Kalle Lasn

Of course, the Occupy movement was a bit like that as well. We deliberately didn’t have any demands and now that it’s gone away we wonder what happened. ‘What was that all about?’ We decided that just about everything else we’ve ever talked about, all the ‘Buy Nothing Days’ and occupations, somehow it doesn’t mean anything.

What could actually happen is that the students of the world could suddenly wake up to the fact that their future doesn’t compute, using the economics students as the spearhead of a larger student movement. If they started revolting against the theoretical foundations of economic science, and if we were able to get some students at the prestigious universities to play a catalytic role and actually, in a visceral way, start talking back against the professors and putting up posters in the corridors… And if that revolt spread to hundreds of universities around the world and all of a sudden started spilling over into the larger economic think-tanks and IMF and World Bank, then we would have a kind of a crack at demolishing the theoretical foundations that have run the world for the last fifty years and actually start off on a sort of whole new paradigm.

To us, this felt grandiose, maybe a little unrealistic. But nonetheless it felt like something that could actually happen that could save the world. And that’s why we published this book. We tried to make it as credible as possible so if a professor picks it up and reads it there’s nothing there that is obviously flakey or easily demolished. Above all it’s a book that will hopefully light a fire underneath students all around the world.

Kalle Lasn

Kalle Lasn

There was the usual kind of stuff about ‘maybe it could be a Robin Hood Tax’, or in America it could be the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act. There was a sort of bread and butter kind of a feeling about it – ‘let’s zero in on one project that would really make a difference’. And yet in our discussion sessions we had the feeling that even if we were able pull off a Robin Hood Tax, somehow we’d still be operating within the existing paradigm.

If you suddenly get a 1% tax on all financial transactions on currency trading and everybody, including the US and UK, ratifies it, suddenly we have a Robin Hood Tax that collects a few billion dollars that still wouldn’t solve the problem. We’d still be running a Doomsday Machine; the capitalist project is still a Doomsday Machine, with or without the Robin Hood Tax. That’s why we said, ‘So, how can we go deeper? How can we have one demand in the tradition of Occupy? What is that one demand that could actually fix the problem?’ We started talking about going to the deeper recesses of capitalism and trying to pull off a shift in the theoretical foundations of the system itself. We felt that this book gets to the very heart of the matter and we’re hoping that it could be the catalytic moment that gets people thinking on the deepest level rather than always on the surface, which is basically why the political left has failed so dismally over the last twenty or thirty years: because we’re always operating on that surface level.

Kalle Lasn

Kalle Lasn

Kalle Lasn

I think one of the things we can salvage is this deep down feeling about collectivism – I guess you could say ‘communism’ (laughs) – this idea that we in the left don’t stand for this rational utility-maximiser kind of guy who runs around trying to become a millionaire but we stand for some sort of a collectivism. What does that collectivism mean in the context of this moment that we’re living through, where everything seems to be collapsing around us? Where ecologically we’re collapsing, and psychologically we’re collapsing, and politically we’re collapsing, and financially we’re on the edge of entering into another 1929 scenario? In this moment of crisis when all these eco-, psycho-, political and financial crises all seem to be intertwining with each other and spiraling down to the bottom, in this dangerous moment what does the political left still have to say? It isn’t just the theoretical foundations of economic science but is there an activism out there that comes from the political left that is up to the task?

Kalle Lasn

They were politicised in a way that absolutely dumbfounded, for a while anyway. One by one all the Naomi Kleins and the Žižeks came to Zuccotti Park. And yet the phenomena itself, this attempt to occupy the iconic centre of global capitalism on Wall Street and take it over, this was a totally surprising new moment.

I think what we need is more ‘new moments’. We need new moments like Pussy Riot in Russia, or like all those young teenagers who are dashing off into the streets in Chile and demanding some sort of education reform, or those people who suddenly rose up in Québec and threw the whole province into a loop, and, of course, the anarchists in Greece and the Indignados in Spain. It seems to me that all over the world young people who feel that the future doesn’t compute are all rising up and trying to figure out how to create a future that does compute.

I don’t think we are in the moment of going back to this sort of ‘old lefty’ idea that we have to somehow come up with some sort of structural analysis of what’s right and what’s wrong. I think we’re in a crazy, anarchic global moment that does have a possibility of leading to a global spring. I think we’ll either have a global spring or we’ll finish up in a thousand year dark age. That’s the basic choice we’re faced with and we have to be open to new magical moments like Occupy, not try to go back to this left-cortex analysis of ‘what the fuck is actually wrong and how do we fix it?’

