climate crisis, the book He wrote inside prison and what it
means to face the reality we’re in.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is best read for this to really sink in, yet the video can be seen at the bottom of the page.
This article is copied from Chris Hedges website for urgency and expediency<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We’ve had 30 years of fooling ourselves that we don’t face mass death, and now we do. What’s needed is prophetic leadership: people willing to stand up and say, you are going to die, and your death is going to be appalling, and you need to go through your dark night of the soul and come out the other side. It’s not complicated. You just need to get a grip and do what you need to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chris Hedges<\/strong>: From a cell in Wayland Prison, Roger Hallam \u2014 co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil \u2014 while serving a five-year prison sentence, wrote his book, Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death<\/em><\/a>. It is a searing indictment of a legal and political system designed to punish those who resist while protecting those who propel us toward mass extinction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the age of climate collapse, telling the truth has become a criminal act. Hallam and his four co-defendants, who each received four-year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organise activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short-term aim was to stop traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The long-term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses. This was not a symbolic protest exemplified by activists hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers<\/em>, preserved behind protective glass in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt \u2014 as it did \u2014 commerce and the machinery of state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although even the protesters who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years. Hallam, like a reviled biblical prophet, warns that we are already experiencing fundamental shifts in climate patterns that are destroying the foundations of human society. Our infrastructure and social structures are increasingly based on climate models that no longer exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seas are rapidly rising. Tens of millions of people once considered safe from coastal flooding are now considered at risk. Global warming has nearly doubled in only a decade. Ocean overheating is accelerating. Over a two-year period, ocean heat waves with temperatures up to 3 to 5\u00b0C above normal lasted for 500 days nonstop, covering 96% of the world’s oceans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Antarctica is undergoing the fastest glacier collapse ever recorded. Thawing permafrost is belching out greenhouse gases. If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced by 50% within the next six years, by 2030, Hallam writes, average global temperatures will exceed 2\u00b0C, displacing an estimated 1 billion people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s 20 times the number of homeless at the end of World War II, amounting to 1 in 8 people on Earth. There’s a 50% chance the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will collapse by 2050, causing temperatures in Europe to drop by 10 to 30\u00b0C. The Arctic is expected to be ice-free in summer between 2030 and 2035. And by 2040, forest fires may destroy 20% of woodland annually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is just the beginning. Joining me to discuss the climate crisis and his book, Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death<\/em>, is Roger Hallam. So, Roger, as you know, I wrote the foreword to this book, so I have to be upfront about that. It’s a great book \u2014 I wouldn’t have written the foreword if it wasn’t. And when I was in London, of course, I visited you in prison. I wondered how that prolonged period in prison changed your perspective, if it did \u2014 not just on your social role, but also on British society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roger Hallam: <\/strong>Well, yeah. I was in prison for about 14\u201315 months, and then I was in prison on remand for about four months. So I’ve been in and out of prison basically for three or four years now for various matters. How it’s affected me \u2014 I’m just a lot stronger. People might think that’s peculiar or unusual, but I don’t think it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think there’s been a recent study showing that people who have been to prison \u2014 and about 250 people have been put in prison in the UK, which is the equivalent of 1,500-plus in America if you adjust for population \u2014 come out more committed, not less committed. There are reasons we can discuss why that’s the case, but it certainly gives you a visceral sense of what an authoritarian state looks like now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of taking action on the must-do projects that we face, we’re already in an authoritarian state in the UK and obviously similarly in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH: <\/strong>I remember Craig Murray \u2014 he’d spent much less time in prison than you did \u2014 but I remember when he got out, he told me he was just stunned at the bankruptcy, if that’s the right word, of the kinds of lives that many of those who were incarcerated led: the lack of opportunity, the poverty, the even illiteracy. Was that something that struck you? I’m curious whether it gave you a window into this rapidly expanding social inequality which certainly defines the United States and the UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH:<\/strong> Yeah, I think it does. It didn’t particularly surprise me or strike me this time \u2014 it’s the seventh time I’ve been in prison. I went to prison in the 1980s when I was 19 or 20, for the peace movement. So I’ve had plenty of experience with the British class system, let’s put it like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n British society has been characterised by extreme inequality for centuries, and that’s sort of baked in. What we need to understand, though, is that people have the opportunity and the courage to deal with their circumstances. Not always, of course \u2014 often terrible tragedies and great injustices happen in prison, as people are aware, like with Chris. But at the same time, people get on with their lives. People are capable of taking control of themselves and living with some dignity in spaces of extreme provocation and deprivation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think this is what we need to understand: I have a generally positive attitude about human beings. We are capable. We’re not just pieces of dead matter that get hit on the head. We are very capable of fighting back, both internally and externally. Otherwise, history wouldn’t happen as we know it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So for me, it was a place of reflection, really, and admiration, really, for some of the guys I was incarcerated with. I was on a corridor with people \u2014 “lifers,” as they call them in the UK. I don’t know if that’s the word in other places, but people who’d been sent to prison for 25 years plus. Many of these people have done terrible things \u2014 there’s no two ways about that. But many of them had decided they were going to live their life anyway. They were very spiritually solid. Not all of them, of course, but a lot of them were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For me, this was a lesson: whatever the bad guys do to us, we always have the opportunity to choose how we’re going to react and how we’re going to live our lives in response to the involuntary hell that’s imposed upon us by the powers that be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH: <\/strong>You have long made this point, which of course is correct, that you have what’s called the liberal wing of the political establishment that will acknowledge the reality of the climate crisis but essentially do little to nothing \u2014 perhaps symbolic gestures. And then you have the Trump-like climate denialists. Both sides of this political equation are dangerous. Explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH: <\/strong>Well, I’m with Martin Luther King, as you know, Chris, right? The enemy is the liberal moderates, not the Ku Klux Klan, as per the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And I don’t mean that in some provocative way, just to get attention. I mean it from the heart of my being: what makes me furious beyond words is not the evil people in the world. There are always evil people in the world, as various people have said. The problem is those people who facilitate that evil with the knowledge that it is evil and pretend to be good while they do it. And this is the liberal class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the class that perpetually undermines the ability to bring about the objective revolutionary conditions which are strategically and ethically undeniably necessary at the present time, given the objectivity of the number of people who are going to die in the next 20 to 30 years due to the whole shitshow of things that are going to be brought down upon us that everyone listening to this knows about. The problem is the lack of leadership \u2014 the lack of revolutionary leadership \u2014 which will call out the liberal class and make clear that if people are not going to die, then they need to join together to create a revolutionary movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I don’t mean, again, in some romantic “put a poster on your wall” way. I mean in the classical 20th-century civil resistance way: having a leadership structure, having a mass organisation, having an explicit strategy of regime change, and having a rhetoric of rage and determination. Until we get those things in place, we will be continually sabotaged by what I would call the administrative class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I’ve recently been mobilising in inner-city London, and this is the problem. There are so many people who are furious \u2014 just about everyone you speak to \u2014 and I’ve knocked on the doors of thousands of people in the last eight months. The problem is that the vast majority of the campaign spaces, the vast majority of the deliberative spaces, are basically controlled by this administrative class, which