Yesterday we looked at how Britain would fair under the Greens. Today we take a look at the manifesto of that other great scion of the New Left, Russell Brand. Here are five of Brand’s most dangerous ideas:
1. Achieve political change by changing the way you feel. Man.
No, really. Brand advocates exactly this. The revolution, we are told, will be “a doddle”, because all it requires is for people to change the way they feel. Having read several of Brand’s books now it is clear that what we are reading is in fact an account of someone who has some severe emotional issues. He assumes the classical psychological fallacy that everyone feels exactly like he does. The only genuinely happy people, Brand asserts, are “children, the mentally ill, and daytime television presenters”.
This may all seem relatively harmless were it not for the fact that Brand couches the entire thing within one vast conspiracy to control our minds. He admits telling kids who admire him not to aspire to material wealth. Because “they’ve been swindled….they are being horribly misled by the dominant cultural narratives.”
You see, these poor kids from impoverished backgrounds don’t understand the fundamental nature of reality. But our guru Brand does. He’s been there. He knows truths that most other people do not – “the more I have engaged with the transcendent, the more I have explored practices that are designed to alleviate the burden of materialism and individualism.”
Individualism and materialism for Brand are the true evils in the world, not the likes of ISIS. He states that ISIS – get this – are “right to be angry”, they have an “idealised view” of what Iraq should be and despite everything, “beneath their militant goals we find love”.
We are blind to these secret truths because ‘our consciousness has been colonised by corporations’. He genuinely thinks that mass meditation can result in affecting the behaviour of others and stop crime. And we can use this to escape the clutches of “The Illuminati” and The Queen. No, really, those are at the top of Brand’s imagined hierarchy of control. Below them, “The rich” are victims of this brainwashing too though, “The minority that are hoarding resources are misguided in their belief that it can make them happy, and we have to be the adults and help them.” That’s right, we have to ‘help’ them. If you disagree with any of these ideas, Russell puts it down to your “conditioning”.
So folks, let us all join hands in a circle, sit here. And think. Really hard.
2. Shirk responsibility
This part of Brand’s political philosophy is closely tied in with with 1) above. We’re all automatons (except for the blessed few like Brand, who have pierced the veil) and as a result not responsible for what we do. He does not think we should waste mental energy to reflect on our bad behaviour –
“What if that feeling of inadequacy, isolation, and anxiety isn’t just me? What if it isn’t internally engineered but the result of concerted effort, the product of a transmission? An ongoing broadcast from the powerful that has colonized my mind?…Our collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a power structure that needs us to remain atomized and disconnected.”
He not only knows this through his incredible meditation techniques and third-hand cod philosophy ideas but also through hard, hard experience. He laments that all of the money, the drugs and the promiscuous sex he has had failed to make him happy and therefore the problem is not him. It must be something external.
He relieves the London rioters of 2011 of any responsibility. In Brand’s view they were brainwashed by “dubious idolatry”. Presumably because of this newfound freedom from accountability he feels free to indulge in violent fantasies (not his fault, you understand). He says had he the guts, he might burn the local shopping mall to the ground. Similarly, upon visiting the States, he found he had suddenly developed the desire to own a gun. Not his desire you understand. No. It was put there. “I want a gat, like Tupac. Of course,I think things like that; the messages that are broadcast on that frequency move fast and stick hard.”
3. Cancel all debt
Sorry, look, I know you’re probably crying tears of pain at the back by this point. E-Brandgelism is a thing now. Swathes of young people (and old brain donors) take him seriously. We need to understand what Brand says and how he thinks. Even if his legion of fans blatantly have not read the book despite claiming to. Stick with it, we’re halfway through.
So yes, back to the topic at hand. Brand’s next big idea is that all debt should be cancelled:
“Tuesday night you go to bed with a credit-card bill, mortgage, and a bloody headache; Wednesday you wake up with a spring in your step and a pound note in your pocket. What a touch.”
Referring to the amounts involved they sound, “like a lot, but I can’t get my head around economics. I’m not supposed to get my head around economics, none of us are; it’s designed to be obtuse.” It’s that damn mind control again.
It gets better though:
“Look at those fucking NASDAQ, FTSE, Dow Jones things: Sometimes I accidentally press a button on my phone and the screen is filled with the numerical babblings of these unknowable entities, and it’s more baffling and mysterious than the Amharic cries that filled the Kensal Green church. They speak in numerical tongues as they worship their invisible God.”
