This essay was a finalist in the How We Saved the World essay contest, where people wrote as if it was 2050 when the world was working, saying how we got there starting with something they did. Here's the intro to this presentation of results, with links to the other finalists and an invitation to make comments about the contest.

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Letter from the future – Welcome to 2050

Letter from the future – Welcome to 2050: I own my own home, enjoy my privacy, the banksters and globalist-technocrats are in jail, we are a world at peace and life is only getting better

Welcome to my home, we have just started a new decade. I own this property, my books, my clothes and various personal possessions but many of the appliances in my home and the car that I use are managed communally and shared when it is appropriate or they need replacing. We have a fairer, broader and more nuanced concept of ownership than the peoples of The Time of Madness[1]; the world has changed in so many ways that it is difficult to know how to begin explaining it. Billionaires no longer exist, poverty and homelessness have been consigned to the dustbin of history, most people own their own home, some own two homes and some live on locally-organised housing cooperatives. Other people live in Non-State Forms (NSFs); intentional communities, eco-villages and/or religious communities of up to 5,040 people (Plato’s number). However, nobody owns multiples homes and rentier-capitalism is no longer a way that people earn their living; and neither is stock broking or currency speculation, for that matter. Once the nature of the state was transformed, NSFs were accepted as necessary parallel structures to states, and the nature of currency was completely reimagined and transformed (no longer loaned into existence bearing debt, but created transparently, with no debt, and under local democratic control) everything changed very quickly.  But how did we make this happen?

My contribution to the changes was threefold; firstly I published my book Postcapitalism: An Alternative to the ‘Great Reset’ (which outlines the changes in the nature of the state, currency, NSFs, psychology, Shadow-work and the healing of trauma, reciprocal aspects of Game Theory – to name but a handful) as my gift of knowledge to the world. Secondly I undertook my own Jungian-Shadow-Work (techniques based on the ideas of psychologist Carl Jung that the mind/psyche/Self is not only multi-faceted but also multi-layered and that dialogue between different ‘characters’ or ‘parts’ is necessary for growth as a human) as my duty to myself, my family and the society at large. And thirdly I stood as a candidate in the UK constituency where I was born (York Inner), for the Independent Alliance and was elected as a Member of Parliament in the city in which five generations of my family have lived.

2024 was a pivotal year; grassroots movements sprang up in many countries which used the existing voting systems in ways which they had never been used before. New candidates explicitly standing against incumbents who were members (or ‘associate members’) of the World Economic Forum (WEF) stood in elections in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. In my own country, the UK, a new party, The Independent Alliance[2], managed to persuade the majority of the approximately 32%[3] of people who did not normally vote, to actually turn out and vote. This was the necessary wild card that helped topple the first domino. It then became the third biggest party in the UK in one fell swoop. With neither the Conservative Party or Labour Party able to form a government on their own and the Independent Alliance unwilling to support either party in government there was a constitutional crisis. This crisis was exacerbated by the release of The Epstein Files, which implicated many politicians, not only in the UK but across the world, and members of the royal family. This resulted not only in a new election and a huge number of arrests, but also major constitutional reform. In the following election the Independent Alliance became the largest party and formed a government.

As a newly elected MP I was now in a position to influence the unfolding events, moreover, the new-found exposure helped propel my book, Postcapitalism: An Alternative to the ‘Great Reset’, onto the New York Times and Amazon Best-seller lists. Sometimes ideas are like the embers of a fire, if they don’t have the proper protection at the beginning they go out, but with the appropriate nurturing and fuel they can burst into a roaring flame. In other cases they are more like acorns, thousands go out into the forest but only a small handful germinate into saplings, and even fewer grow up to become mighty oaks. In this case the embers of my ideas had been glowing for some time but now they burst into flames and were not only discussed widely but came to influence policy. More to the point, the fact that the ideas were now ‘out there’ in the public realm, meant that what had previously seemed ‘impossible’ now became tangible and real; in a way that the four-minute-mile had once seemed impossible but is now considered normal. With this new flowering of ideas in, what was to prove, a period of global paradigm-change, the programming that most people were operating under started to break down. Moreover, it was possible to instigate a new and radical economics policy, one which served the masses rather than being a form of enslavement and pillage of Mother Earth, and a new team, of which I was part, was brought into the centre of government.