exists to prevent any collectivisation of resistance. As soon as you try to do that, they’re down on you. They use various methods to make sure you’re not successful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s the problem. I’m not interested, as you know, in coming on podcasts and saying how bad Donald Trump is. We’ve done that. We’ve been there. What we need to do is organise. And we need to understand how you organise. We’ve got a 200-year tradition of organising since the French Revolution. We need to start being humble enough to realise that people in the past used to do a lot better than we did, rather than thinking we can just mess around on social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH:<\/strong> I think you have pointed out, quite astutely, that this organisation requires that you show up. That you invest significant time in speaking to various groups, in programs of education, that it’s not done online, that it’s done through personal connections, and that it’s labour- and time-intensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH<\/strong>: It is. And there’s no mystery about why that is the case. Humans are basically functions of what’s happening within about five meters around them at any one time \u2014 in other words, what the other humans are doing within your immediate space. I did years of research in academia about this before I co-founded Extinction Rebellion, and I’m not saying anything unusual. There are 40 or 50 years of psychological research behind this. Individuals don’t read books and then decide to act. What they do is talk to people they respect, and if those people are doing X, they’ll do X as well. If they’re doing Y, they’ll do Y.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People can be enormously courageous and enormously evil depending upon what’s happening around them. So the role of the revolutionary is to design those spaces. We don’t need to talk about individuals. We need to talk about spaces and dynamics. There are different units of spaces: what you say to people on the doorstep, what you say to people in assemblies, what you say to people in interviews like this. They all need to come together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The big message needs to be: if we don’t join together, we’re going to die. And I mean that literally. We don’t need to say, “Hey guys, we’ve got some problems, and Trump’s a terrible person” and various abstract nouns. We need to say: you are going to die, and your death is going to be appalling, and you need to go through your dark night of the soul and come out the other side and become a mature human being \u2014 like millions and billions of people were in the past who confronted the same situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s unusual is we\u2019ve had 30 years where we\u2019ve fooled ourselves into thinking we don\u2019t face mass death. And now we do because we\u2019re in 2025. So, it\u2019s a matter of getting over ourselves. And this is the role of prophetic leadership. And there\u2019s not enough prophetic leaders out there because that sort of function is not valued. There\u2019s this idea everyone will spontaneously join together; they won\u2019t, unfortunately. Which doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m justifying some patriarchal, traditional, top-down, crap leadership sort of model. What I\u2019m pointing to are the great leaders of the past who stood up and died for the cause, as we know, which is what usually happens. But again, that is not a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I had thirty years of saying, \u201cWe don\u2019t want leaders because they end up getting shot.\u201d Well, obviously they end up getting shot. That\u2019s what the life of the human involves: sacrifice. We haven\u2019t ended history. We\u2019re still in the midst of it, and we\u2019re about to come to the final chapter of it. And one of the reasons we\u2019re going to fail is because we pretend the old logic doesn\u2019t apply, which is, you live a good life and if you get shot, so be it. That\u2019s the way we need to approach the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s not going to happen unless people act like me and you, Chris. We\u2019re one of the few people in the Western world who get up and tell people. And this is what Larry Kramer did, who I think is the most important American of the last hundred years, not Martin Luther King. It\u2019s Larry Kramer, who got up and said, \u201cGet out in the streets, otherwise you\u2019re going to fucking die.\u201d And he said it again and again. And as you know, he turned around the campaigns against AIDS and the obscenity of what was happening in the late 80s with gay guys dying in corridors. He turned that around. How did he turn it around? By getting fucking angry. It\u2019s not complicated. You just need to get a grip and do what you need to do, really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH: <\/strong>Is there a parallel between the faster we move towards ecocide, the harsher the repression becomes? That certainly seems to be your experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH:<\/strong> Yes, it is, but we take the wrong message from that. We take the materialistic capitalist message, which is life isn\u2019t an accounting system, and you\u2019ve got ten dollars, Chris, and I take five from you, and you\u2019ve only got five left. This is what the Left does all the time to get colonised by neoliberal capitalist logics. If you get put into prison, it doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019ve lost five dollars, and you\u2019ve got five left. It means whatever you want it to mean. You see what I mean? