The Seduction Of The Illusion Of Power

Dancing like there's nobody watching will feel like a skill game in the Crystal Maze soon if you're at Leeds Train Station. I think it's important to try and commit to memory, what your gut response at seeing this is, and put into words what it is exactly about this sight that generates this feeling. What is it that causes the pang of terror to arise in your chest all of a sudden? If you feel anything negative at all that is. This pic might be making you feel a bit safer and relieved right now, because you were mugged at Leeds Station once in the early morning, and haven't been back there since out of the fear it could happen again.

Because after the initial feeling of alarm, and the invasive, discomforting sense that Power can capture even more scrutinizing higher quality footage of you now, as you play the role of yourself walking across the stage of the newly refurbished Leeds Station each morning - every nose pick, bum scratch, goodbye embrace and public meltdown written to a hard disk in a random office somewhere that you imagine some security guard getting paid minimum wage to monitor the monitoring system, will be enjoying as his one solitary perk. The real reason why he applied for the job really - to experience a taste of real power.

Imagining he possesses the omniscience of God at 3am on a Saturday morning, zooming into countless faces and bodies that pique his interest as closely as the technology will allow him, wondering momentarily to himself if this is what an existence serving machines feels like in actuality, before clocking out at the end of his shift, going home to sleep with the residue of unrequited intimacy in his heart.

After Power makes a clear statement to its people, like the one in this pic does, setting the tone for how things will be from now on, comes the gradual stroll down the road towards Normalisation - as we become less and less aggrieved by the dense presence of CCTV and finally cannot even see them anymore. I don't think these all seeing eyes at Leeds Station are in operation at the moment, but they're already functioning.

The Problem of Intention

Whenever I have the intention to do something grand or idealistic, I fail big time, or at least, am left deeply unsatisfied with what transpires as the result was never my intention.

I'm very interested in seeing new systems emerge that help us all work in harmony together though. One experience that keeps coming back to me was when I was at a private festival involving the coming together of various like-minded people. I was struck by the levels of generosity there. Everyone was just so giving! And perhaps because the location we were in was so beautiful, we all felt momentarily separated from the cruelties of the real world, living in a vision of a collective future we wished to be real, a kind of temporary utopia that everyone knew would soon be over because festivals unfortunately don't tend to last forever!

For the next few weeks after returning to the life and person I was before the festival, I found it surprisingly easy and natural to be totally giving to my friends, verging on it feeling quite necessary to be so whenever an opportunity arose. If a friend said they were hungry and I happened to be eating at the time, without thought I found myself offering them my sandwich, telling them they could help themselves. Of course, they would never eat the entire thing, but I feel like it was the gesture that ended up nourishing them more than the food did.

Surprisingly, in group situations where other friends and onlookers witnessed this, I would find myself being offered or given things more often than was the norm for me. And they in turn gave among themselves more than I'd seen before. The atmosphere became one where everyone wanted to give to each other because seeing genuine appreciation and other people being made happier made them happy too! It was nuts!

I'm not one for taking chemicals and then jumping into a hot tub with friends all loved up, so it was a bit intense for me to feel that level of unconditional love just spring up out of nowhere, but I did find that as each day passed, what was an overwhelming feeling of resonance with humanity gradually became normalised, to the point where it no longer disrupted the coordinates of my lived experience and became a part of who I was.

This was years ago though. A fleeting period in my life, a glimpse of the kind of utopia I didn't think was possible. I'm back to 'normal' now! A right selfish bastard who always puts themselves first! Hahaha!!! But I do often find myself longing for the belief that I had in the past. A belief that it is actually possible after all to help sustain and instill in others a love for living through giving