It’s been a crazy busy quarter, I don’t know where the time’s gone! I’ve worked with some fabulous people during Abundant Times’ first three months as a storytelling business, and a few weeks ago I was lucky to have the opportunity to interview Adbusters editor, filmmaker and activist Kalle Lasn for the following blog, which was first published on the Unbreaking website.

Kalle is an influential activist who’s spent more than five decades rallying humanity into taking action to upend the current global system to create a harmonious and peaceful planet that’s beneficial for all, not just the 1%.

Given everything that’s happening in the world right now, the interview was timely. We spoke about the publication of his new book Manifesto for World Revolution, democracy, economics and more. Co-written with Pedro Inoue, long-time Creative Director of Adbusters and Bruce Grierson, a five-time Canadian National Magazine Award-winning writer, Manifesto for World Revolution is published by Unbreaking and is available to buy online.

This important book, which is a blueprint for activism right now, could not have come at a better time. People are fast waking up to the realisation that the democratic rug can be pulled out from underneath them in the blink of an eye, while the rich get richer, and our planet continues to die.

“The revolution that I’m talking about in this book goes deep down into the guts of our global system and asks what’s right and what’s wrong about the fundamental presets and axioms it runs on,” says Kalle. “Can we change those fundamentals to have any kind of future on this planet in the 21^st century? And can we do it in a non-violent way? We need to go deep and ask what sort of global system do we need to have for any kind of a future? And then to push and come up with big ideas, what I call metamemes, and then fight like hell to create a new foundation for our global system. To me that’s what the revolution means, it’s a non-violent changing of the fundamentals.”

Kalle wrote his first book, Culture Jam around 20 years ago, which is when he first started talking about memes. “Memes were not a popular word like now, it was a new kind of a concept,” he says. “We talked about how the future would be a meme war and then we pioneered these new words, micromemes, macromemes and metamemes. For us, metamemes were the biggest ideas you could possibly think of to win in the metameme war. The revolution’s a metameme war, it’s a battle of all the biggest ideas around that we need to change to have a future.”

As global unrest heats up so too does our planet and plans to reduce carbon emissions seem to be sliding further down the global agenda. “We don’t seem to have the ability to stop this warming trend,” says Kalle. “We keep saying, maybe the scientists will fix it or maybe somebody else will fix it but nobody’s fixing it. I think now we’re at the point where it’s so obvious that humanity is plummeting into a long dark age if we can’t fix climate change. Meanwhile, our leaders are talking about a million other things, fighting wars. Climate change has engendered failed states, it’s reduced our ability to have access to water and food. Climate change is the big fatal mistake that we the people of the world made a long time ago and now we don’t know how to fix it.”

“It’s a strange moment, we think we’re smart people and we have this incredible technological trajectory that we’ve been on for a few thousand years. We have all this incredible stuff happening around us and yet we can’t stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. There’s something fundamentally wrong, not just with the global system that can’t fix this problem, but also with our own minds, with our own psychology to not be able to stop consuming, to not be able to stop doing some of the things that we’re doing. We seem to be addicted to our fatal way of life.”

“We also don’t really have a true democracy. We the people are supposed to call the shots, we the people want climate change to stop, we want our leaders to jump to the occasion and to get things done. The last few months we’ve put up a big poster all over Vancouver saying, leaders of the world get your shit together and call a global summit of all world leaders and start fixing the climate problem. But they won’t do it because they’re beholden to the corporations. Our democracy is more of a corporate democracy rather than a people’s democracy.”

One of the really big metamemes in the book is neo-classical economics verses what Kalle calls bionomics. The shift away from GDP as the indicator of a country’s progress. “For the last 100 years or so we’ve been running on this system of markets and we’ve had this kind of paradigm of economics where we assume those economists know what they’re doing. Even though we have crash after crash, somehow, we still trust those economists to call the shots and tell us what to do, and that has to change. We have to wake up to the fact that traditional economists are caught in their own paradigm, they don’t even know the fundamentals anymore, they don’t know how to measure progress. They’re stuck on this growth paradigm even though we know that we can’t keep on growing forever. I think we need six big fundamental metamemtic shifts to make it through the 21^st century and this paradigm shift in economics is one of them.”

1. A true-cost marketplace (where the price of all goods and services tell the ecological truth)
2. The end of secrecy (fostering a climate in which the people must know everything, because knowledge is power)
3. A corporate charter revocation movement – to identify the most carceral companies and wipe them of the face of the earth
4. Bionomics (economics with diversity, locality and contained growth as its pillars)
5. New brakes on fast money
6. A Mental Liberation Front (where we regain the ability to think for ourselves, feel deeply, and shake off crippling fear and depression and shame)

Kalle concludes, “I’m really scared that we on the left and the people who understand what’s going on, can’t get our shit together. The big flaw in the political left right now is that we’re not passionately angry enough. Can we learn something from the political right? I mean they have the wrong ideas, but they have the right attitude and we on the left have the wrong attitude and the right ideas. That’s the purpose of the book, I’m trying to tell the political left, here are the big ideas, let’s start fighting for them.”

“I have a feeling this book is like a blueprint, everyone’s lost and here’s the blueprint; now go for it!”

You can order a copy of Manifesto for World Revolution here.