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Humans are not accounts. When the neoliberal liberal left says repression is really bad because that means people cannot rebel, not only are they betraying the essence of what it is to be human, they\u2019re just talking empirical bollocks, as you know. History is absolutely full of societies becoming more authoritarian. And because they\u2019re more authoritarian, people rebel, not despite, because it\u2019s an obscenity. I mean you\u2019ve got Trump in America and what are the numbers? Like five, ten million people have been out on the streets. Why\u2019s that? It certainly isn\u2019t because of the repression; despite the repression, it\u2019s because of it, isn\u2019t it? People didn\u2019t all rush indoors in Minnesota going, \u201cDear, there\u2019s a chance I might lose my liberty or whatever.\u201d They were going, \u201cFuck this, let\u2019s go,\u201d because some things are more important, right? Which is self-respect and all the rest of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH:<\/strong> How do you see the movement moving? We have had movements that embrace this kind of radical, confrontational response and essentially become domesticated. Most of the environmental movements, the mainstream environmental movements, Sierra Club and all already have. But how would you kind of judge or explain the health of our radical movements in terms of confronting power?<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH:<\/strong> Well, I think we\u2019re in the darkest hour before the dawn. That\u2019s my analysis. I think the state of the radical movements is massively immature in the presence of the objectivity that we face. But the important thing to understand is this is nothing new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a cycle of resistance in response to repression. And you can have a cycle of resistance, and then everything collapses because you can\u2019t keep that level of energy up for a long time. And what we\u2019ve got now is in many ways like the last spasm of denial, right, before it becomes absolutely obvious what\u2019s going on. In the words of a university professor, whose name I\u2019ve forgotten, he was on social media last week saying, \u201cEverything won\u2019t change until white people die.\u201d And this was a professor from an elite university, right? Obviously, he was retired. He wouldn\u2019t say that if he were in a job. But that\u2019s the fundamental tipping point, as we know. And white people will start dying. Obviously, I\u2019m talking about rich white people here as well. They will start dying because the climate crisis is a suicide prospect, which is why my book is called \u201cSuicide.\u201d My book isn\u2019t called, the ruling class are going to do us in, and they\u2019ll be fine and we won\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH:<\/strong> They think they\u2019ll be fine. Don\u2019t they?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roger Hallam:<\/strong> This is a unique moment in the human experience because since 1945, you\u2019ve had the capacity to destroy every human on the planet. It\u2019s not like previous ruling classes were worse than this one. Obviously, they would have destroyed themselves as well. The point is this ruling class will destroy all of us, and also they\u2019ll destroy themselves. And by \u2018destroy\u2019 I mean we\u2019re going extinct, and they will go extinct. And we can have little obscene conversations about whether a few of them survive in the bunker for a few decades, but that\u2019s not the point. The point here is that the whole way our civilisation sees reality is intricately combined with why we\u2019re going extinct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And what we need is a fundamental new way of seeing what it is to live a human life. And this sounds ridiculous at the moment because we\u2019re at the darkest hour before the dawn, but I can a hundred per cent guarantee that in ten years\u2019 time there\u2019ll be a revolution in the ways in which we see the nature of our civilisation, in the ways that prophetic explosions have happened at times of extreme distress in human history. There\u2019s nothing unusual about this. What\u2019s happening at the moment is it\u2019s like we\u2019re having the last dance in Hitler\u2019s bunker before the Russians arrived, you know what I mean? That\u2019s the logic that\u2019s being promoted by the liberal left, and in the conservative spaces is, let\u2019s forget about reality for another ten years, pretend, and then we\u2019ll have to deal with death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH:<\/strong> And yet there are movements within societies that face imminent death – the ghost dance or something – where people retreat into crisis cults. I look at the Christian Right as a crisis cult. You unplug yourself