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The Ghost Society presents a theory of how the social order hangs together and how it is constructed on the horizon of human consciousness.
The ironic earlier working title for the book was How To Be an Individual Revolutionary, because I meant to draw a portrait of the modern western State in order to show how it corrupts and enslaves. The portrait is still there, but during the course of writing, the emphasis shifted from the eponymous revolutionary to those citizens who manage to scavenge a free life under the intense pressures of a relentless and merciless economic system that takes no prisoners. The Ghost Society, in other words. This book is dedicated to its members all over the globe.
The Ghost Society.
We are the scavengers, the coyotes. We live on the outer rim of the campfire where it is colder – but it is also darker, and the shadows are longer. We are harder to see in the twilight gloom as we sift and comb the waste and throwaways of the commercial hothouse in order to live.
Yet The Ghost Society does not have the seeming servility of the coyote.
We are not carpet knights, nor do we beg. But we know how to move quickly. We understand invisibility and opalescence when searching eyes seek us out. It's a happier Society, too, because we understand life better and ride it like cowboys. And I've never met a member who was not something of a passionate voluptuary.
Perhaps it is now time for The Ghost Society to become more visible, because the economic vandals are threatening to turn the earth into an arid, lifeless hell.
Forests are felled in sickening swathes, whole oceans are awash with chemicals, the atmosphere is heavy with smoke and oil, thousands of species vanish daily, while humanity sinks lower into enforced corruption. Anyone with different views is scorned, hounded, bombed and economically punished until they happily hold out their wrists and ankles for fetters and shackles. All this is in mindless pursuit of profit and wealth – at the cost of our real wealth. In the "luckier" industrialised countries we live in houses too big for us which are full of things we don't need. And every hour we are more alienated from the things we do need. Soon the whole earth will be cluttered with the useless and mindless, for which we have blindly traded the vital, the life-giving and the healing.
This book has never been presented for publication. It is and must remain free. Anyone who feels they might like to read it is at liberty to download the book or print it and pass it on.
What
is free cannot be bought or stolen. If you understand that, you are probably already a member of The Ghost Society.
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