🪞 Finding Freedom Within: Personal Transformation
As winter sets in, it's time to go inwards and reflect on ourselves as part of the whole.
In this episode of The Spirit of Revolution, I explore the nature of the self and how understanding it is crucial for both personal and collective action. I share my own struggles with depression and burnout, and how I discovered the power of transcendence—separating the "I" from the emotions and beliefs that trap us.
This isn’t just about mental well-being; it's about finding the inner strength to resist the crises we face. By learning to reflect on ourselves, we unlock the ability to act without being consumed by despair. This journey is about building resilience together as we prepare for what’s to come.
Join me as we begin the path from self-awareness to revolutionary action.
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Episode 3 - The Self
You might say that I am in the business of persuasion. Before I got involved in this surreal task of trying to stop social collapse and human extinction, I ran small businesses, and a lot of that work is about persuading people—to buy stuff, to work for you, and so on. There are a number of rules of thumb. One is that you cannot take people from zero to 100 in one go; they just phase out. Most of our brains, most of the time, have to go through stages.
I have done around 200 talks and interviews on this death project situation that we face—what the opposition calls climate change. You can't go in and tell people straight they're going to die; you have to take it step by step and give examples of each stage of the explanation. I start with the idea that things are real—real in the sense that they can hurt and kill you. Obvious things, like jumping off a building—you do that, and you die, yes, and they're all on board with that. Next, I ask them: Who do they trust to tell them the truth on life and death matters? For instance, if you have a lump in your body, do you go and get a diagnosis from your friend? No, you go to the doctor, and then maybe a professional specialist who has spent decades looking at cases like yours. It is your right, and it is your responsibility, to hear the truth.
So, who do you want to hear from when it comes to putting greenhouse gases into the air? Well, obviously, it's the scientist that spent years looking at the situation. They can give you the raw facts, and then their interpretations, and some predictions about those facts. Only after I've done all of this in a talk do I proceed on to the real issue: What does this all mean with regard to carbon emissions? Only when we see what it actually means do we accept that it is real.
They help people through the horrific information that they are being given. They need to be aware of their emotional reactions. Have they made the painful move from one set of beliefs to another? This is the liberatory transition from cognitive dissonance—fighting with oneself—to the resolution to take action with others, the congruence between belief and action, which is critical to well-being, the health of the soul, as you might call it.
So, this is the process I'm going to follow over the next few episodes. We're going to look at the self, the world, and then time. In this episode, we'll look at self. I am asking you to bear with me here; it may not initially seem obvious, but the direction of travel is, in fact, how to save the world, as you like to call it.
I'm going to take you on a bit of a roundabout journey, the first stages of which may not seem particularly relevant. "What's this got to do with anything?" you might say. But you might want to remember the introductory episode about the verdict, description of my reactions and feelings, how I saw what was going on.
We might want to think about why saint-like people are enormously influential, even powerful, you might say. This is not because they have access to coercive power, lots of money, or force of arms, but rather because they have a certain way of seeing the world. They don't see the world as being a set of real things, particularly—you might call them idealists as a general rule. They see the world as dependent upon the mind.
Of course, we're not thinking we can all suddenly become saints in some classical sense, but they do show a new direction of travel. Like the first movers in the social movement, they are instinctively idealist in this sense. They are not enslaved by the world; their minds are intent, driven even, to change it. They do not see this as an end in itself.
But the second move is the people who join once it is set up and help it to take off need to be introduced to these ways of thinking. They need to be taken on a journey of stages along a path. This podcast then looks at ways to take ordinary people, as you might say, on this journey towards resilient, revolutionary collective action. People don't just arrive there of their own accord.
The general approach then is to use empirics—by which I mean observation—to enable us to question what we have been told about reality, the real. We tend to believe that observation of the real is the same as the reality that we've been told exists, but as we will see, they soon diverge, or at least things quickly start to become complicated. What we think of as real is certainly oversimplistic. It tends not to move with the times, for example, and the conventional view of the real gets used by the powerful to dominate people, to get their own way.
Paradoxically then, there are real problems with reality.
A classic example here is economics, which originally was a subject involving a variety of perspectives, but over time it got reduced to a focus on mathematical models dependent upon a specific assumption about motivation—that motivation is a function of material individual self-interest. In recent decades, a renewed interest in empirical observation has shown that sometimes, often in fact, people do not act as economists assume. They do not act according to this supposed self-interest. The very concept of self-interest becomes highly problematic—who is to say what it actually is?
The problem is not that the approach is useless, more that, like all the practice to reality, it is limited. There are many more games in play out there. And so this is the plan here: the first step is for us to entertain the notion of plurality. How you see the world at this moment is not the last word in the matter. "Myself" might not just be X; it could be Y and Z as well, all at the same time. What we are doing is like starting a workout in a mental gym—you are getting more flexible. And this process will become more urgent, of course, as social conditions around us get worse.
The ways of seeing, set down by a bunch of brainy white guys several centuries ago, a certain set of received dogmas, are not going to serve as well in the coming years. The thesis of this podcast is that we need new perspectives, and these new perspectives need to be at the root of how we take social action, of how we run our organizations.