from reality. You embrace magical thinking. That\u2019s also a phenomenon of an overwhelming existential crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH:<\/strong> Yes. I mean, as you know, I\u2019m not some madman, Chris. This is going to happen, and it\u2019s all really straightforward. I\u2019m a sociologist, as you know, right? And it\u2019s not complicated. This issue is not complicated. It\u2019s emotionally appalling, but analytically it\u2019s not complicated: in times of massive distress, a society will fracture along several key lines. One of them is towards internal destruction – personal suicide, nervous breakdown, domestic violence. Another fracture will go towards external hedonism – live now, forget the future. And another element will go into some form of collective cult-like behaviour or some fascistic worship of death, which is what fascism basically is. And the last fracture will be the fracture that turns towards the prophetic love of life and the human. And obviously, it\u2019s the last one that we\u2019re putting our bets on, right? But it\u2019s naive to think that the others won\u2019t exist. The point is everything will be up for grabs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And any of those fractures could become hegemonic. But no one can predict beforehand how it\u2019s going to go, right? That\u2019s the point. But what we can predict with absolute certainty is the centre will collapse. And it is collapsing. It\u2019s a zombie space already, as we know. It\u2019s only there because of institutional support. So that\u2019s the prospect in the next two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH:<\/strong> Let me ask a little bit about the climate crisis itself. As it accelerates, you, of course, see the solidification of climate fortresses. This is what Europe is doing. What the United States is doing, essentially locking out those who are fleeing northwards. Talk a little bit about the crisis itself and the increasing pressure it\u2019s bringing on human societies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH:<\/strong> Well, first of all, we need to deal with the liberal left idea that the climate crisis is complicated, right? There\u2019s lots and lots of talk shows and podcasts about the climate crisis, and what\u2019s communicated is this vague idea. There\u2019s nothing vague about putting CO2 into the atmosphere. There are three facts we need to just establish, and then we can just move on to what\u2019s going to happen on the human scale, right? We\u2019re at 1.5C. No one can dispute that. We\u2019re going up 0.4C per decade. So, we\u2019re going to be hitting 2 around 2035, maybe a bit before, maybe a bit after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At 2 degrees, we trigger all the tipping points in the Earth system. Again, maybe 1 or 2 will be earlier, maybe 1 or 2 will be afterwards. That will create runaway climate collapse. Everyone knows that. That means we\u2019ll go up to 2.5 and 3 and 3.5 and such like. And once we pass 2 degrees, a quarter of the world\u2019s population will be on the move. Again, not immediately, not all of them, but who\u2019s counting, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n As you said in the introduction, that\u2019s two billion people. That\u2019s two billion people on the go. And in the future decades, it will rise. There is a get-out clause, which is a revolution that collapses carbon, which is why I am revolutionary, because that\u2019s the only way out. And then there\u2019s a technological fix, geoengineering and such like. So, it\u2019s not a hundred per cent guaranteed that we\u2019re going extinct, but we have to accept that\u2019s now the main scenario, because it\u2019s quite difficult to have a revolution and there\u2019s no guarantee geo-engineering will work. But if you want to be a realist out there, if someone\u2019s listening to this and they think, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m a realist,\u201d then you have to be a revolutionary and you have to consider geoengineering. That\u2019s it. And obviously, added onto that, we\u2019ve got AI and nuclear war and various sort of wild cards. But this isn\u2019t a wild card; it\u2019s physics. It\u2019s like you drop a ball and it drops to the ground, right? You put CO2 into the atmosphere, it warms up, and we\u2019re at 1.5, and we\u2019re going to reach 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, once we\u2019ve got that established, then we can look up what it means to have a billion people on the move. And we know what that looks like because 50, 100 million people were on the move in World War II. And basically, it destroys the world economy. That\u2019s the first thing to say. There\u2019s going to be no pensions. The second thing to say is unless there\u2019s a revolutionary religious transformation, there\u2019ll be genocides of a scale many, many times greater than what happened in the 20th century because we know what fascists do is they kill the outsider. And that\u2019s what\u2019s coming down the line. And they\u2019ll kill those who try and prevent it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, we\u2019re going into a period of history where unless we do something fundamental with ourselves and our society, we all