The Naked Potential of 2024: Democracy, Chaos and Creativity
Reflections on the year and some big announcements
It’s just after dawn, and I’m naked on a pier in Dublin. The man beside me is also naked. So is the woman beside him. In fact, thousands of us stand with our heads bowed as the Irish sea sprays us with cold mist. A man cranes his head to the sky and shouts ‘This is what the Lisbon Treaty is all about!’ We laugh and a few of us whoop.
This memory keeps coming back to me as we enter 2024. It happened in the summer of 2008, when I’d signed up to be in one of Spencer Tunick’s photographs of naked bodies in landmarks around the world. I was a university student, and a few weeks before I had voted for the first time. The vote was about whether to adopt the Lisbon Treaty, and chances are you’ve never heard of it.
It was a proposed amendment to the EU’s constitution that would move it further toward ‘ever-greater union’ and centralised power. For legal reasons, Ireland had to hold a referendum for it to go through, which meant that one of the EU’s smallest countries suddenly had the power to derail its plans.
It was the first time I’d ever voted, and it’s on my mind because 2024 is an unprecedented year in which more than half the world’s population is going to participate in a democratic election. Some, like the US election, may forever shift the fate of humanity. Others will be democratic in name only. But wherever we live, one thing many of us share is an apathy toward the democratic process.
Institutional trust is at an all time low in the US, and the ‘populist’ energy that led to the election of Trump and the Brexit vote in 2016 hasn’t gone anywhere, with electorates in countries as different as Argentina and Holland voting in (supposedly) anti-establishment figures last year. Against this backdrop, we’ve just experienced the hottest year on record. Everything is heating up, we can’t keep living how we’ve been living, and something has to give.
The idea that democratic voting is the best way to enact change is deeply ingrained in modern societies. Sometimes it’s true. But sometimes the democratic process itself perpetuates a broken system. This can leave us stuck in a bind, wanting to act but unsure how. Too often, a deep-seated frustration at an unfair and extractive system is capitalised on by ideologues and the far right. However, mainstream institutions deriding democratic elections as ‘populist’, as if that’s a bad word, erodes trust in democracy even further.
My first experience of voting was defined by this double-bind. I voted No to the Lisbon treaty, and in the end the No vote won. But not for long. For the EU establishment, the No vote was the wrong vote. It was dangerously ‘populist’ and what was needed was for the masses to be re-educated until they saw the wisdom of an ever-greater union.
In 2009, we were asked to vote again. I felt deeply betrayed, and believed we’d be forced to vote over and over until we ‘got it right’. It was formative for me, especially against the backdrop of the financial crash, Occupy Wall Street and the bailout of the banks. For many in my generation, that lesson of that era was that unelected bureaucrats and financial interests hold the true power in society, and voting wouldn’t change that.
Since then, I’ve loosely subscribed to Churchill’s idea that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” and I do still vote. However, is democracy today the same as it was in 1947 when Churchill said that?
N.S. Lyons argues in his excellent piece The China Convergence that democracies in the West are converging with the kind of authoritarianism we see in China; intensified central control, an obsession with correct thought and language, and invasive technologies like the social credit system.
Lyons refers to this as ‘managerialism’ and defines it in part as a system made up ever-more byzantine and controlling bureaucracies. It’s an ideological stance he argues we can now find in the East and West in different guises, and one that always seeks an ever-greater social and political control. It’s rigid, structured, hyper-rationalist and blind to anything outside of its own claim to legitimacy. French politician Valéry Giscard inadvertently pointed to this in 2008, writing in Le Monde that the way the Lisbon Treaty was being handled would lead people ‘to the idea that the construction of Europe is organised behind their backs by lawyers and diplomats."
The anger many felt toward this unelected power is echoed by the idea of ‘the deep state’ that enrages so many on the right in the US, and will surely return with a vengeance during the US election later this year. The degree to which the idea is factual or a mythic expression isn’t as relevant as what it points to in the collective imagination. Many people have the sense that the ruling class is increasingly disconnected, authoritarian, extractive and unjust. Molochian forces rule almost every aspect of our lives, and the people want change.
That change can come through grifter politicians, or it can come from somewhere far deeper and more generative.
New Paradigms and Fractured Visions
Despite our increasingly fractured politics, there is always a regenerative hope just under the surface of things. The transcendent balm of the sacred hides in the cracks of even the most rigid authoritarian regimes. The human soul and its wild, fecund desires will always break through our attempts to control it. Trying to guide culture, police language and demand ‘correct thought’ can only last for so long, because it’s an attempt to push against reality itself.
Culture is an emergent process, and the human experience is complex and contradictory, full of dissenting voices and clashing ideas. Trying to make it anything else is like trying to hold back the tide with our bare hands; the creative energy of who we are will burst through and make itself felt. I draw a lot of hope from this.
Many of us sense, as we stare into our phones at mounting horror in Gaza and read stats about our heating world, that there must be another way. For all the increasing commodification and centralisation of power, millions of us are seeking something new. We sense that we can be more to one another than atomised fellow consumers. That the world can be more than a dead machine to be picked apart and understood.