So, let's get stuck in. I'm going to plough through some stuff, and I might wheel back on some themes. It's not gonna be straightforward, but it is necessary. Let's look at the self. I'm writing on a sheet of paper on a table in my cell. The table is here. I can see it—it exists. When I think about myself, or critically, if I make that two words—"my" and then "self"—I encounter a fundamental problem. I cannot see this self that I am looking at, meaning I cannot see it in the same way as I can see this table now in front of me.
This solid thing in my line of sight—the self—is what you might call hidden. It's not actually physically there. You might say that it is invisible, but it is still there in some real sense, not least because if it was not there, I would not be able to see the table. Whole books, decades of lives, as you may know, have been devoted to trying to sort all this out, trying to straighten out the contradictions—or what we should call the paradoxes—involved in what I've just said. And it is fair to say, I think, that some of the best minds in history have gone round in circles on this.
The approach I want to suggest we take in this podcast is to consider that this may actually not be a problem. You can scratch your head about it, then forget about it, go for a walk, and the sky does not fall in. You will most likely still be alive tomorrow if you decide you cannot resolve the greatest contradictions of life—not least the relationship between the self and the world.
Of course, what I'm suggesting is not a new approach. Some people call this response "pragmatism." Note the word "response" rather than "answer." Note also what will become an ongoing theme—that empirical investigation, if honestly undertaken, is a tool for discovering that the real undermines the real. We become sure about the groundedness of this thing, the self, and also this thing, the world.
My aim, then, is simply this: to create a sense of fluidity, a metaphysical plurality, if you want to use that long word. Let's return to our story here. Where are we up to? We are saying that there seems to be a fundamental difference between the nature of the table—this thing in the world—and this thing called the self—us. And there is a problem: what comes first, consciousness or the world? Idealism or realism, as are the technical terms used by Western philosophy.
But then there are more difficulties, such as the infinite regression of this self. I view myself, fine, but what or who is the "I" looking at myself? What is this thing that sees, watching the "I" looking at myself? In principle, there's no reason why you cannot continue to ask this question ad infinitum—forever, without end. Tricky.
Maybe we can say at this stage there are two categories—this could be our provisional staging post. There is this thing, the world, and there's this thing, the self. The latter is there, it's just you can't see it. The nature of the self, then, is what I would call suspended. It seems to have no solid foundation, or at least we cannot find one. But this definitely does not mean, in a sense, that it's not real. Note that word "sense"—that realization is a key step on our journey to recognize the suspendedness of a thing. It's okay. It's emotionally acceptable to us. We're not running from the room in terror. As I said, the sky is not falling in.
The key point is that we do not have to choose between this binary—between the real and the not real. Once it feels okay, we're on our way. Maybe it's a bit like the posters on the walls of this prison I'm in. They say, "Some people are gay. Get over it." You accept the way things are, and suddenly the lightbulb moment comes on—it's okay, life goes on. We'll come on to discuss how this process is more about emotion, about our psychology, than some 18th-century notion of refined reason.
So now we have this idea of suspendedness. What next? How about functionality, meaning you can—you do—something with this situation. That is, something can be useful to us. It is therapeutic, and it can help us save this world. Let's think about depression for a moment. Again, lots and lots has been written about depression, but I want to say something brutally simplistic about it: depression is about being stuck.
What does it mean to be stuck? When people say, "I am depressed," they are fundamentally not acknowledging the nature of the word "I" in that sentence—the "I" looking at me being depressed, meaning the realization that there are two things: the "I" and then the "me" being depressed. The "I" then is not depressed. The "I" is looking at the depressed "me." Once this is realized, there is in principle an escape route—the "I" can organize the escape. The realization is that, in fact, you are not your depression. You are not it.
This realization can come into being by thinking about two related ideas. First is self-reflexivity—the ability to see yourself and to realize that is what you are doing: seeing yourself, to see the "I" looking at the self. Some people are so into themselves that, as you might say, they find it almost impossible to get out of themselves. They are stuck, enmeshed.
Children are often like this. They are literally overwhelmed by their emotions. It's like they *are* their emotions. They are swept along by some massive flow of being—they can't extract themselves. The problem, of course, extends into adulthood. We all experience it. You see it a lot in prison—people so full of their distress, their anger, and rage, they cannot see themselves at all. At the same time, prison is also full of people who, paradoxically, have become very good at being aware of themselves. They've learnt it the hard way, you might say. They come to realize that a lack of self-reflexivity is a big problem, stopping them from getting on and living their lives.
So, there's more than a philosophical conundrum going on here, right? The ability to reflect on yourself, on your emotions and your behavior, leads on to a more general idea—maybe the central idea of this podcast—and that is transcendence. This might be described as a deep ability to move outside of oneself, to look at oneself from the outside, simply to *watch.* Something like that. Words don't quite grasp it, but I hope that is a good enough-to-go definition for now. This ability, then, is what I would call the meta-therapeutic move. It is a deep structural thing—the ability to see you're not your depression, for instance. In fact, you're not actually *anything* towards anything. Things like depression are actually constructions. As such, they're not solid. You're not stuck. You can get out and escape, or at least the situation is not hopeless, even if it feels like it.
