Looking Back - A Prophecy (2024 Remix)

Words & Audio

JE52 783458 £20

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1st January

The start of a new decade is a ridge walk.
Such rare, high, temporal-perspective
reveals truths less accessible
in the lowlands of days, weeks and months.

From up here you can see for a century
as the great landscapes of past and future
fall away on either side.

The past always fades to darkness.
Eventually, everything is forgotten.

But future-light shimmers.
Nothing can be distinguished.
Everything is bathed bright.

Up here you see
infinite possibility
is our future’s fundamental truth.

Down in the tick tocking of the Lowlands
they are mole-blind to this sovereign territory.
Imaginations are chained to current beliefs.
This sentence of subjugation condemns all
to the poverty of eternal repetition,
to the poverty of eternal repetition.

Pity them.

Capital depends on hopelessness.
The system’s survival requires it
to manufacture and deliver
through its bureaucratic tentacles
the dream dampening venom of despair
to paralyse any possible future
discordant to the logic of Capital.

A conscious act of rebellion
is to look into the shadows of the past,
to identify the dim edges of solid shapes.
And then for you, and your friends,
to bridge between those shapes
a new history to a better future.

Over the last ten years
money burners have done just that.

In the beginning, people regarded us as a curiosity.
‘Quixotic’ was the word they used.
Within the shallow logic of Capital,
money burning was a self-defeating enterprise.
The authorities watched, but were quiet.
They believed we’d snuff ourselves out.

We already had our detractors, of course.
There have always been shouts
about the homeless, the food banks,
and the children in war-torn countries.
But once witness to a Ritual Sacrifice,
the certainty of the righteous crumbled.

Some were persuaded to join us.
Our Ritual reaches out
to a higher spiritual and moral power
than any form of exchange.

Minds were now ajar;
dusty ideas blew through.
The symbiotic relations between charity & economy,
poverty as a structural component of Empire,
and money as the cornerstone of our own oppression
- all were fresh remembered
as if new and clean born.

Such heresies
became the common currency of conversation
at those parties,
where for one brief night,
a Republic of gratified desires was attained.

But the footsoldiers,
the zealous supplicants,
and the servants of utility
hadn’t been stirred up from the outside, as yet.
Their naïve anger was ripe for exploitation.

A few years into the decade,
with the movement gathering momentum
- at festivals and other autonomous spaces -
the Empire of Capital finally acted.
The ire of the masses was stoked
and directed at us full square.

‘Woke Wizard’s Revolting Orgy of Excess’
ran one headline.
‘How Dare They Call Themselves a Church?’
asked another.
“They should be forced to give it to Charity”
said the commentators.
“Ban This Filth!”
was the general chorus.

We were cast as the apotheosis of sneering excess;
not the bankers, nor the billionaires, nor the Bullingdon Club,
but us.
We, the money burners were set against all decency,
and against all reason.
We could be hated without restraint.

But our defence was strong.
And their attack fatally flawed.
Capital dare not challenge the idea
at the heart of its own ideology.
Since the Empire’s great victories in the 1980’s
the battle cry of the neophytes had always been,
‘It’s my money, and I’ll do what I want with it’.

Now, we shouted it back at them.

We stated our case, too.
We parlayed hard.
We exchanged for profit.
We gave to charity.
But above all,
we continued to burn.

Through the spits and fury,
witness after witness stood tall
and testified to the forgotten power of Ritual Sacrifice.

The roar from the first great wave of anger
had abated by the middle of the decade.
It was heard all around the world.
Our numbers swelled from hundreds
to tens of thousands.

The Empire regrouped
to prepare for a second assault.
Meanwhile, the catastrophe of climate change
completed its transformation
from existential threat to lived reality.

Now, it was not only the poor
who couldn’t escape its impact
but the rich, too.

The political pressure this manifested could not be ignored.
The ravages of extreme weather rapidly out grew
the capacity of even the richest governments
to respond effectively.

And worse.
They found it impossible even to pretend
to have control of the crisis.
Their grip on power was slipping.

We — the money burners — were their opportunity
to kill two birds with one stone.
We’d be both the scapegoat for public rage
and the justification
for extreme political and economic measures.

The second attack came twenty years to the day
after the 2008 crisis broke.
Black Friday — as we now call it -
was when the scourge of money burning
would be routed from the world.

Those countries without laws preventing it
were publicly encouraged by the highest powers
to enact legislation at the earliest opportunity.

Where laws were already in place,
but not enforced,
arrests were made.
It was terrifying to be in the crosshairs.

But Capital and its allies felt fear too.
To take extraordinary action
signals weakness not strength.
Capital had been provoked
into rolling the dice.
The gamble would be won or lost
on the table of public opinion.

Their strategy was to cast us as ‘against life’,
as nihilists,
as if our cash were the carrier of some vital life-force
which we ritually murdered
and that these acts of wilful destruction
were a death-wish,
a suicide note from humankind.

‘The public must not succumb to hopelessness’,
they proclaimed without any sense of irony.
‘All efforts, resources and money must be directed
to the climate emergency.’

Waste would no longer be tolerated,
and neither would we.
They wanted to crush us.
And they wanted to do so visibly
and in all righteousness.

The triumph of their logic
- their truth -
would be the means by which austerity,
in the most extreme and vicious form ever imagined,
could be enacted
under the cashless conditions of absolute surveillance.

The poor would be eternally sacrificed
to save the rich.

Money burners were helpless.
No individual can survive the machinery of state.
Empires survive by their ability to divide us
and then crush any and all pockets of resistance.

But their initial reactions had been slow.
The seeds we’d already sown had begun to flower.
Public opinion was shifting.
Sympathies were changing.

We stated our case again and again.
And still, we burned our money.
The battle of private consequence
and public reaction
was played out.

It had been said a long time ago,
that ‘Money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns’.
Now, finally, perhaps we can begin to believe
that everyone
no matter what they say in public
must realise this truth.
Because in private, no-one at all
- most especially the politicians, themselves -
believes that saving money,
will save the world.

Capitalism’s crisis is a permanent condition.
Stability has always been a smoke and mirrors deception
born of political exigencies, elections and luck.
Political power is purchased through promises.
But values born of a vote bought,
are always in debt
to the logic of Capital.

Back at the first Church of Burn Synod,
a few weeks before the start of this decade,
money burning had been described
as ‘the breaking of a spell’.
And now at its end,
our continued acts of disenchantment
have carved out a space in the Noosphere.
We’ve created a gap in the Mindspace
into which old ideas no longer fit.

The story of austerity as both saviour and necessary evil,
and the logic of capital in whose language it is told,
are the Old Testament.

A new one is being written as we speak.
It will be a story of Magic and Change.
It will put the values of Care and Freedom
at the heart of our collective life.

And it will be so because without these qualities,
without the sacrifice of our old ideas,
all human life
on planet Earth
will die.

So let our past be no longer a prison,
but an old home, we’ve outgrown.
Let us live with grace in the present
and look with hope to the future.

And here, right now,
in this midnight moment,
on the ridge between two decades
I finally burn JE52 783458 £20
and bring to a close
the ritual, magic and divination
that has for so long
been woven around its sacrifice.