It is all good, because only the bad people will suffer the consequences, and even then in Brand’s view, those consequences are not so awful. Referring to the fallout from the 2008 financial crash he says, “Aside from a few people carrying plants out of their offices in cardboard boxes, I don’t remember there being many consequences at all.”
Global debt cancellation is a possibility – and a good policy – for Brand because, he argues, it has already been done. The fallout of the 2008 crash was, in Brand’s bonkers imagination….nothing. He genuinely does not appear to be aware that the debt has simply been shifted to the taxpayers until (and if) the bailed out banks can be sold on again.
But what should we expect from a complete clown who says this when ham-fistedly attempting a mathematical calculation:
“I just used the calculator on my phone to subtract 85 from 3.5 billion, and the answer had a letter in it. It did, it had a letter ‘e’ in it. Even the calculator has gone berserk at this injustice.”
We’re witnessing misunderstood genius here, I tells ya.
4. Don’t vote
Brand regularly spews vitriol at UKIP and bemoans their ongoing rise. However, He also argues that “The idea that voting is pointless, democracy a façade, and that no one is representing ordinary people is more resonant than ever” (his evidence for this, by the way, was an afternoon spent in Greys).
The only realistic means of actually “stopping UKIP” is purely tokenistic and that is the end of the story for Russell. Those people who died and suffered for universal suffrage don’t matter because he thinks they would not have bothered had they seen what voting had been reduced to now. He in fact uses women’s suffrage as an example, arguing that the female vote has been “incorporated” and “rendered irrelevant.” Whatever that means. With no irony whatsoever, he says that the legacy of the suffragettes has been “thoroughly douched”.
Even a form of direct democracy is intolerable to him. He objects to direct democracy in Switzerland because they often choose to vote in a way that he disapproves (they were tricked by the media, naturally). He does not trust individuals to make these decisions for themselves anyway because, “We all have dualistic and duelling intentions. This is why systems are more important than individuals.”
So Russ, how you think “da yoof” should be engaged if not via the political system? Here’s our man’s thoughts:
“I don’t feel irresponsible for telling kids not to vote; I feel like I deserve a Blue Peter badge for not telling them to riot. For not telling them that they are entitled to destroy the cathedrals of tyranny erected to mock them in the heart of their community. That they should rise up and destroy the system that imprisons them, ignores them, condemns and maligns them. By any means necessary.”
Got that? In case you weren’t sure what he had in mind. Here’s more: “torching a Nike Town is no crime at all compared to the incessant immolation of the rights of the workers that made the goods within,”
So what rag-tag army would our working class hero cobble together to achieve this? “a gang of Toxteth’s finest, of Broadwater Farm’s most deadly, Belfast’s most up for it, raid Molotov’s drinks cabinet, and light up the Westminster sky.” Oh. Go out and break stuff (and people), but whatever you do, don’t vote.
5. Anti-intellectualism
“Become a tool of a higher purpose by opening yourself to prayer and meditation. No need to think.”
That’s right. Don’t think. It is bad for you and you’ll only be captured by those evil corporations and the Illuminati (not forgetting the Queen of course). But what about all of the amazing technologies and social advancements that have been enabled by focused application of the scientific method? Well,
“the scientific method—is about to be similarly overthrown [as flat earth theory]. There are just too many questions unanswered and unanswerable.”
Brand does not just state his contempt for intellectual pursuits; he embodies this contempt throughout his book. Here’s a sample (from a big stable of examples):
“I am vulnerable to mystical-looking people.”
“You know that bloke who tightrope-walks between skyscrapers? No? You want his name? Google it yerself.”
“Jesus Christ, the Jewish nationalist radical.” (Jewish nationalist?)
“Jupiter is orbited by four moons.”
Consider that this person is currently the primary source of information on Fracking for tens of thousands of impressionable minds. For him, a child would understand that Fracking is lethal and immoral if its “true nature” was only explained to them. According to Russ, widespread Fracking means “planning to explode your way into the earth’s core, extricate gas, and sell it.” I mean, really, “On what basis can an energy corporation claim to own gas at the earth’s core?” Who could argue with that?
I’m actually happy to invoke God myself at this point and plead with him to give me strength. And peace from Russell blathering his idiocy on prime time television. Strewth! Any kind of knowledge or intellectual endeavour is worthless to Brand because there is only one epistemological principle worth keeping:
“Anything that directs consciousness away from that truth [universal oneness] instead of towards it is bollocks and it has to go.”
