Some thoughts

One day I was on the way to work in a bar in Bristol, England, where I used to live. As I passed the hospital, I noticed that one of the walls was freshly painted grey, and a small, white plaque was fixed to it, saying something to the effect of "No Graffiti: Hospital money is for treating patients, not for cleaning up after vandals." I stopped in front of it, completely shocked.

Since I'd started working at this bar, I'd walked past this wall every day and seen a huge spray-painted mural of a wild-eyed lunatic jester pointing a pair of handguns right out of the wall at me and grinning like a psycho killer. The effect had been startling, unsettling, visceral. It was really fucking cool, and it was there in public for everyone to see, free of charge. Art for art's sake. Now it was gone. On the opposite side of the road were three huge billboards. Toyota. Coca-Cola. Nike.

At that moment, I had my first glimpse of an unpleasant truth. We are in a war. A war is being fought for our minds, for our actions and our thoughts and most of all, for our desires. We are being preyed upon by people who do not simply want us to do and think certain things, but who want us to want to do and think those things, which is much, much worse. They are extremely successful in this, because they have the money and the power to fill our visual space, our auditory space, and our mental space with their images and their words, all of which are quite carefully designed to make us keep wanting.

When the same story is told to us again and again and again, when we are swamped with one tale, this is propaganda. If a story is told well, and told many times, we begin to believe it, and become increasingly suspicious of other stories that show a different point of view. We are being told the story of happiness through acquisition, of love through ownership, and we are being told it as often as the rich and powerful can grab our attention. Eventually, each of us may even begin to believe there's something wrong with our own story, because it is not the same as the fiction we have been brought up on. We begin to hate ourselves for being ourselves.

Why did I spend so much time for so much of my life wishing I were someone else? Why did I not live in a society that considered me most valuable when I was being simply myself? Why do you let yourself be told that some must be leaders and some must be followers? If we all give each other what help we can when it is needed, then we are all leaders. There need be no followers.

We seem so determined to control everything around us, and then we wonder why we don't have a healthy relationship with our environment, with ourselves or with others. What kind of love can there be between a master and a slave? How can you be satisfied in a world where no one will stand up to you? The dream of power is hollow and empty.

Marketing, advertising, spin-doctoring, salesmen being allowed to decide what images surround us where we live - these things are robbing us of our compassion. We are in the process of utterly fucking up everything that really matters, and most of us don't even realize it. We have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that it is acceptable to buy our future on credit and leave others to pay. It is not. We have gone about this all so very wrong, and now our children and grandchildren will suffer for it.

If there were enough to go around for everyone, we could indulge the dream of being happy by surrounding ourselves with new, exciting, useful things, and feel no guilt for it. But there just isn't, and we must accept that. We are responsible for each other, and we are doing an absolutely appalling job of living up to that responsibility. The people who are scrabbling to make what money they still can from our dwindling resources have a vested interest in persuading us that it is not a moral failure on our part to continue to demand more while others have less than enough. We should know better than this. We cannot let ourselves be convinced to abandon our responsibilities. What we stand to lose if we do is more valuable than anything money will ever buy.

The marketing industry, and everything that comes from it, suffers from two fundamental weaknesses, which can be exploited by those of us who would stand up against what they are trying to do to our minds. The first is a relatively free movement of information, which means that anyone who can read and has access to the internet or to a half- decent library can acquire at least some of the knowledge on which their techniques are based. The second is that at its heart, marketing relies very heavily on creativity, but has only money with which to buy it. And money simply doesn't buy the best creative work there is. Passion does.

So do something. Every single one of us who has ever been made angry by someone's attempt to manipulate our desires, every one of us needs to stand up and say something about it. Be creative. Have no mercy. Have no fear. Use your passion. Speak out about what you hate, and about what you love. Borrow their clever imagery and throw it back at them as an expression of your truth instead of their lies. Advertise your truth. Tell us all what you see. We're tired of watching them parade their baubles around like the world is some kind of giant bazaar. Show us something else, something different, something genuine. Life is too short to eat lies with your breakfast, lunch and dinner. We are hungry for the truth.