Recorded live at Housman’s Bookshop, London, this is Roger Hallam at his most unfiltered – tearing apart 30 years of climate communication and making the case for something harder to name and more urgent than conventional activism. Having written his latest book during a prison sentence, Hallam argues that what the climate crisis demands is not more petitions, more awareness campaigns, or more people sitting in roads – but a fundamental transformation of how we understand reality itself. Part polemic, part philosophy, part stand-up – this talk covers: • Why climate narratives have failed for three decades • The difference between despair and ecstasy • Cultural revolution vs metaphysical revolution • What a “spiritual revolutionary” actually looks like • Why the real is not real – and why that matters for everything Roger Hallam is co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and one of the UK’s most arrested climate activists. Recorded at Housman’s Bookshop, Kings Cross, London by Jamie Lowe (jamielowe@kinokast.net)
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate
2 Comments
Frustration of the author is strange. Only three month ago he published a long lecture “How to Start a Revolution in 2026”. Everything was absolutely practical and rational; well-developed step-by-step methodology; no need for some vague spirituality. And now is a 180-degree turn. So, the irony of the first commenter can be well understood. But revolutionaries, especially the spiritual ones, have no reason for despair, and the greatest blander they can make is to deny rationality. If some presumably rational arguments repeatedly fail in some situations or circumstances, such as in the court setting, it signifies incompetence, or simply stupidity, not intellect of their authors. Continuous repetitions of unsuccessful actions may indicate strong will power, but certainly not rationality. ‘Rational spirituality’ is what is required. Every person who has experienced genuine ‘spiritual realization’, which definition is beyond this comment, becomes a potential socialist or even communist as this writer can personally testify after such an experience. Unfortunately, this ‘spiritual realization’, regardless of being perfectly feasible for an average modern secular person, is highly unlikely to become a common phenomenon in the near future.
What is even more interesting is that a person not suffering from a major neurological disorder simply cannot act irrationally because the human brain, an ultimate driver of all human behavior, is a probabilistic inference engine that, at every moment, attempts to act based on sensory input and prior experience, which, for all practical purposes, is the best definition of rationality. So, any kind of behavior (conscious, unconscious, spontaneous, automatic, intuitive, etc.) is rational by definition unless one believes in some mystical, super-normal, divine, etc. irrational forces that determine one’s behavior. Consciousness or awareness only adds some “flavor” to this mechanism making it more accurate, but doesn’t change anything in principle. And thinking or mental deliberations, as important as it is for human species, is simply a separate process, which results are, essentially, another input into the same totally rational brain computer.
A break down of the major points.
“The human is incapable of sustained rational thought.”
(No…qualifier)
“Particularly when they’re engrossed in power formation…”
“The issue is not the people, the issue is the obsession with rationality.”
Something about complexity creating confusion and people killing people by getting on the tube coz everything’s connected unlike in the Middle Ages when people went after others with pitch forks.
Then
“The problem with the left is they’re still stuck…in this rigidity of rationality.”
2 solutions.
Solution one. Political program for the revolution.
A. Re-engineering the processes of creating rationality.
At the moment it’s a herding mechanism. At least that what it’s called, herding, in various literatures. So you need a circuit breaker. That’s sortition. Introduces a chance element by selecting people outside the system. Chance is not herdified because there’s no consciousness. (That sounded important!)
B. People, randomly chosen, deliberate freely. Like that’s what Habermas said, right. Remember when he said that? And if people are allowed to deliberate freely there’s a good chance they’re gonna come up with something sensible. Again, right!
C. Obviously this deliberative process has to have constitutional power. Legally binding.
Solution 2.
Give yourself to God. It’s about transcendence. Transcendence as a circuit breaker.
Some more stuff about those caught up in the empire of reason who can’t access certain knowledge or something, eventually leading to the transcendent revelation that the real is not real. Apparently you can get to that if one reads some quantum physics…it’s all in there…right.
It’s all just a flow. We’re free and we can say anything. Apparently.
The “reason” (whatever that means) we don’t succeed is a chronic inability to do stupid things. “You see what I’m trying to say?”
“At the moment we’re all proto-revolutionaries, or at least some of us are, but at some point in the next ten years, everyone’s gonna explode into like a mental breakdown, and the people that come out of it will be like us or me or other people right?” (That sounds like anyone could be anyone!)
They will make that transition from despair to ecstasy.
This is what Hallam is trying to say. Get it?
It all comes through the trauma of despair.
Don’t read spiritual books because they’re shit. It’s not about being religious and love and not being a revolutionary, because if you were that you’d just be a dick. And it’s not about killing the bad guys or being an anarchist and burning down churches and stuff. Come on people. It’s about conceptualising what it’s like to be a spiritual revolutionary.
We need both things and someone, better than Roger will probably, hopefully, maybe work it out in about ten years. Shirley.
Anyway. Talk in a nutshell. Clear as a bell because I’m as stupid as the come, certainly as far away from rationality as I can get, and therefore, understood everything he was trying to say. Some of the most substantial shit I’ve heard in years. Right?