He uses this principle to excuse his wilful ignorance in all matters. In a discussion on economics he says he does not know what the ECB and BIS are and cannot be bothered to even use Google to find out (great this having access to the immutable unchanging truth isn’t it?) He says to the reader if they do not know either, “[l]ook it up yourself or ask a grown-up.”
And he’s not worried about anyone else (i.e. not ‘the corporations’, ‘the illuminati’ or ‘the Queen’) coming along and seducing him with their own particular narratives or propaganda because he’s immune to such things. Why? –
“Well, I believe in the Glory of God. I believe in the power of people to manifest here on earth a society that represents holy principles. This inoculates me from their bollocks.”
“Ask a grown-up”, indeed.
In the final analysis
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. The above is only a modest selection from the collective dribble that is out there to be waded through, especially from Brand. I maintain it is important to look at these people closely and resist any urge to dismiss them out of hand. No matter how laughable or idiotic we perceive them to be. Both the Greens and Brand are growing and substantial influences. We ignore them at our peril.
Who do I think would be more destructive influence if their policies and philosophies were made flesh though? Now that is an interesting question to answer. In practical terms the Greens would seem to be the most obvious threat. Theirs is a concordance of utter calumny. A Hobbesian paradise of hairshirt wearing hobbled harridans with haughty exhortations to the hearty and hale to lay down in the mud and please, would you mind awfully, dying. There’s no room for the strong, the exceptional or the quick witted here sonny. In a Green Hell reimagining of Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian world of ‘Harrison Bergeron’, those with any talents natural or developed, would be best advised to keep their capacities well hidden and under control if they can’t escape in the first place.
And yet, dim and primitive as a future “utopian” Green society may seem, the very political system that is currently enabling them to affect policy is also restraining them. The two sharp U-turns on key policies in just the last week are cases in point. There is enough inertia, and opposition, within and without the system to stymie the worst of the Green’s efforts.
They have done plenty of damage already I know. Yet I would argue that the only reason they are not a spent force already is because they are kept alive by the desperate Guardianistas and student coffee shop revolutionaries who want an alternative to the status quo but would rather eat Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations page by page than support UKIP. In the medium term I am certain their days are numbered, especially as they have bet the house on catastrophic man-made thermageddon. Every year it fails to materialise, the Greens die a little on the inside and out. And it shows.
And on the plus side, the Greens appear to be sufficiently ignorant to not realise that many of their flagship policies are mutually exclusive with EU membership. At least a Green UK government would also mean a UK free of the EU. Hilarious given the Greens’ stated predilection for it.
As you’ve probably already guessed, I’m going to opt for Brand here in the disaster stakes. Mainly because his effect is so insidious and pernicious. In particular I would highlight his anti-intellectualism. It is nothing short of toxic. This is especially so because his target demographic – young adults – will be the most vulnerable and receptive to it. He may look like just a gangly scarecrow, yet both his words and behaviour encourage a lassitude in our youth that we should do everything in our power to fight back against. Brand, or someone like him, will continue to remain in the public eye. He is financially dependent on it. He currently earns thousands in filthy lucre (non-materialistic non corrupting money, you understand) from being a YouTube partner. He has to continually participate in stupid stunts and pretend to support causes in order to maintain the level of gullible viewers required.
Our educational system is already clogged up with dubious ideologies and regulated by an equally dubious regulator, OfPerv. We still have an ongoing literacy and numeracy crisis. When school leaver age kids and older get home, they’ll be turning not to Bill Hicks, or George Carlin, but Russell Brand. His awful anti-intellectualism combines with his evident ‘poor me’ self-esteem issues in a way that would be very appealing to someone going through a similarly rebellious and seemingly (to them) misunderstood phase in their life.
In agreement with numerous writers here at Breitbart, I believe that our most fundamental war is not a political war but a culture war. The Greens are fighting in the trenches primarily for the former. Brand is a despicable trooper for the latter and will be treated by young people with great earnestness because of his alternative and rebellious appeal. Even the Greens may seem too stuffy for teenagers and early 20 somethings.
In my view the two most pernicious challenges for the individual attempting to truly begin their journey in this world are facing ignorance and low self-esteem. Brand encourages and embodies both. He may float around like a fairy of f*ckwittery spreading big brown clouds of nonsense everywhere. But our kids will choke on it. They deserve better. We deserve better. Take every opportunity to hold him and his idiot followers to account and every media outlet that provides a platform for his messianic masturbatory malignancy. And give the Greens a kick while you’re at it too. I know I will.