plunge into the greatest spasm of horror the human race has ever experienced. And it\u2019s super important that people don\u2019t avoid that, because the only way we\u2019re going to avoid it is by facing it, which means facing up to death. And this is why I\u2019m spending more and more of my time talking about religiosity in the widest sense of the word that unless you come to face what it is to be a human, i.e., a conscious entity that\u2019s going to die, and accept that reality whenever it\u2019s going to be, you\u2019re never going to grow up and be able to be fully human in the face of horror. And it\u2019s entirely possible to do that, right? But it\u2019s not going to happen by avoiding the realities that we face. And this is difficult, to put it mildly, but it\u2019s not impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH:<\/strong> Well, consumer society is completely oriented towards the fantasy of eternal youth. I mean we\u2019re fighting against a culture that essentially does everything it can to mask or hide the fact of our own mortality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH:<\/strong> Which is why we\u2019ve got a massive mental health crisis because the mainstream culture is saying, \u201cYou can live forever.\u201d That\u2019s the subliminal message. I know we sort of know that in actuality, but that\u2019s the message, the idealisation of youth, the idealisation of life without death, which is a contradiction in terms, obviously. And then we\u2019ve got the reality, which is people below 30 are facing a slow death by starvation and death in social breakdown and all the rest of it. And the solution to that is prophetic witness, as it always was in the past. And this is why the new movements that are going to emerge, which are going to be in a position to actually concretely deal with the crisis materially and spiritually, have not yet been born, to be honest with you, Chris. They\u2019re going to come out of the edges of the social space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the reason I come onto shows like this is not to talk to the ninety per cent. I\u2019m talking to the one per cent of people who have at the back of their mind that they\u2019re going to be the people who are going to provide the prophetic witness. And there\u2019s nothing wacky or weird about this. I had a chat with Paul Engler, you may know, who\u2019s one of the most skilled movement organisers in the States, and we both compare notes every now and again because I do similar work in Europe. And we both agreed. The single biggest determinant of movement growth is prophetic leadership.<\/strong>You need someone to go around and say, \u201cYou\u2019re going to fucking die. Get out there.\u201d You don\u2019t want people to start giving you facts and figures. When I do talks, I do that, what I\u2019ve just said. It takes two minutes to tell everyone where we\u2019re up to. After that, the key question is: how do you want to live your life? The key question isn\u2019t, “What are we going to do?” That\u2019s like a machine question, right? You know, Lenin was a machine revolutionary. It\u2019s like, no, the question isn\u2019t what are we going to do. We\u2019re not dealing here with a broken car engine. We\u2019re dealing with a spiritual being called the human, and the key question is how are you going to live your life? And the great thing about that question is, it doesn\u2019t matter what the outcome is because the outcome is above your pay grade, as we all know. It\u2019s only like humanist arrogance that thinks we control this world. We most certainly do not control this world, which isn\u2019t to say we shouldn\u2019t give up a good life. But the reason we live a good life is that we believe in the good. And if you don\u2019t believe in the good, you get mentally ill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It doesn\u2019t take long to put your ducks in a row. You know what the ducks in a row look like, Chris, right? And many of your viewers and listeners know what having your spiritual ducks in a row looks like. But someone needs to go out and talk about this rather than why the rich are terrible and all the rest of it. Obviously, the rich are terrible. People don\u2019t need to be told the rich are terrible. They\u2019ve known that for the last 5,000 years. What they need to know is what it is to live a good life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH:<\/strong> Well, you mentioned the word religiosity and I know that that\u2019s important to you, as it is to me, not in an orthodox kind of way, but I think it is vital for a successful movement where one is judged not by the outcome finally, but by one\u2019s integrity and commitment to justice and I wondered if you could kind of flesh that out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH: <\/strong>Yeah, well the first thing to establish is orthodoxy, as you called it, is what secularity is imposed upon us. Like the whole idea of religion is a modern concept, as I think you know, and many of your listeners may know. The word religion didn\u2019t come in until the modern period. Before the modern period, the notion of religiosity, as you might say, was impregnated in all aspects of life. And what <\/strong>modernity did, what secularity did, what the