A New Revolution-Lilipoh Interviews Nicanor Perlas

by Nicanor Perlas		print version
		print version (graphics)

LILIPOH: Nicanor, I know you have lived here in the US, and I know also that you are highly critical of the stance that the US government has been taking in the world. Can I invite you to “drop the gloves” and say plainly what you see?

NP: Yes. Let me start off by saying something about the positive and high ideals of the US. The US pioneered the ideal that a government is accountable to its citizens. People admire your country for its relative openness and freedom, especially when this authentically expresses itself in some of your outstanding thinkers and individualities. What is happening now, the aspiration to establish a Pax Americana as part of global empire building, is very far from the intentions of the founding individualities and ordinary US citizens—who generally love their country and its ideals. They have no stake in attempts to sabotage or overthrow governments in the world for specific narrow purposes. But they do have a responsibility.

LILIPOH: What is that responsibility?

NP: To love your country means, in this case, to work to keep it true to the roots and high ideals that made it an outstanding country in the first place –a country with a specific meaning for the world. As a result of the unilateral and imperialistic US response to 9/11, tragically, the US has lost a key opportunity to create a more peaceful world together with other nations as well as most of its positive image in the world.

LILIPOH: What is the new image? A bad actor forcing globalization on the world?

NP: You need to discriminate between elite globalization and globalization, per se. There are positive aspects to globalization. With elite globalization, there are only a few winners and billions of losers. With it you have one worldview seeking to impose decisions on other nations, decisions that are alien to the identities and purposes of those nations. A healthy global civilization would respect and honor innate differences. With the pursuit of empire, the US has made the adverse impacts of elite globalization even worse.

LILIPOH: What do you see lying behind the dark aspects of US influence?

NP: Behind the push for empire is an unhealthy alliance between Christian fundamentalists with those who have an overwhelming desire for power and wealth. The Christian Right wants to hasten the coming of the apocalypse because that would accelerate the second coming of Christ – and that impulse has gotten married to some of the narrower interests favoring US world domination. In addition, the power elites want to make other countries malleable so that US corporations can come in and extract wealth.

LILIPOH: A repeat of Rome?

NP: More far-reaching, really. Today, a very drastic form of revolution is taking place—rapidly and with great power. But it is in many ways invisible.

LILIPOH: Invisible?

NP: People usually understand revolution as a radical restructuring of the relationships within a society, often with the taking of state power through armed insurrection. These revolutions often fail because cultural, economic and political aspects of a society have their own dynamic, and, by ignoring these, the end results are as bad as that order which they have overthrown. But today, with the increasing dominance of global economic systems and a few superpowers, both supported by propaganda masquerading as mass media, a revolution can occur without the usual external appearance of a state takeover.

LILIPOH: So you wake up one day and …

NP: … and find yourselves in a very different world. That is happening now. A very revolutionary project is unfolding on a world scale, especially in the US, but affecting everyone.

It encompasses the impulse to empire already mentioned, and includes two other main aspects. One is the development of technological singularity—that is, the convergence of nanotech, biotech, info tech, and cognitive technology—leading towards super-intelligent machines and the Cyborg, a half-human, half-machine. Many futurists have been alerting us to this for some time: a new species composed of machines that may not really need us; or people, who through engineering of human/machine interfaces or artificial genetic sequences, are no longer truly human. The other aspect is the radical restructuring of nature, which includes powerful devices being developed under the rubric of Star Wars. These devices will manipulate natural forces or phenomena to disrupt communications or to kill combatants and people en masse.

LILIPOH: The empire, the technological singularity, Star Wars – you are connecting the dots, then.

NP: Yes. The worldview that sees a human as a wonderfully complex but nonetheless biochemical machine that can be altered, cloned and patented stands behind the empire. It does not concern itself with global climate changes because it feels it can create life forms, agricultural species, or maybe even modified humans who can withstand it. With all of these factors together, the definitions for revolution are met. What we have is actually the most extreme revolution that humanity has ever faced.

LILIPOH: Who are the revolutionaries?

NP: One way or the other, we are. Once you begin to see, to truly know that this is going on, it becomes difficult to live a “normal” life. We are faced with a decision. Are we, in our individual lives and institutions going to be instruments in this revolution—passive instruments—and allow ourselves to be fed into this death machine? Or are we going to take active control of our own fate and destiny and struggle to create a different world?

LILIPOH: You think it’s that bad?

NP: It’s no longer possible to just sit on the sidelines.

LILIPOH: You can’t just go “tsk, tsk, tsk?” and go back to your meditation?

NP: The moment you do that you are aligning yourself with the decline of humanity—through passivity and lack of courage. To turn this around will require the work and resolve of citizens around the world, not just in the US.

LILIPOH: You must have gone through a decision process on this yourself, no?

NP: Yes. In my own life experience of activism in the Philippines we had gone through one big victory after another. We successfully opposed nuclear weapons programs and nuclear reactors. We stopped pesticides and instituted sustainable agriculture programs. Then, the power of the WTO [World Trade Organization] emerged as a threat that could marginalize everything we had done for 25 years – so powerful was its challenge to the environmental work we had done, to the work with indigenous peoples, and so on—the fruit of all that labor was at risk.

My personal reaction was total depression. It went on for many months.

LILIPOH: What got you out of it?

NP: I had to find inner approaches that could go beyond the level of the problems. It involved a transformation of my concepts and perspectives, as well as my mood and attitude towards the world.

LILIPOH: Can you characterize those transformations?

NP: I no longer saw the problems as obstacles. I saw them instead as messages from the external world, as questions asking, “So what is the next stage that now needs to happen?” It became a kind of spiritual attitude. I saw that you cannot use the same consciousness and structures that created the problem in order to bring about change. At the same time, you have to work out of the internal requirements of the situation. You can’t do it out of a spirituality that’s off the ground. You need instead a profound spiritual deed based on the constraints and possibilities of the existing situation.

LILIPOH: Please translate that to our situation. What are the stages you see for us, if we are to have the right kind of revolution?