Description

By Bill Bailey

ISBN: 9781849910842
Published: 2009
Pages: 200
Key Themes: philosophy, politics, empowerment

Description

The Ghost Society reveals that the State has become a disastrous incubus on the social matrix, the intricate web that constitutes the fabric of human consciousness. The modern State is merely the evolutionary result of a concept born in the distant past, a mechanism to control volumes of people larger than tribal communities. However, this book deals mainly with its contemporary manifestation as it thrusts forward in efforts to globalize its nature and underlying economy.

It is written in an approachable and discursive style with a whiff of the classical Platonic and preSocratic traditions. The author wishes to avoid the pseudoscientific rationalism of modern philosophy, as well as verbal continental brain twisters that leave only professional academics to rake over the meanings.

The Ghost Society refers to that group of people who choose, as much as possible, to live outside the values and control of this ever more controlling and inquisitive State. The ordinary concept of work is dismissed by the Society as an onerous imposed value that is in large part a contemporary form of indenture or slavery. In turn, the Ghost Society is reduced to invisibility by the State.

The initial working title was How to be an Individual Revolutionary. But during the writing the manuscript was transformed into something more interesting and unusual. It became apparent that the next revolution must be quite different from the ones that have defined the current State. The compelling revelation was that there must now be a revolution that changes the social matrix itself, one that surgically removes this old and dangerous entity of the State that enslaves us today. In essence, it is time for human consciousness to evolve in a way that creates a destiny more worthy of the title we have meretriciously awarded ourselves, homo sapiens. Revolution via conscious evolution must happen and continue to happen if we have any hope of becoming any more than just another unsuccessful hominid dead end. We are currently facing a crucial fork in our path, self realisation or self destruction. Choices must be made now, as individuals and as communities. The prognosis is bleak, even for optimists. Soon the Ghost Society must become more corporeal if wisdom is ever to be anything more than a dream.

About the Author

Born in a small rural town in North Carolina, Bill Bailey began his itinerant life after graduating from university with a degree in philosophy and a keen interest in judo. After being drafted and subsequently ejected by the US Army for being incompatible, he found work as a prison guard in Canada and continued his study of judo before briefly prospecting for gold in British Columbia. Having meanwhile accidentally married a Texan heiress, he moved to Houston, Texas where he managed a ranch, scrambled motorbikes, rallied sports cars, worked as a bouncer, taught English and French and organised the first white collar union in the US meat packing industry. He placed third in the Southwestern US Judo Championships light-heavyweight division and was awarded his black belt. Backing quickly away from Texas after stumbling into the acting profession he moved to London. Within a year of his arrival he became the first full frontal male nude on the British stage and, consequently, was featured in a full page photo in Life Magazine opposite Lennon and Ono.