capitalist regime did, is stick religion as a noun and stuck it as something that happens on Sunday and some weird belief in some concrete other called \u2018God\u2019. Right? That\u2019s nothing to do with religion. That\u2019s like what secularity has done. And the tragedy and the appalling criminality of secularity is to prevent people engaging in the sense of the transcendent and the enchantment of what life is, because they\u2019re told that\u2019s child\u2019s play and all the rest of it, and it\u2019s some weird belief, as if secularity and modernity isn\u2019t a belief itself, right? The outlier is modernity. For 99% of human history, people have believed in transcendent phenomena, the transcendent within the material, and related ideas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And even in today\u2019s world, for the sake of argument, 80% of the world\u2019s population is aware there\u2019s something other than going out and making money. You see what I mean? Like we need to understand there\u2019s history here, just as there\u2019s history in imperialism and there\u2019s history of the oppression of common people; there\u2019s also the history of the stripping of a sense of the transcendent from culture. And this is the primary reason why we are not resilient, why people burn out because they think they\u2019re just themselves. But being just yourself is just some weird cult idea of Newtonian physicists. It\u2019s obvious that we\u2019re not just on our own. We\u2019re part of some universal thing that\u2019s beyond words. And just because something\u2019s beyond words, it doesn\u2019t mean it doesn\u2019t exist. Just go and read some quantum physics, for God\u2019s sake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So, we need to start battling back, and this is a big battlefield, of saying it\u2019s obvious and it\u2019s natural, and it\u2019s absolutely needed that we start understanding what it is to be who we are, which is to be part of something greater than what we are, because that\u2019s objectively what we are. It\u2019s not some postmodern whim; it\u2019s a reality. We are objectively part of something bigger, and we always are and always will be. And once we start engaging with this, I\u2019ve got great hopes that the younger generation, the under30s, are ready for this because it\u2019s intolerable to live in a world where there\u2019s just you on your own. People will be looking for it. And if we don\u2019t provide a progressive pro-social orientation of what the transcendent is, we know what will happen is the Nietzschean Nazi space will come and gobble everyone up and get everyone to worship death and destruction as some sort of perverted form of transcendence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The race is on, but the idea that this is just about inequality is appallingly self-sabotaging. People need to believe in something greater than themselves. And it\u2019s already there, right? I mean better people than me, no doubt, will design what that looks like over the next 20 years. But there\u2019s absolutely no question that we\u2019re not going to win by pretending we\u2019re dead matter because we\u2019re not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chris Hedges:<\/strong> So just to close, ideally, what does this revolution look like? How is it built? How does it come about? And how are the ruling global elites dethroned?<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH:<\/strong> Well, first of all, by not asking the question. I mean, if you ask the question, Chris, without doing the spiritual work before you ask the question, you\u2019re going to burn out in six months. This is why Gandhi said you have to go and do self-purification before you go into battle. Everyone has done this for the last 2,000 years. You can\u2019t send your troops into battle thinking you\u2019re going to hit the left wing and then the right wing and then do X, Y, and Z. First of all, you have to pray to God. Praying to God is the important bit, right, because that gives you the courage to do everything else. So that when it looks like you\u2019re losing, you don\u2019t turn and flee, because if you do, then everyone dies. I mean, obviously that\u2019s the military version of it, but there\u2019s a nonviolent Gandhian version of it as well. So, as I said, the first question is to ask the question with other people in some form of collectivity, in an assembly: what do we want to do with our lives? What are our obligations to our parents and our children? What\u2019s our obligation to our countries? What is it to be good? Those are the key questions. Only when you\u2019ve spent a decent amount of time asking those questions, and you\u2019ve got a practice that reintroduces you to those questions on a regular basis, can you then go into battle?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And when you go into battle, then there are a few basic rules, right, which are to concentrate all your resources in one time and space. In other words, you have to create a mass collectivity. You have to elect or choose who your leadership, your generals will be, who will go, \u201cGo there. We\u2019re going to go to Washington on the 2nd of October. We\u2019re not going to go to Washington a little bit in September and a little bit in November and a little bit in December.