Kalle Lasn

Kalle Lasn

We never talk about the core axioms that propel our system. If we start talking about those fundamental things, like ‘Can we really keep growing forever on a finite planet?’, or ‘Can we really have an economic system that makes any sense if, at the centre of that economic system, is this parody of a human being called “a rational utility maximiser”?’ Or can we have any kind of system that works and is sustainable if we dismiss the externalities, if we dismiss climate change and if we ignore people like Sir Nicholas Stern who said that ‘climate change is the biggest market failure that the world has ever seen’? If we keep on ignoring the biological, ecological and philosophical foundations of our system, then how can we ever fix anything?

I think there is a glimmer of hope in this book. For if we start fighting a ‘Meme War’, a war of ideas against the keepers of the current system, and we go right to the very foundations of that system, then we can begin a war of ideas where the good guys can eventually win.

Kalle Lasn

I think we need to fight a ‘Meme war’. We need to have ‘Meme wars’ in our universities, and ‘Meme wars’ are already going on. I mean if you look at philosophy or you look right across all the endeavours of humanity then right now there is a fundamental questioning of everything that happened over the last few thousand years, right down to this big question that has perplexed me all my life: What is it about Western civilization? How were we born? Were we born out of logic? Were we born out of the left-cortex? How come that we in the West were the people who came up with the foundations of logic? Why is it that we have always tried to prove the existence of God by using the laws of logic and is that logic is some sort of a fatal flaw within our civilization?

The more ‘right-cortex, feet-in-the-mud’ kind of philosophy that came out of the East… Is there some way that the logic of the West and the ‘feet in the rice fields’ kind of an ethic can create a new mythology that suddenly does start to make sense and capture the imagination of everybody on the planet? Is there going to be some sort of a ‘Messiah’ kind of a character? You know it could be an economist, like Keynes. That hasn’t happened yet. Is it possible that some ecological economist will suddenly rise up like Keynes did during the crisis of the 1920’s and 1930’s and suddenly give us a new way of looking at economics? Is there some sort of philosopher who can come up with a new connection to nature we’ve never had before?

We do need a new mythology. I believe there is a glimmer of a new mythology hovering on the horizon right now.

Kalle Lasn

When I was young and was studying philosophy at University there was this thing called ‘logical positivism’ and there were people like Gilbert Ryle in the UK and a whole bunch of people coming out of France at the time who tried to get rid of metaphysics and hated existentialism. There was this sort of a battle between a more emotional Europe versus a hyper-rational Britain and I do believe that somehow between those two approaches is some clue to the future. I think that we on the political left, and we in the West, do have to jettison some of that tradition of logic, rationality and exactness that people like Bertrand Russell stood for. Perhaps the other side, the people who come out of the Islamic tradition and the Eastern tradition – especially the Chinese and Japanese tradition – you know, maybe they have something to learn from us about being a little bit more exact and a bit more rational. I think that the only glimmer of hope is for there to be a synthesis of those two traditions that have fought for the imagination of the world over the last few thousand years.

Capitalism is like a religion; it’s like a mythology that has all seven billion of us in its grip.

Kalle Lasn

Ecologically, psychologically, politically and financially we’re about to hit the wall, and if we do hit the wall all this ‘rationality’ that you talk about will mean nothing, you know. It’ll be like a fart in the ocean because if all of a sudden we go through a 1929 scenario – and back in 1929 of course we climbed out of it because we still had the forests and we had the fish and we had most of the oil still in the ground and we had the clean water and we had all that fantastic stuff going on, we had the natural capital of the planet still to fall back on – this time if we go into a 1929 scenario then we won’t have the forests! We won’t have any of that stuff anymore and you know you can’t eat derivatives!

Again, I have a feeling that we’re in danger of descending into a thousand year dark age: it takes a thousand years even to grow back 1 inch of fertile topsoil. So maybe the difference between you and me is that I see the immediate future in much more apocalyptic terms. The rationality that you talk about, as I said, is like a fart in the ocean if this human experiment of ours descends into chaos, into hubris, into a long dark age. Rationality doesn’t make any sense when people are killing each other for food and if there’s not enough clean water to drink anymore. This is the dangerous moment that I think we’re sitting in right now. So we need new approaches, we need new mythologies. We need more moments like the Occupy moment, where young people suddenly become politicised. Rather than rational analysis we just need magical new approaches that wake the world up to what’s really happening, because at the moment we’re still in denial. Most people are still sort of saying, ‘Oh, we’ll be OK. We’ll slowly work out this recession that we’re in and then it’ll be sailing forward again’. But if you see the world in the same apocalyptic terms that I see it, then maybe you’ll be more ready for some of these free, open, anarchic, fuck-it-all approaches. Let’s just go forward in a ‘fuck-it-all’ way and keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.