Alice Mason Artist

A world where we are endlessly curfewed by governments who are blatantly corrupt, sustained by an equally corrupt media unable or unwilling to hold politicians and corporatists to account, where we have to be dependent on money-driven pharmaceutical companies administering updated vaccines every year to keep up with continuing mutations of viruses (and profiting more than they could ever have imagined), where the dictates of the market, even when it comes to climate and environmental mitigation, predominate and influence any decision made, is not a world that anyone can call humane or natural and it is certainly not going to solve the crisis. It is the ultimate triumph of the capitalist death-drive to control and consume until there is nothing left to consume. It is destroying what is left of the fabric of society, which has survived despite the increasing demands of the debt-driven markets. The mental health crisis, which is barely discussed with the seriousness it should be, is not a result of individual failings, it is not something in the individual to be fixed, it is the result of a systemic crisis with the basic structure on which our economic and political systems are built. It suits the upholders of that system, and those most invested in its continuation to characterise and generalise anyone who opposes them as extremist, as delusional, based on the examples of a few. Nowhere in mainstream news is there an acknowledgment that the financial and political systems are themselves toxic and must be challenged and replaced as a matter of utmost urgency. This will reach a tipping point and it will become irrelevant to frame all those who oppose this madness as “far-right extremists” or “conspiracy theorists”. A rebellion borne out of love of humanity and love of nature, however obscured by clickbait junk, must find its place to heal this generational wound, because it is in our deeper nature to do so. This cannot go on, because bio-techno-capitalism based on surveillance and control to service the needs of a tiny fraction of the world population is not sustainable, it is not an answer, it is the symptom of a fundamental disease that must be treated.

The weaponisation of fear is not just with institutions. Some of that is also coming from big, powerful far-right organisations who have infiltrated what were essentially leftwing and liberal spaces (eco-spirituality) to poison the water, or as Steve Bannon put it “flood the zone with shit”. But it is telling that any dissent now can be characterised as “far-right” or “conspiratorial” which makes it so much easier to dismiss and much harder to hold corrupt governments to account.

Giulio Sica