We turn now to the arts in order to hold a mirror up to the competitive relationships that we have chosen to live among. The film Don't Look Up, which premiered globally over Christmas 2021, is a satire on the media's failure to communicate climate science. It ends with the complete destruction of the earth in the final scene after a creepy billionaire, who seems to be Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos rolled into one caricature, attempts to mine rare metals from an asteroid rather than deflect it from its Earth- destroying trajectory. The film has an all- star cast, including long- time climate advocate Leonardo DiCaprio, and neatly and alarmingly portrays the trajectory to oblivion of the climate and ecological crises that we are living through. DiCaprio plays a scientist whose warnings could save the earth from the meteor impact but are ignored, ridiculed and turned into clickbait for the attention economy until the crisis that could have been avoided destroys the earth. As a matter- destroying shockwave spreads around the world from the meteor strike and disintegrates the main characters, they reach out to hold hands around a dinner table. In this final moment, the full gravity of Don't Look Up sets in as the comedic affectation of the film is lost and the characters cease to be caricatures and appear human through the care and comfort that they offer each other in their final moment. The film holds a mirror up to news readers who are more interested in stoking controversy than listening to experts, politicians who are more concerned with their next election than saving the planet and the billions of people who care but are made powerless by a system that has no interest in serving them. As the credits rolled, I was struck dumb by the horrifying reality of the film and the mirror that it held up to my own frustrated efforts to engage policy makers and the media. In the following pages, we will see why markets blind the rich and powerful to the crises that they perpetuate while the rest of us are left to our impotent grief, fear and anger.

As a Jew who was forced to flee Nazi Germany in the wake of the murder of many in his family and community, Eric Fromm was witness to the worst of humanity. As a member of the Frankfurt School, whose philosophers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, sociologists and critical theorists sought to make sense of the world after the horrors of the Second World War, Fromm dedicated much of his life to understanding Love. In his book on The Art of Loving, he explores the common conception of Love as something that happens to us and argues that Love is better thought of as something that we do. While we often talk of Love as something that we can be ‘struck’ by or ‘fall’ into, Fromm suggests that we would be better served by considering Love as a verb. There is perhaps a hint of this kind of active Love in the responses of brides and grooms in the marriage ceremony when they say ‘I will’ when prompted by the priest or celebrant asking if they will Love one another. This points towards wisdom that we ought to heed rather than accepting our usual passive interpretation of ‘being’ or ‘falling’ in Love. This active form of Love has profound implications for how we live our lives. Yet, other than in the ritualized marriage ceremony, we do not often conceptualize Love as something to be done. Fromm, along with any number of other notable philosophers, from Nietzsche to bell hooks, tells us that the suffering that is at the heart of the human condition is the result of our fundamental separateness from humanity and the rest of the world. It is this separateness and our yearning for connection that can be found at the root of our anxieties, anxieties that are exacerbated by the market- led competitive economic relations that have inveigled their way into every facet of our lives. As we create a society where we are seemingly more separate than ever, despite the possibilities for technological connection that grow by the day, we have seen anxiety emerge as a preoccupation of the modern individual and of society as a whole. If there is a way to overcome this anxiety- inducing separation, then we must surely explore it. This is the task to which this book is dedicated.

In the last few chapters, we have peered back into the past millennium to understand a little more about where we have come from and who we are. Magic is described in the Merriam- Webster dictionary as ‘an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source’, and we saw how the market's emergence from the Triennial Act of Parliament in 1641 would have closely fitted this description. Had the market not been so normalized since then, we might see it as a form of magic today. However, the market as a form of inexplicable magic is of course not the full picture; the market is like other magic in having its own internal logic. Whether reading tarot cards, enacting the divine rights of kings or managing a pension, there are certain rituals and ways of doing magic that we collectively agree on. In this chapter, we will see that the power of kings and queens was replaced by the possibility that anyone could hold power over others through the market. In Chapter 1, we saw that seeking to hold power over others is the antithesis of Love. This means that not just the monarch but everyone in society is now encouraged to act against Love. In this chapter, we will see how the market's denial of Love began in the 1500s, or perhaps in the 1000s, and how this continues today in the form of neoliberalism. In light of Bateson's schismogenesis, this type of imminent critique of the market is problematic because it is likely to compound anyone's pre- existing zeal for market economics. However, an understanding of how we got to this point will help us to understand what a more loving critique that might help us to overcome the forces of capital might look like, and this will be explored in the following chapters.

In some accounts, the origins of capitalism can be traced back to the Norman Conquest of England. William the Conqueror seized control of England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and, as any British schoolchild will tell you, introduced castles to the English countryside. When combined with the gifting of land to his barons, the castles gave William and his loyal new aristocrats a monopoly on violence that enabled them to extract rent from the lands that they now claimed.

