and your house and take everything you've got and buy shares in Wilco. You'll have it coming to you in what you'll get from that kind of capitalism. But now look at what these funny teenagers have done: They have created a music industry, a magazine industry, a fashion industry, and a music video industry. Add up all the informational transactions from that planetary culture of information and divide it by the dole and you'll see an incredible return on investment. But we don't look at these kids as the J.P. Morgans and captains of industry of the modern world. We look at them as parasites, aliens, predators, and the rest of it. That's because we can't see punk as the working class transformed into an art form. These kids are smarter than Maggie Thatcher. They know no one needs them. They're not needed as slaves in the old system. They're not needed as serfs in the medieval system and they're not needed as proletariat in the industrial system. Nobody needs them. What have they done? They've created a role for themselves in the planetary culture by doing for industrialism what the circus did for pre-industrialism. IB-WT-29


If one takes all of the five future transforms together, they form a pattern, a slight aikido move that is necessary to transform the militarism of Reagan into a new populist liberalism for a transformed Democratic Party in the nineties. If the Democratic Party remains the party of the industrial past, of labor unions and ethnic blocs, it will, like Mondale, become a fossil. And if the Democratic Party tries to become identical to Reagan's party and to woo the same constituency, it will only prove itself to be shallow, thought-less, opportunistic, and completely lacking in credibility as well as power. If, on the other hand, a new American ecological party were to try to make it on its own, such a movement on the Left would generate its mirror-opposite on the far Right, and Lyndon LaRouche's thermonuclear fusionists would probably match the Greens vote for vote, with each party taking about 15 percent of the electorate. It would be far better for the Democratic Party to take the best of the ecological party and the best of American Big Science, to move the new ethnic majority in defeat of the white suburban affluent constituency that supports Reagan. Paradoxically, it is this new Latin and Asian America that is more truly expressive of the California culture that first put Reagan into power.
I doubt if the Democratic Party will adopt Gaian politics in 1988; most likely it will try to copy the Republicans with someone like Iacocca, and our politics will be the typical American cultural situation of Avis and Hertz, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Burger King. But history is full of surprises like Chernobyl, so I would imagine that by 1992 this awful generation of the fifties, these hideous reruns of the anti-intellectual McCarthy era, will have spent themselves. Just as the sixties introduced a quantum leap in consciousness for the whole human race, so will the nineties take us up one more step. It won't take a national charismatic leader to effect such a cultural shift, for by the nineties the generation of the sixties will be spread throughout the establishment as corporate presidents, as politicians, as popular musicians and video artists, as university leaders. As they look around and see themselves in position, they will remember, and those camp-followers who now celebrate their neoconservative orthodoxy will change spots and drag out their old sixties credentials and begin to boast about how many demonstrations, love-ins, and rock festivals they took part in. Once again, it will be fashionable to be idealistic, and patriotic, not simply for Springsteen's U.S.A., but the entire planet. Such is the fantasy of one who came of age in the sixties, and such is my fantasy of a new Gaian form of politics for the nineties. GP-WT-15


So the loss of American hegemony is one thing, but there's another quality coming on at the same time. It does like it's sort of a return of the Middle Ages in the sense that nationalism is not as important as it used to be, but class, in a Marxist sense, has not gone away. In many ways, one's access to education, whether one goes to Harvard or not, seems to be now a function of family. And the society is beginning to take on very medieval characteristics. There is a ruling class at the top that communicates through oral means, face-to-face. Then there's a scientific/technical class which would be like the "informational knights"; these are the equivalents of the lords and the knights of the Middle Ages, and they communicate through electronic, scientific, and technical means. And then there's a kind of artisanal class, and at the bottom there's an underclass. So it's almost like a return of the Vedic four-fold caste system: mouth, eye, hand, and rump. The oral class has the right accent, and has wealth; the class of the eye reads and studies, and has science and art; the class of the hand works; and the bottom is on its ass. So things are becoming extremely hierarchical as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the smaller ruling class just rules the masses through pageantry and illusion. So television is the means of disseminating and creating this electronic state of entertainment, but the people who are outside are, by definition, not part of the "electro-peasantry". Television really is the means that defines whether you are a knight of information or an electro-peasant. CC-WT-31