A Conscious Choice column from August 2008, written as progressives lost faith in the Obama campaign. Pinchbeck sets out the policies he would want — an end to GDP as the measure of a society, a Northern European mix of incentive and social protection, an exit from the military pursuit of oil.
First published on Reality Sandwich on 18 March 2008 and reprinted in Fifth Estate later that year. Reading the Bear Stearns collapse and the subprime meltdown alongside Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse and David Harvey’s remarks at the Left Forum, Pinchbeck argues that this is not a liquidity crisis but a crisis of money itself, invoking Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts on money as the visible divinity.
A Conscious Choice column from July 2008. Pinchbeck recalls channelling a prophetic voice in the Brazilian Amazon and admits he now feels less like a prophet than like Chicken Little, then takes Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse seriously enough to ask what an American version of the Soviet unravelling would look like.
Written for Reality Sandwich in July 2008 as an abstract for a lecture at the Prophets Conference in Glastonbury. Pinchbeck proposes that orbs, crop circles, UFOs and spirit encounters are neither simply real nor simply imaginary: the Other is coming to presence within the human psyche, in stages, as a co-creative initiation.
A Conscious Choice column from June 2008, written around New York’s commemorations of Gandhi’s satyagraha. Pinchbeck distinguishes active nonviolence from the passive ahimsa popular in yoga culture, and argues that the techniques Gandhi and King used are the ones now needed against the military and corporate order.
Written for Reality Sandwich in May 2008 to announce the Evolver Exchange marketplace. Pinchbeck confronts the obvious objection — why would a magazine about gift economies build a shop — with an argument about an anti-consumerist idealism that nonetheless keeps buying things, and about what a values-based commerce might look like.
A Conscious Choice column from May 2008 reporting on the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, where Pinchbeck spoke alongside Stanislav Grof, Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Christian Rätsch, Kat Harrison, Rick Doblin and Jeremy Narby. The mood, he notes, had turned respectable: these substances are now treated as tools with consequences.
A Conscious Choice column from April 2008. Pinchbeck describes switching between two incompatible stories about the world — secular progress through reason, and an occult account of hidden control — and concludes that reason alone may not be sufficient, and that meaningful change may require initiatory processes as well as political reform.
A Conscious Choice column from March 2008. Besieged by questions about December 21, 2012, Pinchbeck argues the date is useful only as a meme that catalyses change, and turns his criticism on the spiritual materialism of writers such as Eckhart Tolle, whose emphasis on presence sidesteps the social and political struggle.
A Conscious Choice column from February 2008, written as the subprime crash exposed deeper faults in banking and insurance. Pinchbeck argues that economic and social systems can be redesigned so that cooperative behaviour is rewarded over selfish action, and that the design revolution and the political struggle are the same struggle.