I closed my laptop as I finished the last chapter. I had been hunched at my desk all morning; my body was telling me to get up and go for a run and I still had some time before going to pick the children up from school. It seems needless to say that I Love the crows and the lapwings on the hill. I Love the hill. Watching the sunsets and sunrises from the ancient barrow that tops it helps me to recognize and Love our Neolithic forebears who dug the barrow and watched the same transitions between day and night six millennia ago.

My usual run takes me up and over the hill and through the raised embankments of the ancient village that housed the people whose lives would be celebrated at the barrow four thousand years before Jesus or Mohammed were born. My legs then start to burn as I run back up the hill towards the barrow. On this day, as I reached the flat top of the hill and picked up my pace, a raven came and flew off my right shoulder, letting out a primal ‘craw’ as it joined me. We looked at each other as I ran along the crow- topped fence. The crows are used to me and so do not always fly off at my presence, but the raven was a surprise. Halfway along the fence, it let out another loud ‘craw’. Even louder this time as it swooped towards me, first clipping a crow with its wing, before brushing past me.

Looking down at the crow that the raven had led me to, I noticed some orange twine tangled around its feet and trapping it on the fence. The twine cut into its feet when it saw that I had stopped next to it and it tried to get away from me. It calmed down when I took my T- shirt off and carefully covered its head, but the twine was so tightly wound that it was cutting into the metallic flesh of its feet and would have broken its legs had I pulled it away. Momentarily dwelling on the problem, I remembered that I had previously noticed a rabbit burrow nearby.

In the late 1970s, Nobel prize- winner for economic sciences Milton Friedman was filmed in the Library of the University of Chicago for the opening scene of the ‘Free to choose’ documentary that would air in the US on the PBS network in 1980. As the camera pans across the room, we see that Friedman is holding court with 20 men and three women. This is the same library where the Chilean Chicago Boys had recently been schooled in Friedman's and Hayek's pro- market orthodoxy before returning home to Chile to develop the economic policies that underpinned the Pinochet dictatorship that had violently seized power in 1973. Freidman had visited Chile and met with Pinochet in 1975, and Hayek followed in 1977, the same year that the filming of ‘Free to choose’ began, and the same year that Pinochet's military junta ensured the unopposed implementation of Friedman's and Hayek's economic models by banning all political parties and torturing or murdering many of those who continued to oppose them. As the documentary continues, Freidman's voice introduces us to an aerial shot of New York City: ‘Once all this was a swamp covered in forest. The Canarsie Indians who lived here traded the 22 square miles of soggy Manhattan Island for $24 worth of cloth and trinkets. The newcomers founded a city, New Amsterdam at the edge of an empty continent.’

The aptly named first episode of the documentary series, ‘The power of the market’, then continues with a description of how the US conferred a previously unknown level of freedom on the European migrants who came to settle in New York and then the rest of the US. Friedman's description of the Canarsie lands is more modern than Adam Smith's ‘uncultivated land’ and ‘naked and miserable savages’, who we met in Chapter 5, though the same meaning is there: these were lands to be ‘improved’ by the power of the market. For Freidman, this power is a force for good, but perhaps it was not for later generations of the Canarsie and their cousins across the continent, who watched Europeans grow rich on the destruction of their ancestral lands, culture and people.

I was thrilled when my daughter asked for a telescope for Christmas. As we looked up at the constellation of stars that form the Seven Sisters one freezing evening in January, we had an excited discussion about what it meant that the specks of light in the viewfinder were 444 light years away. She was only five at the time, so it took a little explanation for her to understand that this meant that the light we were looking at was an image that had been made four centuries ago. However, when she understood this, she was amazed and wanted to know if the stars were “older than the Queen or the dinosaurs”. While we talked on, I wondered whether to reveal to her that the universe is in fact much stranger than our time- travelling images that were created the same year that Europe was being torn apart by the violent religious forces of the Reformation and the first Thanksgiving dinner was held in Newfoundland – though I thought I should perhaps wait until she was a bit older before raising the prospect that there is not really any such thing as time, other than in our imagination. That we are, according to the physicist Carlo Rovelli, ‘beings made of time’. However, assuming that you are slightly older than my daughter, I shall try to explain this to you, and perhaps she will read it herself in a few years from now. In doing so, I hope that you will see that Love is the single force that has the potential to make us feel at home in this fantastically strange universe.

