Starting from the British political scandal over decades of child sexual abuse and its cover-up, this piece argues that profit-driven systems select for sociopaths and that elite universities train what Herbert Marcuse called irrational rationality. Pinchbeck describes an occult control system, links Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati to Rudolf Steiner’s Ahriman, and notes that Egypt and Central America gave Set and Tezcatlipoca a ritual place.
A short post releasing the position paper Towards Regenerative Society: A Rapid Transition Plan, dated October 2014, as a downloadable PDF. The quoted opening argues that humanity has reached one of the rare junctures requiring a thorough transformation of society, culture, and consciousness, and that activating the prefrontal cortex allows a new planetary civilization to be envisioned and designed.
The first newsletter of the Center for Planetary Culture, dated July 2014. Pinchbeck, its executive director, distinguishes the think tank he started with Jana Astanov from RAND, Brookings, and the Project for a New American Century, describes research toward a regenerative civilization, and cites Buckminster Fuller on utopia or oblivion and Joseph Beuys on social sculpture.
Announcing the Center for Planetary Culture, this working draft lays out a post-carbon transition plan divided into technical, social, and communication strategy. It covers bioremediation through Paul Stamets and John Todd, ecocities, alternative currencies and blockchain-based organizations, demilitarization, and liquid democracy, citing Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest.
Written in support of the Worldwide Wave of Action. Citing IPCC projections, a 30 percent rise in ocean acidity, and James Lovelock’s forecast of a human population reduced to a few hundred thousand, Pinchbeck argues that no adequate response is possible under neoliberal capitalism, and that ownership must give way to stewardship using new social technologies.
Pinchbeck describes the split between creative work and self-promotion, citing his GaiamTV talk show Mind Shift, which he was expected to sell to 1,000 new subscribers, and the years he lost marketing his own company, Evolver. He invokes Lewis Mumford on capitalism and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism as grounds for arguing that artists should not be their own marketing machines.
Built around quotations from Bataille’s On Nietzsche, Antonio Negri’s Time for Revolution, and Georg Kuhlewind’s Becoming Aware of the Logos, the piece argues that capitalism rests on domination and cannot be reformed, only superseded. Pinchbeck holds that a cooperative society must integrate humanity’s destructive tendencies as ancient Egypt and the Maya did through paired deities like Set and Tezcatlipoca.
Conducted for Codigo, a Mexican art and design magazine, in 2014. Pinchbeck calls for repurposing mass and social media to shift planetary consciousness, citing Jose Arguelles on the sacred function of art, Joseph Beuys on social sculpture, Bernard Lietaer’s Terra currency, and Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics. He mentions his talk show Mind Shift and the film 2012: Time for Change.
An introduction to Alan Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology, written in the early 1960s about LSD and psilocybin. Pinchbeck argues that Watts’s real claim is that the Western ego does not exist, and that the psychedelic revolution has barely begun. He cites Thomas B. Roberts’s view of entheogens as a second Reformation.