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Someone needs to make the big strategic decisions, and you need to choose wise people to do that, obviously. But you can\u2019t avoid that. And then, once you go into battle with the powers that be, then you need to have a positive message of what you\u2019re going to do afterwards. You can\u2019t have all the neoliberal civil resistance movements of the last 20 years that overthrow some dictatorship in Egypt or Ukraine and then just reinstitute liberal capitalism, which morphs into monopoly capitalism. You have to have a fundamentally revolutionary demand. And that revolutionary demand is sortition, which is the original meaning of democracy, which is people selected randomly from the population in order to make the decisions of the society, which is what they did in Athens and what they did in Florence, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was only the last 200 years we\u2019ve got this perverted idea that voting in elections was democracy. It\u2019s not. That\u2019s aristocracy. It\u2019s oligarchy. And you only need to look at America to see how it works out. So, we\u2019ve just been told a big lie that we\u2019ve got a democracy; we haven\u2019t. But there\u2019s no point complaining and trying to make voting better. You need a whole new system, which is that you select people by sortition, randomly. So, 70% of the people in the decision-making assemblies are working-class people because 70% of people in the population are working-class or whatever you want. And that\u2019s a whole new other discussion, of course, Chris, right? But the point is that\u2019s the revolution for the 21st century. And unless you make it explicit, then people obviously degenerate back into liberal logics, and then you\u2019ll have fascism because obviously there\u2019s no point voting for the Democrats or the Labour Party. It just facilitates a bigger fascist surge next time round. And this is why you need strategic and prophetic leadership; otherwise people will go, \u201cYeah, let\u2019s give the Democrats one more chance.\u201d Like those days have gone. Haven\u2019t they?<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH:<\/strong> Yeah. Well, they went a long time ago. But the liberal class is quite good at herding people in every election cycle back into the dead embrace of the political system. I mean that\u2019s probably why they\u2019re there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RH:<\/strong> Yeah, which is why, if you want to talk concretely, after you\u2019re doing your spiritual preparation, what do people do? You need to organise in your communities. Simple as that. And everyone thinks this is a hard grind. Obviously, it\u2019s a hard grind. But also, it goes nonlinear at a certain point. Like in the community that I\u2019ve been organising, we organised about five or six of us, three or four nights a week and then we started a community campaign, and we had twenty, thirty percent name recognition within six months. This is my day job, right? It\u2019s not like I\u2019m making this stuff up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My day job is how to organize mobilisations, but that\u2019s what needs to be done. There\u2019s no point going to conferences or sitting on social media. That\u2019s just going to let the fascists win because the fascist strategy is to get out into communities and organise those communities. And if you don\u2019t organise them, then the fascists will organise them, and this is one of the biggest problems with the secular left is they don\u2019t actually like human beings, right? You know what I\u2019m saying? I mean you need to decide whether you\u2019re a Democrat or not. If you\u2019re an elite anti-human leftist, then fair enough, but at least be honest about it. And if you actually genuinely love the common people, you need to go out and talk to them, for God\u2019s sake. You see what I\u2019m saying? You need a hundred thousand American young people to do a big freedom summer, which is spend the summer knocking on the doors of working class districts, listen to people, get them into assemblies, allow them to create their own political realities like Paulo Freire<\/u><\/a> did in Brazil, and then put their candidates up, organize mutual aid projects, organise local campaigns, aggregate them, build a mass movement, and then off you go. It\u2019s really not rocket science, right? Sitting around moaning about it is just like a suicide strategy, as we know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CH:<\/strong> Right. Thanks, Roger. And I want to thank Max, Thomas, and Nawelle, who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/ROGER-HALLAM_SUICIDE_ADVERTS-03.png\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/roger-in-market-2-1.png\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/roger-doorknocking.png\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/mr-fish-1.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/d3a0360360984df04d9715789b42dcda.png\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/DOLLAR-SIGN-1.png\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Gandhi_Tolstoy_Farm.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/house-of-people-1.jpg\")