Rovelli's The Order of Time sets one's head spinning as he explains how all that we think that we know about time is almost certainly wrong. As if the subject was not complex enough, the book requires a whole chapter on ‘The inadequacy of grammar’ to discuss time. We are told that to propose that there is such a thing as now or that there is a present in the universe is meaningless: ‘The idea that a well- defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience.’

My mother's Love knew no bounds when it came to my father's care. She nursed him for many years until his death. When I returned to the home where he no longer lived, she handed me a sheaf of handwritten papers that described the week leading up to his death: ‘Suddenly, a profound silence. I hugged him again and again and again. How much I Loved him.’ Her diary of this final week is remarkable for the unlimited and tender care with which she eased his passing, but perhaps more so for the way that her Love appears on the page as both a noun and as a verb. Love worked through her, but it was also a practice, an action that was done and perfected through her many years of care for him, through her decades as a nurse and as a mother to my siblings and me. It is this distinction between Love as something that exists beyond us and as something that we act out that makes Love so difficult to conceptualize. This dual meaning of Love means that our grammar is inadequate to speak about it and that we are often talking of different things when we refer to ‘Love’. However, Love is fundamental to almost everything that we do in the world, so this inadequacy of our usual conceptualization of Love will be addressed in Chapter 1. First, I will address what we mean by the Enlightenment and map out how the rest of the book will suggest that we might want to recover from it.

The Enlightenment can loosely be described as the emergence of European scientific rationality since the 1600s. It is the ongoing attempt to define and describe everything and often results in the disposal of anything that cannot be described. It has been expressed in: the loss of the divine right of kings in the 1600s; the standardization of weights and measures in the 1700s; the harnessing of ever more powerful forces, from steam to atomic power; and even recent attempts to quantify our attention for use and sale by companies like Facebook. While this process has created an increasingly complex and measurable understanding of the natural world, it has also hastened the destruction of the natural systems that we all rely on.

On the first weekend of June 2022, hundreds of people arrived at Davidstow Moor in the south- west of England for a three- day party. Held on an abandoned military base that is now public land and miles from the nearest house, the partygoers had followed a widely shared text message that finished by telling them: ‘Please be respectful to the locals and the authorities. Lets not give them a reason to become hostile towards us. The mission is to leave the site as we find it. We are all responsible! Please bring bin bags and take home what you can in your vehicles.’ Despite the partygoers being of no apparent threat to public safety or property, the police were mobilized to prevent access to the party, and although they did not attempt to shut it down, they did limit the number of people who were able to get there. As the Queen's Diamond Jubilee was celebrated elsewhere across the country on the same extended weekend of street parties bedecked in Union Jack flags, cream teas and village cricket matches, videos of the rave were shared on social media and the national news. To understand why a few hundred people having a party that did not impact anyone other than the police who were needlessly sent there made national news, we need to understand a little of the history of free parties in Britain, and the first clue is in the text message quoted earlier, which starts: ‘Free festival culture is back celebrating 30 years of Castlemorton!’

Castlemorton refers to a gathering of 50,000 people in Gloucestershire in May 1992. The Castlemorton Common rave occurred when the police prevented people from getting to the Avon Free Festival near Bath, resulting in thousands of people, the buses and vans that they lived in, along with countless sound systems parking on Castlemorton Common in the Malvern Hills. With nowhere to go, the party on the common started on 22 May and carried on for seven days. Leaked police intelligence reports have since indicated that the Travellers may have been intentionally corralled into a renowned beauty spot to engineer public animosity towards the ‘New Age Travellers’ of the free party scene. Soon enough, hostile editorials were running in the national press to call for legislation to criminalize free parties, or raves.

Reading The Wealth of Nations now, it is hard to get away from the fact that Adam Smith was mired in the presumption of his own racial superiority. This inconvenient truth for Smithian economics can be seen in the ‘Introduction and Plan of Work’ to all five of the books that make up The Wealth of Nations and situates Smith's work in a very different time and, perhaps more importantly, in a very different colonial world view that unflinchingly asserts the author's superiority over the ‘savage nations’:

It is worth considering that Smith is writing over a century before the criminologist Cesare Lombroso expounded the virtues of eugenics for defining criminal classes by race. Lombroso's racist conceit enabled the continued subjugation of black people and colonized nations well into the 20th century, up to and including the most horrific act of genocide when Nazi Germany attempted to exterminate Jews, Roma, ‘asocials’, black people, disabled people, Freemasons, gay people, Jehovah's Witnesses, non- Jewish Poles and Slavic prisoners of war, and political opponents and trade unionists in the Holocaust.

