What I am Reading Now…
Grace Ndiritu
June 2024

The State of The Nation 
Books, film and thoughts for navigating an election year

Keywords: Society, Activism, Healing and Politics.

Where to begin but perhaps with a quote from one of my favourite books of all time – Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil by Paul Levy. Written in 2013 this book seems as timely as ever especially the quotes I will use to punctuate this short text about the state of the world we are living in.

‘Jung never tired of warning that the greatest danger that threatens humanity is the possibility that millions of us can fall into our unconscious together and reinforce each other’s blind spots, feeding a contagious collective psychosis in which we unwittingly become complicit in supporting the insanity of endless wars; this is unfortunately an exact description of what is currently happening- ing. Let’s look at how we are using our energy: we are literally investing our resources into developing engines of mass destruction so as to keep ourselves safe and protect ourselves. In the process, we are destroying each other, ourselves, and the biosphere, the life support system of life on earth-that we depend upon for our very survival. We are literally feeding and supporting our own genocide. Our greatest resource, our own mind, is continually being polluted and corrupted by the massive propaganda engines of wetiko [evil] that have become incorporated within our wetiko [evil]-saturated culture and internalized within our own minds. What modern-day humanity is confronted with, to quote the Trappist monk and social activist Thomas Merton, is “a crisis of sanity first of all. The problems of the nations are the problems of mentally deranged people, but magnified a thousand times because they have the full-straight-faced approval of a schizoid society, schizoid national structures, schizoid military and business complexes.’

My first  recommendation to combat this ‘sleeping’ position I would recommend Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger which investigates how fake news can produce fake heroes like Steve Bannon and Naomi Wolf who were once emblems of the Left in 1990s but slowly drifted into a parallel universe of far-right social media alternatives of Twitter (Gettr), YouTube (Rumble) and Instagram (Parler) through an equation of what Klein calls “Narcissism (Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown”. Similarly to Bannon and Wolf; Rogan, Tate, Peterson, Owens and Brand are now the mainstays of the ‘culture wars’ which pollute our air waves and create more polarity and division for the rest of us during election years.

This leads me to share with you a recent cinematic viewing of the blockbuster Civil War directed by Alex Garland. A movie about a group of journalists who are trying to get to Washington to interview the President, during a dystopian civil war across the U.S. Some critics have accused the film of being apolitical because it does not clearly depict which side the protagonists are on, which further promotes the idea that journalists can’t just report the truth – they must pick a side. Thus, in contemporary culture we have been taught to understand that an objective truth must always be tainted by a journalists’ own subjectivity – an objective truth is no longer good enough to get a point across, meaning that objective truths can be continuously  dismissed as being fake by the instigators and purveyors of fake news.

My third suggestion in complete disavowal to that way of thinking, is a new book on John Berger: The Underground Sea by Tom Overton and Matthew Harle about Berger’s unpublished essays on Miners and the Miners Strike. One essay The Nature of Mass Demonstrations in particular from 1968 hits home when thinking of recent student protests at Columbia University in New York and now university campuses globally. To quote Berger ‘’The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary consciousness….State authorities usually lie about the number of demonstrators involved. The lie, however, makes little difference….The importance of the numbers involved is to be found in the direct experience of those taking part in or sympathetically witnessing the demonstration. For them the numbers cease to be numbers and become the evidence of their senses, the conclusions of their imagination. The larger the demonstration, the more powerful and immediate (visible, audible, tangible) a metaphor it becomes for their total collective strength.

This ‘rehearsal’ can also be witnessed in recent viewings of  the reality TV show Gogglebox which films groups of family and friends collective viewing across the nation of current TV shows including the news. Gogglebox gives an edited voice to the people which reveals the secret thoughts of the actual citizens who occupy the nation, not the media but the general public. It is a beautiful visual display of democracy at work. Through its weekly transmission of political views from a unwitting wide cross section of class groups (Working, Middle and Upper) of modern Britain, as they prepare to go to the ballot box, it is act of subversion that even Channel 4 who make it, are probably unaware to the extent of how powerful it is. In other words if you want to understand how a nation is going to vote, forget following polling trackers and watch Gogglebox.

But what can we do individually when as Levy says, ‘… evil for example, is being enacted by our own government, by those who are supposed to have our best interests in mind and are entrusted with our protection, it is intolerable to realise that atrocities are being perpetrated in our name ; thus, the evidence has to be internally denied….[Because] their evil is so off the radar of our accepted system of morality that it is practically beyond the ability of our legal system to redress.’

I personally turn to thinking about the topic of ‘healing trauma’ – ancestral, political, ecological, racial, brilliantly encapsulated in a new podcast series from the makers of SAND (Science and NonDuality) conference, entitled Talks on Trauma. By recontextualizing the current issues of the day i.e. climate, war, economy etc. through the lens of spirituality and creativity, I am able to enact a type of ‘sacred activism’ which motivates me to get up and fight another day.

As Levy says and which I truly believe  ‘Unrealised creativity is one of the most destructive things in the human psyche. The creative artist is able to express, mediate, alchemically transmute, and humanize the daemonic into a communicable form that is beneficial for others, thus performing an invaluable and necessary service for human society. Human beings are the conduits through which the timeless creative process that underlies and informs the human psyche as well as the world at large becomes expressed and actualized in linear time. Like living oracles, artists are mouthpieces for the time in which they live.’