And there are, of course, lots of therapeutic approaches and practices that work off of this idea—that people can see this escape route. It is, then, a move, a transition from rigidity to fluidity. And of course, this process does not work every time. If only the world was so simple! As we have mentioned about this journey, the lightbulb moments occur, and then, annoyingly, they fall back—we fall back. We are all different; we have different personalities.
Another scene we're going to consider—it's a big error, then, to think that everyone is the same. We are not. So, this takes us to the endpoint of this podcast. Let's have a little peep at it: the direction of travel. I will illustrate it by giving you two personal stories to finish off this episode.
When I was a teenager, I was not happy. Apart from all the standard, excruciating challenges of navigating a route from childhood to adulthood, I found myself endlessly fuming and bitter about the injustices of this world. Not least the bright idea that some people had that it would be okay, in certain circumstances, to release nuclear warheads to the point of creating a nuclear winter, meaning the death of the whole human race in a matter of weeks.
It gave me a good few sleepless nights. By the time I got to being 21, this rage had expanded to the whole system—the whole system out there that allowed this possibility to happen—and then critically expanded towards those other activists I worked with. They knew what was going on, and yet they were self-evidently not pulling their weight, given humanity was on the edge of total destruction. This is a familiar tension in radical culture, and I was an extreme case.
Then I literally had a revelation one day—it hit me out of the blue, a lightbulb moment. The revelation was this: that I can try and save the world and be totally miserable and bitter while I do it, or I can try and save the world and decide *not* to be totally bitter and miserable. The choice suddenly seemed crystal clear. I could separate my actions from my feelings—ah-ha! And if anything, it would make me a far more effective activist by not being such an irritable fucker all the time. You know the type.
Practically, it meant when I woke up in the morning—at least on a good day—I had no expectations of other people. I did my best, did what I could, and did not get attached to the actions, or lack of them, of others. This did not stop me from feeling depressed and angry, but a fundamental change had happened: now I knew there objectively existed an escape route. I did not have to entertain myself, as I tend to put it. I had a choice.
The act of transcendence is like a physical muscle—the more you practice doing it, the stronger you get at doing it. The more I consciously decided to transcend myself and my situation, my emotions, and the shittiness of this world, the better I got at it. And as many of you know, I am sure, this is a lifetime journey and challenge.
So then, when I got to my 30s, I had a really bad experience. Six months or so afterwards, every morning when I woke up, I’d be okay for a moment, and then I would remember—*bang*—it hit me like a sledgehammer: an overwhelming depression.
I was swamped with a feeling of self-contempt. I could not understand why I was still alive. I wanted to die, and for months, I was helpless to stop it—such was its intensity. All I knew was I would have to wait. Very gradually, I re-identified myself. I rediscovered the "I" that could watch myself being subject to this monster. I envisioned it a bit like being in a room with this raging, thieving thing pushing me up against the wall, such that I could not move. And then again, I gradually worked out a way to skip past it without it noticing and escape through the door. And then I'd be okay for a little while. And then it would come back, and I'd be trapped up against the wall again.
Maybe I was lucky, blessed with this ability to slip out, or maybe it was an aspect of my personality—who knows? But there was definitely an element of personal agency. In part, it was because I knew about this transcendence thing, this withered muscle that could get stronger through its use. As I say, I discovered it in my 20s and have been developing it ever since. This experience, then, was a bit like some advanced crash course to take things to the next level. The whole experience massively strengthened me. I became a lot more resilient. Whatever happens to me in this world, whatever happens will be happening to *myself*, the self, not the "I" watching the self. The "I" is, in some fundamental sense, not of this world—as they say—it cannot be touched by the world, however terrible it is.
To realize this, then, is to sense the source of a completely different sort of power—a power not based in this world, but that comes from somewhere else. Which leads us back to the big idea of this podcast, the core proposition that we will build upon: that we can respond effectively to the ubiquitous burnout that undermines the resistance we need at the present time, that cripples our ability to act in service and in solidarity, to combine together to respond to the real crisis that exists. We can realize that all our horror at what is happening in this world can, in fact, be transcended.
The essence of being human is nothing to do with our being *in* this world—it is to do with having a choice. The choice to transcend or not transcend, the choice to realize or not realize. We are children of God, as they said in the past. But bringing ourselves back to practicalities, all this is about just that—practice, in both senses of the word. First, to practice as a single person, to self-reflect so it becomes a second nature. So you can go, "Ooh, something big is coming up—I need to watch myself," like with my verdict experience, rather than going, "Something big is coming up—ah!" And secondly, in an eclectic sense, to engage in a practice with others in community. As we all come onto this, it involves collective rituals, events that bring people together, so we realize we are not alone. We are already together; we just need to realize this and enact that togetherness.
This, then, is the direction of travel. Again, as I say, don't think you have to have all this sorted right now based on what I've just said. You don't need to make any final judgment—in fact, please don't. You can just sit with it and go, "Yeah, I sort of get it, it sounds interesting." In the next episode, I will move on to the other two things: the world and time.
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