are you along for the ride...

Free Association:
Bill "Che" Hicks On Revolutionary Comedy
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“A poet is a beggar with pride.”
--Idries Shaw

“An Artist is a poet with a business plan.”
--Ben Mack

Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as an art student and later as an ad man, I came into close contact with corporations, mass media, and advertising of all sorts. I watched friends from art school succeeded and floundered.

I began to realize that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming a famous writer or making a significant contribution to advertising: I wanted to be of service.

How does one actually carry out a work of social service? How can I unite my endeavors with the needs of society?

First, I wanted to ensure I wasn’t a drain on society. From a modicum of success in advertising I knew that money wouldn’t buy me happiness. From a lack of success in art I knew that poverty didn’t provide me with happiness either.

I wanted to shed my fear and live in light. I came to the realization that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. We have a choice, right now, between fear and love.

The proponents of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors and buy guns, close yourself off; the warriors of love, instead, see all of us as one. As one, there is no such thing as death, and life is a lucid dream in which we play the imaginations of ourselves.

Loving for no reason is a revolutionary act. That’s what I get when I read Jesus, to love for the sake of loving because love is metaphysical gravity. If as a society we ever organize ourselves around love we will live in a profoundly different world.

For this task of organization, as for all revolutionary tasks, fundamentally it is the individual who is needed. The revolution does not, as some claim, standardize the collective will and the collective initiative. On the contrary, it liberates one's individual talent. What the revolution does is orient that talent. And our task now is to orient the creative abilities of all entertainment professionals toward the tasks of social welfare.

We must begin to erase our old concepts. We should not go to the people and say, `Here we are. We come to give you the wisdom of our presence, to teach you our science, to show you your errors, your lack of culture, your ignorance of elementary things.' We should go instead with an inquiring mind and a humble spirit. However, we should never be so humble as to tolerate their intolerance. Instead, we should hold them accountable, truly accountable to what they say they stand for. In many instances in America, this is the words of Jesus. If that be their choice, then ask them to demonstrate these words in action. If there choice be otherwise, let them demonstrate the good in those words.

Later we will realize many times how mistaken we were in concepts that were so familiar they became part of us and were an automatic part of our thinking. Often we need to change our concepts, not only the general concepts, the social or philosophical ones, but also sometimes our concepts of entertainment and attention economy.

We shall see that ignorance should not be treated as it is in big-city schools. We shall see that the educator has to be a farmer also and plant new ideas and sow, by example, the desire to consume new notions, to diversify the nutritional structure which is so limited, so poor.

If we intend to make creative work a daily, dynamic source of all our happiness, then we have goals towards which to work.

I think one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in peoples’ awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful.

Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', a civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being."

But the artist cannot be deaf to the call of truth; it alone defines his creative will, organizes it, thus enabling him to pass on his faith to others. An artist who has no faith is like a painter who has been born blind.

The greatest truth I’ve met in this universe is sustainability. Just about every artist I know dreams of being wealthy. Many business people I meet dream of being artists.

I dream of being happy. Many of my daydreams have lasted me weeks at a time.
Here’s to dreaming. Thank you for playing along in my dream. We become the stories we tell ourselves. Let’s help each other tell ourselves better stories.

Ben Mack