On the fringes of culture, new communities are forming to experiment with new social games defined by localisation, decentralisation, a focus on human connection and ecological sustainability. In the mainstream, we’re faced with the political urge toward ever-more centralised, ordered and structured visions for humanity. And so a growing tension is building, between novelty and order. Local community farms vs the server farms of giant corporations. In-person rituals vs meeting for a coffee in the metaverse. Nuanced and heartfelt conversations vs DEI seminars.
I think the tension between these visions is going to grow almost unbearable in 2024. It speaks to a deeper process unfolding in the Western soul, between the narrow humanism of the Enlightenment and its endless quest for control over nature, and new visions that see us as beings embedded and held by a complex ecological and social matrix that is far bigger and more enriching that our hubristic notions of progress.
As 2024 unfolds, my mission remains to try and bring more aliveness to the social imaginary, and learn from others doing the same. We need to draw on everything we have to find a way out of the mess we’re building. Our deepest moments of shared humanity, our most robust science, and our wildest mysticism. We need to uncover the unusual, the non-ordinary, the mysterious to see the world anew. To connect with the grounded, the sensible and the bureaucratic to get things done.
Above all, we need to bring an aliveness back into a social reality that has become increasingly lost and empty. I’ve been feeling this for months; a desire for cultural growth, for artistic chaos, for novelty and richness to penetrate the stale madness of consumer culture.
And that desire is leading me to make some big changes to this Substack.
The Bigger Picture in 2024
This year, The Bigger Picture is going to evolve into a platform featuring the work of many writers and creators.
It will be a place where we grapple fearlessly with the most pressing issues of today: political polarisation, gender politics, AI and social media, existential risk, the meta and meaning crisis, and more. Over the last year I’ve been bringing my own lenses to these topics, but while my interests are eclectic, my perspective is limited and incomplete.
The time has come to invite something into being that can become more than the sum of its parts.
I’ll still be writing regular features and interviewing interesting thinkers, but I’ll also be curating an ecosystem, not just of new ideas, but of new ways of seeing and being. At first I’ll be featuring written content from people I think are bringing an exciting new perspective, but I aim to expand into different forms of media as this evolves. As it does, this will become a place for artists, academics, and jesters. Scientists, philosophers and sages. It will be truly multi-disciplinary, maintaining a journalistic and academic rigour without sacrificing artistry and novelty. I’ll also be hosting a new monthly discussion call for paid members, where we can connect with one another and delve into different topics, wherever possible with our guest contributors on the call.
I have some amazing guest writers lined up already who I’ll be announcing in due course, but I’m also opening for submissions for readers who also write. If you’re interested, you can submit your ideas for pieces and see the editorial guidelines on this google form.
If you feel inspired by this vision for The Bigger Picture, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I will be paying guest writers and experimenting with new formats, and your support makes that possible. As a regular subscriber you’ll have access to our bi-monthly calls, while the Community Member tier gives you access to a smaller, more intimate group inquiry every month. Those have been running for about a year and have been some of the most enjoyable and emergent conversations I’ve had in recent memory.
Below, a few short updates and events. Below that, paid subscribers can find my recommended reading, watching and listening list, along with my new Complexity Tolerance practice.
Breaking Convention
This year we’re hosting Here and Now, a one day Breaking Convention event in London at Conway Hall on April 20th, and our full 3 day academic conference will take place in 2025 in Exeter University. The theme is ‘Between the History and Future of Psychedelics’ and as well as clinical and academic speakers, we’ll be exploring how underground and fringe has influenced psychedelia, from rave culture to neo-shamanism. We launched last week and half the tickets are already gone, so book soon to avoid disappointment.
New Ways of Knowing
New Ways of Knowing began in mid-December and we kicked off 2024 with a wonderful session from Trish Blain on how the Four Forces can help us tune into the underlying desires driving different political and relational dynamics. Next week we have Nora Bateson coming in to teach us about transcontextual knowing. The live tickets are all sold out but you can still purchase a content-only ticket to gain access to all the course materials, exercises and recordings. For the next 72 hours, I’m offering 25% off with the code ‘January’ (case sensitive).
Contemporary Spirituality course
I’m going to be teaching on a course called Contemporary Spirituality: Meaning and Mysticism in the Modern Age run by my friends at Advaya. Explore the foundations of meaning and belief in the modern world, connections between the sacred and profane, and topics including altered states and the psychedelic renaissance, eco-spirituality, sacred activism and the meaning crisis.
It starts on 13 February and I’ll be teaching alongside some of my favourite people involved in contemporary spirituality and wisdom practices are on the faculty, including John Vervaeke, Elizabeth Oldfield and Timothy Morton (of Hyperobjects fame).
Get 15% off your ticket with the code TEACH-CS-BEINER - find out more here.
Thanks for reading and supporting. Remember you can also find me on Instagram, and connect with other readers on regular calls if you sign up as a member.
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