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by Paul Cudenec
September 05, 2024
from
WinterOak Website
What I like most about fellow English
anarchist Darren Allen
is how he manages to so utterly condemn the miserable condition of
contemporary society, while at the same time insisting on
metaphysical truth that puts that sorry state of affairs into
context.
This is very much the case with his latest book, The Fire Sermon
- The Unbelievable & Unacceptable Truth, 1 which he claims was
written by Modra the Monkey God, with only some "help" from himself.
However, having read and reviewed some of Allen's previous work,
2
I very much recognize his pen and am going to have to call out this
imposture and identify the non-divine Allen as the sole author of
this sermon!
The book is a smallish one, of fewer than 200 pages and, with its
rather beautiful cover and numerous illustrations, I suspect that
Allen is reaching for a wider, and perhaps younger, public.
Not that this holds him back from the scathing indictments of the
modern world for which he has become renown.
Allen has Modra the Monkey God tell his human readers:
"Now you live in a world without the wild,
which means without death, without freedom and without real
mystery. That's why you are all so bored, and so boring". 3
He points to the existence of,
"a huge SYSTEM which now covers
the earth and controls all life on it". 4
Things are set to get even worse, as those who control the system,
"are working to suppress free speech, so that nobody knows what is
going on.
"They are working to stop free movement, so that the poor cannot
escape from their poverty.
"And they are working to make sure
that everything anyone does is monitored, so that any threat to
'security' can be instantly detected and SUPPRESSED". 5
One of the themes of Allen's work is the way that the sense of words
can be changed to mean what the speaker or writer wants them to mean
- often by those with power, though we can also do the same thing
for our own purposes.
This is very much the case with the word 'security', he says.
"'Security' means the security of the system. If you threaten the
system, then you are a threat…
"This was why THE POLICE were invented, to protect the power of the
system, to turn independence from the system into a crime -
gathering wood from the local forest, for example, or even just
hanging round - and then to punish it.
That's what 'security' means:
lack of freedom...!
"Today
the 'powerful' are doing
what they can to completely eradicate freedom.
You must be totally dependent on the machine
for everything,
Allen characterizes our current society as being something like,
a
corporation that wants to control and manage its operations.
As a result, millions of different societies,
"with different
atmospheres, different dress, different speech, different thought,
different feeling" have been replaced by one all-inclusive "omni-society
of the screen". 7
He describes the,
"demonic world of the screen" as "the mask of
death", 8 behind which "there is nothing, a dead and
empty nothing". 9
Individual uniqueness cannot be tolerated by the system/corporation,
which uses its "educational" apparatus to churn out the lifeless and
interchangeable human beings that will best serve its global
machine.
Allen says that by the time you have gone through these "conformity
factories", you are "nothing".
"Your heart has shrunk, your character has shrivelled up and you
don't actually know how to do anything, which adds to your
immaturity.
"All you really know is how to fit in to the
machine and how to depend on its owners and managers". 10
"Your parents and teachers will tell you that to do well at work and
to get a good job you need to be hard-working, clever, flexible,
kind and so on...
"Yeah, maybe.
But try being disobedient, unpredictable and original
at school or at work, and see how far your hard-working creativity,
intelligence and kindness get you.
"Obedience comes first in
this world.
If you put quality over obedience
and conformity - if, for example, you decide not to do
stupid things or listen to horrible people - then you are 'bad'
and you will be punished, rejected, banished or you will made to
undergo some kind of 'therapy' until you are 'good' again".
11
As a result, he says,
"everyone is living a FAKE LIFE" in which they
refuse to recognize the truth and "will avoid anything or anyone who
reminds them of it". 12
Despite the grimness of this world stripped bare
of all quality and creativity, Allen insists that we should all be
happy - indeed that,
"you have no right to ever be unhappy", 13
and that "to be unhappy is to be an ally of evil...". 14
This is only really possible, as he explains, by taking a leaf out
of the system's book and redefining the word "happiness" to suit our
own purposes.
For him,
"happiness is the truth of life. Not
just knowing the truth, but actually being true". 15
Allen's form of happiness also embraces pain, which is an
unavoidable part of any creature's life,
it means being conscious
of that unavoidability and thus not upgrading pain into suffering.
"To realize that existence is pain
means to become free of SUFFERING, which means to be
actually happy, and that is the rarest state on earth". 16
Being conscious in this way - stepping back from our own subjective
living, our own "personality" or ego - is thus the broader key to
escaping the prison of fake living.
"The more conscious you are, the more aware you are of THE WHOLE
THING.
The moment is more vivid. Colors are brighter, qualities
more intense and situations open themselves to you, and reveal their
secrets.
"You become an artist, a kind of magician really,
able to see into people, even into the strange heart of mere
things. 17
"Face your own death. Live as if you are going to die, because you
are. Face the death of everything - because everything you are
attached to will be taken from you.
"Better to release your
grip now, while it isn't so painful; than to have what you are
attached to ripped from your grasp". 18
Ultimately, we have to be conscious that,
our individual existence is
merely a convenient and temporary vehicle for the life-energy of the
earth and the cosmos.
And that consciousness itself comes, of course, from beyond the
individual human mind.
Declares Allen:
"It's not that I am conscious of nature, it is that
nature is conscious through me..." 19
References
-
The Fire
Sermon - The Unbelievable & Unacceptable Truth by Modra the Monkey
God with help from Darren Allen (Reading: Expressive Egg
Books, 2024).
All subsequent page references are to this work.
-
Self and Unself - Darren Allen
Authenticity is the antidote to
anti-culture
-
p. 11.
-
p. 94.
-
p. 103.
-
p. 104.
-
p. 111.
-
p. 112.
-
p. 111.
-
p. 93.
-
pp. 40-41.
-
p. 21.
-
p. 18.
-
p. 170.
-
p. 14.
-
p. 42.
-
p. 56.
-
p. 152.
-
p. 167.
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