We started with reducing VAT from 20% to 5% and a wealth tax, along the lines proposed by Gary Stevenson[4] (the most profitable Citibank trader in 2011 turned radical economist), and this was a resounding success. When people could see the obvious benefits of this it became much easier to acclimatise people to the idea that radical change was not only possible, but in fact necessary, in order to build a better and fairer world. As a member of the economics team I proposed both a radical re-imagining of currency and to instigate an economy based on the ideas in Kate Raworth’s[5] Doughnut Economics. With the space created by the wealth tax and the emergence of a plethora of radical ideas, banking was transformed using the ideas around Copiosis[6], and the proposals of engineer turned economist Thomas Greco.

Although I was a member of government my inner anarchist/libertarian leanings had not disappeared, and I was happy when a coalition of anarchist/libertarian academics and thinkers formed an alliance with those already living in alternative communities, to petition for the right of communities to live outside the control of the state. They already had the weight of experience and academic rigour behind them, and the chapters in Postcapitalism on the nature of NSFs resonated with them, so they knew they would have a sympathetic ear from me. Although initially there was plenty of grey area between how the UK state would relate to these fledgling NSFs, this was viewed as a strength and not a weakness. Flexibility was essential in the beginning, and within five years various documents were drawn up enshrining in law the two-way relationship, with meetings held at least once a year in order to address new issues when they arose.

As many of us intuitively and experientially understand, a crisis is an opportunity for radical and sustained change, and so it proved to be. In a similar way that a ‘mid-life crisis’ is an opportunity for growth and change only if it is seized and has some type of strategy behind it, so too the power vacuum created by the collapse in the traditional power structures, and the subsequent mass break down of programming, required a strategy for it to have been effective and not to have descended into chaos; which certainly seemed like a distinct possibility at many points in the decade following 2024. In addition to the systems’ change to the state, the nature of currency, drug-policy, the arms trade and NSFs, there was also a global psycho-spiritual shift. This shift had many parts, including but not limited to; initiation ceremonies within a protected sacred space with trusted elders, counselling and psychotherapy within a limited time-frame (not open-ended), group therapy, truth and reconciliation committees, entheogen[7]use and Jungian Shadow-Work. Thus the human race not only had the time and space (mentally and emotionally) to undertake both its individual and communal shadow work, but also the opportunity and incentive; a new world was coming one way or another, and better that it was primarily guided by well-adjusted humans and not people suffering from trauma or by psychopaths, as had previously been the case for most of human history.

People need examples of change as well as strategies to change, and so I offered up my own life as an example of how Shadow-Work can help a person heal from trauma, and become a better version of themselves. I can’t pin down exactly when my own shadow work began, but I do know what some of the key planks of it were; raising my daughter, renegotiating the boundaries of my own anger (to reduce the ‘egoic-anger’ and to harness the ‘righteous-anger’ (although actually I prefer the term ‘sacred anger’)), to take a deep dive into my psyche and dialogue with my inner cast of characters using entheogens, meditation and visualising the ‘new man’ I was to become. In my own case anger was a key part of this change. Once I understood that my sacred anger was what allowed me to set and defend my personal boundaries, and was therefore not only useful but actually completely necessary the rest became much simple. The egoic-anger (self-centred anger) naturally reduced when I put myself to service and really ‘nailed down’ my daily meditation routine, it all became fairly straightforward when I understood this. The videos of YouTubers Emerald Watkins and Jordan Thornton were extremely useful in my own shadow work journey. The man I am now in my seventies; at ease with himself, happy with his contribution to the world is a very different one from the late twentieth century man, who had not examined the negative patterns programmed into him by school, family and society and then internalised by the tape loops of his own mind. It is satisfying to be able to face my own mortality with no regrets.

A similar strategy (as has been used in the UK) was used in the USA to persuade non-voters to turn out and vote against the ‘uni-party’ (it having been recognised by many ordinary people that both the Republicans and the Democrats represented the interests of globalist-technocrats, the military-industrial-complex, and other special interest groups such as the prison-industrial-complex). Cornell West and Marianne Williamson won Copresident as independent candidates and things changed quickly after that. Emboldened by the changes elsewhere in the world, and with a political mandate, West/Williamson declared an end to the so-called “War on Drugs”[8] (in actual fact a war on the poor and the working class). Following this countries all over the world abandoned their slavish devotion to the nightmare that a deranged Harry J Anslinger had inflicted on the world due to his own delusion and insanity. In Europe the evidence had already been examined (the Portuguese model, the Dutch model and the work of Professor David Nutt in the UK) and the European nations used these as blueprints for their own drugs policy, which now took into account local cultural factors. Many other nations across the world used this evidence to inform their own citizens and drugs policy was crafted locally in line with the needs, wants and cultural norms of the local community. The DEA was abolished by West and with that the cheerleaders and zealots of the War on Drugs, found themselves looking for new employment.

