Authenticity is the antidote to anti-culture

Such is the wit and insight of fellow anarchist author Darren Allen that I can imagine a parallel universe in which he is a household name in our native UK, a national treasure of the “love-him-or-loathe-him” variety.

His latest works would be seen in the window displays of big bookshops from Falmouth to Fort William, he would have a column in one of the heavier Sunday newspapers, a weekly slot of whimsy on BBC Radio 4 and be a regular guest on Have I Got News For You.

But this scenario is impossible because Darren’s deep critique of the modern world makes his views entirely unacceptable to those who own and run all the big bookshops, newpapers, radio stations and TV channels.

Furthermore, Darren would not be expressing what he expresses – would not be able to do so – if his talent had been recognised and rewarded by the society in which he lives.

He knows as much, too, defining the word “famous” as indicating somebody “isolated from genius” and “doomed, therefore, to lose whatever creativity or intelligence made him or her famous in the first place”. [1]

Such is the shallowness, duplicity and utter absurdity of the narrowed-down non-thinking required by the system, that men and women of true conscience, authentic sensibility and intellectual integrity are inevitably forced outside of its thought-policed limits.

This explusion from “acceptable” culture is itself a cleansing, clarifying and hardening ordeal, which allows them to see and communicate truths of which they would not otherwise have been aware.

Because their thinking is not secondhand and derived from compliance to today’s norms, but sourced straight from within their individual minds, hearts and souls – and therefore from essential truth – it is unmuddied by the lies of the system and as clear as spring water.

All this pure and truthful thought, cast out beyond the pale of systematic consensus, comes together through a sort of centrifugal force to form a bright and shimmering liquid circular wall of thinking around the central “mainstream” core.

When the system collapses under the weight of its sheer unchecked corruption and its complete lack of essential quality, that thinking – regardless of whether the individuals who channelled it have survived the apocalypse – will form the guiding basis around which a new and uncorrupted society will rise up from the ruins.

The second edition, revised and expanded, of The Apocalypedia: A Primal Dictionary, is officially launched by Expressive Egg Books on December 1, 2023, although I gather copies can already be purchased. [2]

It is presented, as the title suggests, in the form of a pseudo-dictionary, in which Darren’s definitions of words both real and invented are interspersed with slightly longer articles.

He describes its primary source as being, “in a sense”, [3] his other books, such as Self and Unself: The Meaning of Everything, which I reviewed a couple of years ago. [4]

Like that other work, The Apocalypedia is a glorious mixture of humour, astute observation of the human condition, political commentary and solid wisdom.

Among the gems that I found particularly funny are Darren’s introduction of “appean”, meaning “to agree with everything someone says in order to get them to shut up”, [5] and to “brangle”, meaning “to agitate someone who is calm by telling them to calm down, to make someone break something by fearing for their clumsiness, to annoy someone by asking if you are annoying them”. [6]

Often, of course, the humour is rooted in social critique, such as the explanation that to advertise is to “spray shit with glitter”, [7] that an apartment/flat is “a garage for the overnight storage of wage slaves”, [8] or that postmodernism involves “using ‘ah, but it’s not supposed to be taken seriously’ as the justification for smearing one’s excrement over a potato”. [9]

I like the notion of “wotnog”, which is “not quite understanding what someone is saying, but smiling, nodding and ‘yeahing’ your way through, in the hope that you’ll get the point in the end, which turns out to be mistaken as you find you don’t understand, but you can’t now say you don’t understand because that would mean confessing that all your understanding sounds were tiny little lies”. [10]

And I am sure many could relate to the following Apocalypedia definition: [11]

provulsion n 1 [job-advertisement generated sensation of] trying to get a job while, at the same time, being appalled at the prospect of being employed 2 fear of losing a job while, at the same time, desperately hoping that one’s factory or office will be swept away in a tornado or hammered into OBLIVION by an enormous fist

There is also some shrewd analysis of personal relationships in the comedy, as with the presentation of the word “onsoculpa”, meaning the error of “confusing persistent guilt caused by contempt for one’s lover with persistent anger at their tiny mishaps”. [12]

Darren has very sound political views, by which I naturally mean that they are pretty much identical to my own, apart from the occasional difference in emphasis, perhaps.

He thus describes democracy as being “euphemistic shorthand for state-sponsored totalitarian mercantilism”, [13] capitalism as a synonym of socialism, both being “technophilic, statist, workist, domesticating” [14] – with Karl Marx just another “technocrat” [15] – and civilisation as something “which civilians are completely helpless without, and so terrified of losing, but which demands mass-murder, mass-slavery, mass-destruction of nature and mass-insanity, which, as with all addiction, civilians cannot bear to be reminded of”. [16]

I found this definition, inspired by Glenn Albrecht, particularly poignant: [17]

solastalgia n 1 heartbreaking disorientation caused by homelands altered by ENCLOSURE, monocultural agriculture and ‘development’, rendering them alienating and unfamiliar 2 homesickness felt by people who are still at home 3 SOLASTALGIC adj to be in exile everywhere

We are, Darren explains, dispossessed by the system, a “technocratic, institutionalised and domesticating world-parasite” [18] and “the system can no more allow people to be free than a prison can”. [19]

He recommends that we focus on “freedoming”, which is “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free… doing whatever you have to do – as far as your situation will possibly allow – to live with independent dignity”. [20]

He says we need to “radically simplify society” [21] and insists: “Make no demands… We can educate and coordinate ourselves, we can refuse the system ourselves. What’s more, demands, like leaders, can be managed. The greatest threat to the system is un-needy silent action.” [22]

An all-round holistic wisdom pervades The Apocalypedia, such as in the definition of “uxorate” as “to recognise, in art or literature, a truth that you already knew, but had not realised” [23] or in the observation that “to find faults in great minds, the hobby of small minds, usually amounts to complaining that a painting of an ocean is not a painting of a mountain”. [24]

Writing of the world today, Darren remarks: “The schizoid nature of this anti-culture precludes a need to take in a whole, to see the totality of the situation, to connect it all up or see through it, into a fateful continuity; for every moment, every thing, in our postmodern state, stands only for itself”. [25]

And in stark contrast to the postmodern/woke cult of artifice and lost meaning, he correctly defines reality as “that which, after you subtract what you think and feel about it, is still here”. [26]

To conclude, I would like to offer my own contribution to The Apocalypedia, which maybe could find its way into an obscure footnote of an eventual third edition…

bookfluster n reviewer’s sense of self-satisfaction at having concluded a 399-page book, momentarily punctured by a swiftly-dismissed tinge of regret that he had not read it in a fractionally more leisurely fashion

[Audio version]

[1] Darren Allen, The Apocalypedia: A Primal Dictionary, Second edition, revised and expanded (Expressive Egg Books, 2023), p. 66. All subsequent page references are to this work.
[2] https://expressiveegg.org/store/
[3] p. 358.
[4] https://network23.org/paulcudenec/2021/04/19/darren-allens-self-and-unself/
[5] p. 14.
[6] p. 27.
[7] p. 13.
[8] p. 13.
[9] p. 150.
[10] p. 285.
[11] p. 159.
[12] p. 40.
[13] p. 48.
[14] p. 32.
[15] p. 300.
[16] pp. 34-35.
[17] p. 218.
[18] p. 234.
[19] p. 240.
[20] p. 232.
[21] p. 298.
[22] p. 233.
[23] p. 14.
[24] p. 64.
[25] pp. 46-47.
[26] p. 165.