I've reached Varna, the Black Sea

Yesterday in a café in Arbanasi, I wrote the following words. I apologise in advance for their 'craziness' and/or for being mistaken, if I am. I am aware that this deep and ponderous self is only of my dimensions. Indeed that I have many 'selves', none of which are fake or pretentious, none of which, to me at least, seem mutually incompatible. This means, however, that when I express myself, such as I do below, in a way particularly suggestive of only one of my selves I feel somehow embarrassed by a suggestion of self-misrepresentation. Yes, this is me, but I am more than this, so to consider this to be me, and only this me, is to be led astray.

In the world to come

There will be no

Money or Trade
Marriage or exclusive love
Egoism or Idolatry

However, People on the material plane will be able to have whatever they want and in whatever quantity they desire (so long as it is available).

Also:

People will not have to work. People will only work if they want to, and if they know what they want to do. People will only ever do work which they want to do.

People's privacy will be an certain prerogative and possession. That said, privacy will be conditioned by the realities of life lived according to the authentic, not the egoistic "I". That authenticity on the one hand will lead those possessing it (i.e everyone) to want to sensitively respect the lives of others; so delicate hands respecting the other will be seen. On the other hand, people will not want to isolate or conceal themselves, since the public domain will itself be infused and animated, suffused and conditioned, by that very same mode of authentic being which inhabits, albeit in a different style, the individual soul. Recognition felt, then, between an individual's inner life and the outer, public life of society will lead people both not to feel the need, in the extreme way we see today, to conceal and demarcate private from public, and to want to share and reveal their inner desires, feelings and thoughts to the greater vitality and richness of that public space. So a different arrangement or 'contract' between public and private will be established, based always on consent and desire, regulated by the inner voice of an authentic, not egoistic, self, attuned to the holistic intelligence of God.

Clearly the above is very utopian, very idealistic. So what? After I finished my after dinner speech at the Athenaeum Club in London to the Society of the Knights of the Round table in 1988, I was told by an elderly gentleman never to lose my idealism. I wonder if the above pleases him.

A Communist, moi? If you want, I don't care for labels. Communitarian certainly. What's in a word? Communist could do as well. But of course since the divine is central, indeed foundational, to my vision, clearly I am world's away from the disastrous experiments in communism of the recent past. Reminiscent more, no doubt, of the social experiments of England during the 17^th century Interregnum, but still rather different from them too.

The 'Communitarianism' I speak of belongs to the future, not the present. And it will follow, not precede, a transformation of human consciousness which will itself attend and follow, as we can already see it doing, the collapse of the traditional structures of human society, through a dynamic, not of revolution but implosion.

Marx's great error was to see matter as more fundamental than consciousness; and related to this to suppose that human nature would be changed by a radical reordering of social and economic relations. Because of this error, Marxism was doomed to failure from the start.

He was right however to see human nature as malleable and mutable, unfinished and capable of great things, but wrong to see it as something only needing liberation from an unjust system in order to achieve greatness, justice and freedom. His critique of the world, then, was not deep enough, since he failed to deplore the human subject for what it is in-itself, be that ruler landlord or peasant, merchant or worker.

First the inner life of mankind must change, only then will his outer life be transformed, and the phoenix of a genuinely just world arise from the ashes of a redundant and surpassed world.

It should be a gentle and gracious process, the old making way for the new gradually, not by violent revolution, but when it has been observed that the old has been transcended, that new wine requires new wineskins.