Once the war on drugs was ended and the DEA and other similar organisations disbanded, many people choose to experiment with entheogens such as magic mushrooms, magic truffles, Iboga, LSD, MDMA, DMT, Peyote, San Pedro Cactus and Ayahuasca. This allowed people to choose from a range of shadow-work tools and healing modalities. These substances were not monopolised by big pharma, but were used under the guidance and advise of shamans in those traditions that had them. In those countries with no tradition of shamanism, such as in the UK, guidance was given by trained mental health professionals or it was undertaken without guidance by people who were aware of the risks and pitfalls that they faced. This helped many people understand themselves, come to terms with their trauma and heal themselves. They certainly helped me, although I recognise that they are not for everyone and that other healing modalities, which do not involve the use of psychoactive substances, exist also.

A contingent of African nations, emboldened by the winds of change blowing through the traditional power centres, pushed for an indefinite moratorium on the arms trade at one of the last meetings of the old United Nations (the UN had also been rocked by the Epstein Files and other corruption scandals), before it went the way of The League of Nations; into the dustbin of history. The measure was passed and despite the fact that the UN no longer commanded political legitimacy, the document that they produced was well thought out, detailed and nuanced. The newly elected politicians all over the world used the documents as the legal basis to arrest various business leaders and former politicians, all of whom had strong ties to the arms trade. Although there were still pockets of fighting in different countries, with the supply of weapons choked off this fizzled out sooner rather than later. This allowed the debate around gun-ownership to be undertaken in a less polarised and intense environment than had previously been possible.

These changes allowed the space for discussion about the values of our societies in an open and honest manner. The healing that occurred meant that the trauma that had driven many people into lives of desperation; homelessness, prostitution and drug addiction being the most common manifestations, could now be examined in an entirely different manner. It was recognised that the dark triad personality types had exploited this trauma as a deliberate ‘divide and conquer’ strategy and that they had imposed their perverted value system from the top down. The space that had been created allowed for a new ‘bottom up’ morality and value system, that respected both individual and group rights while simultaneously recognising that duty and ‘natural-law’ were the intrinsic balance and ‘price’ (not actually a price at all, but something which, while hard work, could result in great satisfaction)  for inalienable rights. In fact the duality of rights & duty are the necessary starting points for the dynamic-equilibrium (the Ying-Yang) of harmonious societies. That’s not to say that everything was smooth sailing or all ‘moonbeams and rainbows’, but that the necessary re-orienting of values was fitted into the jigsaw of change along with the other parts.

I’m so happy that people recognised that the globalist-technocrats of the WEF and the so-called philanthropists, did not have the best interests of the people at heart and wanted to create a two-tier world of Technofeudalism[9]. I appreciate my privacy and understand that paper money allows me privacy that would have vanished under a system of CBDCs. When all is said and done life is so much better than it was. Obesity, diabetes and cancer have all but disappeared, and the pharmaceutical industry is a fraction of its former size because of this. Ending the war on drugs, implementing an indefinite moratorium on the arms trade, accepting NSFs running in parallel to functional states, instituting Doughnut Economics and using non-debt-based currencies to create free and fair mediums of exchange has allowed the ideas of visionary futurists like Buckminster Fuller, Jacque Fresco and Nikola Tesla to become a reality. Society has benefited, I as an individual have benefited, Gaia is now respected and not plundered. There is still work to be done, but I have a song in my heart and the wind in the trees whisper to me.

[1] This is the phrase that many historians now use to refer to the first two-three decades of the twenty-first century.

[2] https://www.independentalliance.co.uk/

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1050929/voter-turnout-in-the-uk/

[4] https://millionairesforhumanity.org/the-millionaires/gary-stevenson/

[5] https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics

[6] https://www.copiosis.com/

[7] The word entheogen(s) refers to any psychoactive substance which is used in order to gain knowledge, communicate with a higher power or to heal. It is used here in preference to the ideological materialist-reductionist term ‘halucinogen’.

[8] For evidence of this read; Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari or The Emperor Wears No Clothes: A History of Cannabis/Hemp/Marijuana by Jack Herer or any number of books on the topic.

[9] Technofeudalism is a term coined by Yanis Varoufakis to describe a high-tech surveillance state that has a huge wealth and power gap between the ruling class and the great masses of the people.