Fake living versus the happiness of truth

What I like most about fellow English anarchist Darren Allen is how he manages to so utterly condemn the miserable condition of contemporary society, while at the same time insisting on metaphysical truth that puts that sorry state of affairs into context.

This is very much the case with his latest book, The Fire Sermon: The Unbelievable & Unacceptable Truth, [1] which he claims was written by Modra the Monkey God, with only some “help” from himself.

However, having read and reviewed some of Allen’s previous work, [2] I very much recognise his pen and am going to have to call out this imposture and identify the non-divine Allen as the sole author of this sermon!

The book is a smallish one, of fewer than 200 pages and, with its rather beautiful cover and numerous illustrations, I suspect that Allen is reaching for a wider, and perhaps younger, public.

Not that this holds him back from the scathing indictments of the modern world for which he has become renown.

Allen has Modra the Monkey God tell his human readers: “Now you live in a world without the wild, which means without death, without freedom and without real mystery. That’s why you are all so bored, and so boring”. [3]

He points to the existence of “a huge SYSTEM which now covers the earth and controls all life on it”. [4]

Things are set to get even worse, as those who control the system “are working to suppress free speech, so that nobody knows what is going on.

“They are working to stop free movement, so that the poor cannot escape from their poverty.

“And they are working to make sure that everything anyone does is monitored, so that any threat to ‘security’ can be instantly detected and SUPPRESSED”. [5]

One of the themes of Allen’s work is the way that the sense of words can be changed to mean what the speaker or writer wants them to mean – often by those with power, though we can also do the same thing for our own purposes.

This is very much the case with the word ‘security’, he says.

“‘Security’ means the security of the system. If you threaten the system, then you are a threat…

“This was why THE POLICE were invented, to protect the power of the system, to turn independence from the system into a crime – gathering wood from the local forest, for example, or even just hanging round – and then to punish it. That’s what ‘security’ means; lack of freedom.

“Today the powerful are doing what they can to completely eradicate freedom. You must be totally dependent on the machine for everything, for everything you hear, for everything you see, for everything you feel, for everything you think, for everything you do”. [6]

Allen characterises our current society as being something like a corporation that wants to control and manage its operations.

As a result, millions of different societies “with different atmospheres, different dress, different speech, different thought, different feeling” have been replaced by one all-inclusive “omni-society of the screen”. [7]

He describes the “demonic world of the screen” as “the mask of death”, [8] behind which “there is nothing, a dead and empty nothing”. [9]

Individual uniqueness cannot be tolerated by the system/corporation, which uses its “educational” apparatus to churn out the lifeless and interchangeable human beings that will best serve its global machine.

Allen says that by the time you have gone through these “conformity factories”, you are “nothing”.

“Your heart has shrunk, your character has shrivelled up and you don’t actually know how to do anything, which adds to your immaturity.

“All you really know is how to fit in to the machine and how to depend on its owners and managers”. [10]

“Your parents and teachers will tell you that to do well at work and to get a good job you need to be hard-working, clever, flexible, kind and so on.

“Yeah, maybe. But try being disobedient, unpredictable and original at school or at work, and see how far your hard-working creativity, intelligence and kindness get you.

“Obedience comes first in this world. If you put quality over obedience and conformity – if, for example, you decide not to do stupid things or listen to horrible people – then you are ‘bad’ and you will be punished, rejected, banished or you will made to undergo some kind of ‘therapy’ until you are ‘good’ again”. [11]

As a result, he says, “everyone is living a FAKE LIFE” in which they refuse to recognise the truth and “will avoid anything or anyone who reminds them of it”. [12]

Despite the grimness of this world stripped bare of all quality and creativity, Allen insists that we should all be happy – indeed that “you have no right to ever be unhappy”. [13] and that “to be unhappy is to be an ally of evil”. [14]

This is only really possible, as he explains, by taking a leaf out of the system’s book and redefining the word “happiness” to suit our own purposes.

For him “happiness is the truth of life. Not just knowing the truth, but actually being true”. [15]

Allen’s form of happiness also embraces pain, which is an unavoidable part of any creature’s life – it means being conscious of that unavoidability and thus not upgrading pain into suffering.

“To realise that existence is pain means to become free of SUFFERING, which means to be actually happy, and that is the rarest state on earth”. [16]

Being conscious in this way – stepping back from our own subjective living, our own “personality” or ego – is thus the broader key to escaping the prison of fake living.

“The more conscious you are, the more aware you are of THE WHOLE THING. The moment is more vivid. Colours are brighter, qualities more intense and situations open themselves to you, and reveal their secrets.

“You become an artist, a kind of magician really, able to see into people, even into the strange heart of mere things. [17]

“Face your own death. Live as if you are going to die, because you are. Face the death of everything – because everything you are attached to will be taken from you.

“Better to release your grip now, while it isn’t so painful; than to have what you are attached to ripped from your grasp”. [18]

Ultimately, we have to be conscious that our individual existence is merely a convenient and temporary vehicle for the life-energy of the earth and the cosmos.

And that consciousness itself comes, of course, from beyond the individual human mind.

Declares Allen: “It’s not that I am conscious of nature, it is that nature is conscious through me.” [19]

[Audio version]

[1] The Fire Sermon: The Unbelievable & Unacceptable Truth by Modra the Monkey God with help from Darren Allen (Reading: Expressive Egg Books, 2024).
All subsequent page references are to this work.
[2] https://network23.org/paulcudenec/2021/04/19/darren-allens-self-and-unself/
https://winteroak.org.uk/2023/11/22/authenticity-is-the-antidote-to-anti-culture/
[3] p. 11.
[4] p. 94.
[5] p. 103.
[6] p. 104.
[7] p. 111.
[8] p. 112.
[9] p. 111.
[10] p. 93.
[11] pp. 40-41.
[12] p. 21.
[13] p. 18.
[14] p. 170.
[15] p. 14.
[16] p. 42.
[17] p. 56.
[18] p. 152.
[19] p. 167.