In the early 1960s, Harvard Professor of Psychology Richard Alpert gave himself and hundreds of willing volunteers enormous doses of the psychedelic drugs LSD and psilocybin. The states of bliss and enlightenment that they found through these chemicals would have a profound impact on the philosophies and politics that emerged over the next half- century. However, no matter how high they got, or how enlightened Alpert, his colleague Timothy Leary and their fellow travellers like Allen Ginsberg became, they always came down. Even after three weeks of dropping acid every four hours, they came down: ‘Oh, here I am again – Richard Alpert – what a drag!’ As Alexander Beiner also writes of the psychedelic experience in 2023, ‘no matter how much we expand in the moment, we always have to return to the realities of the systems we live in’. In 1967, all of this would change for Alpert when he was travelling through India and met the spiritual teacher Neem Karoli Baba (or ‘Maharaj- ji’). After a few days of getting to know him, Maharaj- ji asked to try some of Alpert's acid. Although Alpert had lost his enthusiasm for dropping it himself, he had been giving LSD to pundits around India in the hope that they might be able to tell him what the psychedelic experience meant. The pundits had been unable to give him an answer – that is until he met Maharaj- ji, who took a dose that was ten times more than Alpert thought sensible or safe. Describing the event 48 years later, Alpert tells us: ‘Nothing happened. He didn't have any reaction, I watched, and I watched, and I watched, nothing happened.’ Nothing happened because Maharaj- ji was already in a state of bliss; he was already enlightened. Asking Maharaj- ji how he could ‘get enlightened’, Alpert was told to ‘serve people and to feed people’. The acid that Alpert had taken before travelling to India had allowed him to momentarily experience something approaching enlightenment and had inspired his curiosity; Maharaj- ji had told him how to live an enlightened life.

In the 2013 film A Field in England, we are dropped into the narrative without time, date or explanation. We do, however, glean from the witchfinder hats and disembodied sounds of battle from another field nearby that we are in the midst of the English Civil War (1642– 51). The film's director, Ben Wheatley, later explained that he did not want the audience to understand the culture of the 1600s, which, to our modern sensibilities, would have been very strange indeed. Thus, the film gives us the sense of being dropped into a foreign land. The confusion continues as we are faced by multiple narratives that appear to run at different paces, are often unconnected and even pass in different directions as characters who have died in one moment appear alive in the next. We might take this to be an expression of the granular nature of time, with our ability to make sense of the apparently chaotic scenes being a testament to our ability to make sense of the strange and chaotic universe that we occupy more generally. The weirdness of the film is compounded by a ring of hallucinogenic mushrooms, or ‘fairy ring’, as we learned in Chapter 2, appearing and being eaten by the film's six characters, who then set off on a whole different type of ‘trip’ than the confused quest that they are already on. From this point, Wheatley's storytelling becomes ever less orthodox as we are given the impression that we, the viewers, are also affected by the same mushrooms – though this is of course an illusion.

One among many strange happenings in the film sees a man being pulled across the field by a stout rope lashed around his chest. Wheatley tells us in a later interview that this is a reference to folklore, which describes how entering a fairy ring will place you in ‘a magical realm where time is different’ but that four men can pull you out with a rope. This scene is a metaphor among many that appears to refer to the time in which the film is set.

The hill behind the house where I live is bisected by a fence line that is often highlighted by 40 or more black crows sitting atop each fencepost to form a perfect row of full stops against the sky. On some days, I see the full stops take flight and dive towards the ground in a chaotic mass. When they do, the nesting lapwings rise up to meet them and push them away from their eggs and young chicks. Lapwings are petite birds with a pretty crest when on the ground, but when they take flight, their huge blunt wings dwarf their bodies as they lumber up into the air for a battle of life and death with the mobs of crows. While their wings seem to hinder their taking off, demanding more energy to flap than seems possible from such a small bird, they hold the lapwings solid in the air as they physically block the crows’ trajectory towards their nests. When they have successfully resisted another bombardment, the lapwings gracefully soar up and away from the scene of the fight before wheeling back around for the next barrage. These birds have taught me an important lesson: the unity of the universe demands that we engage in battles of life and death every day to defend others, ourselves and the planet; however, the knowledge that there is a higher metaReal world of Love that underpins the world of politics and crow attacks should enable us to soar away from the emotional weight and potential trauma that they induce. Like the lapwings, we cannot control when the crows will attack, but we can choose to soar up into Love when we need to, and from the perspective that we gain when we do, we are able to look down and determine how to act next while also avoiding our own destruction. But the lapwings are not just a metaphor for our minds and the meditation practices that take us out of oppositional thinking. Our bodies also live in the world, and like the lapwings, we can physically take ourselves out of harm's way when we need to.