As the old paradigm crumbles, the fatal flaws of neoclassical economics are quickly being exposed to the world. This is a time of reawakening and rebirth: the age in which a new, more chaotic, more biologically and ecologically based paradigm is struggling to be born. This is the moment to align ourselves with the mavericks – to become agitators and provocateurs. This is the moment to openly challenge our professors and their neoclassical dogma and force the world to face the havoc their models have wrought. You can start by printing off the Kick it Over Manifesto and nailing it, Martin Luther-style, to your professor’s door. Then try staging a Neoclassical Sheep Walk down the corridor of your economics department.

When Canwest – Canada’s largest media conglomerate and Adbusters’ longtime adversary – filed for court protection against creditors earlier this month, the company left a lot of people high and dry. In addition to the long line of creditors the company is trying to default on, dozens of recently laid off employees will lose their promised severance packages, 80 non-union retirees will lose their health benefits and 120 former employees are facing reduced pensions.

Oh well, times are tough. Everybody’s taking a hit right now, right?

Wrong. Three Canwest directors, four top executives and 13 other senior members of Canwest management will PROFIT from this mess, splitting $9.8 million in Key Employee Retention Plan bonuses. That’s in addition to their already exorbitant salaries. So in one of the most baffling phenomena to come out of this current economic crisis, the very execs who drove the company into the ground are being paid millions of dollars to stay. Everyone else is simply out of luck.

This outrage is the latest hurdle in our protracted battle against Canwest and would-be media mogul Leonard Asper. We’ve been fighting Leonard in court for years, battling for the right of Canadian citizens to access their own public airwaves under the same rules and conditions as corporations and ad agencies do. It’s been a long, hard and expensive fight but finally, last April, a BC Court of Appeals overturned previous rulings and declared that television airtime may indeed constitute the “public space” we have claimed it to be. The ruling cleared the way for us to move forward against media corporations like Canwest that refuse to sell airtime for citizen-produced messages.

Canwest fought back with a technical challenge. They knew they couldn’t defeat us on the principle of free speech so they went after our pocketbook, hoping to tie us up in nonsense litigation and deplete our modest coffers. But in September, we won again. The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed Canwest’s challenge and gave us the green light to pursue our case in the lower courts. The courts also ruled that Canwest is liable for a portion of Adbusters’ legal costs.

But suddenly Canwest is out of money. And Adbusters joins the ranks of employees and creditors the media giant is refusing to pay. But we’re looking at the bright side of things … it seems Asper’s media empire (the one he inherited from daddy) is beginning to crumble. And any blow against his biased, autocratic rule is worth the money. With Conrad Black in jail and Asper on the run, we may finally be on the road to ending media tyranny in Canada once and for all!

The curious interplay between our imagination and external reality gives credence to the argument that the struggles over the mental environment are the future of activism. By protecting our mental environment we change external reality more quickly than any number of direct actions. But to make such an argument in today’s materialist, secular and scientific world requires the courage to imagine a different way of thinking.

Three hundred and seventy years ago, René Descartes sat down in a comfortable chair, with a candlestick on his table and his feet warmed by a fire. Closing his eyes, he gave free reign to his imagination. “What can I know for sure,” he wondered, “if I doubt everything?”

Modern philosophy began in this moment, with Descartes leading us through a series of thought experiments in which the rejection of all dubious knowledge leads him to discover the only knowable fact, famously expressed as “cogito, ergo sum”: I think, therefore I am. The freedom to imagine and to doubt all conventional wisdom and traditional truths was, thus, the first step in building our modern world-view.

The primacy of imagination in the construction of modern philosophy cannot be denied. A well-known criticism of Descartes’ imagination experiment is that it divorced the mind from the body and drew a barrier between the internal world of thoughts and the external world of reality. This mind-body separation occurs in Descartes because of his will to accept only what is absolutely knowable. To prove that the mind makes mistakes and cannot be trusted, he utilizes his imagination to interact with and falsify external reality.

Take, for example, an odd moment where Descartes imagines robots walking the streets. Near the end of his Second Meditation he writes, “if I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves… Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind.” In this moment of uncanny apprehension, seeing a man but imagining him to be an automaton, Descartes asks for certainty and rejects the evidence of his eyes because it can be influenced by the wanderings of his mind.

But what if he had not asked for certainty, had set aside the principle of non-contradiction, and accepted that what he saw at first as men were later automatons and then men again. In other words, what if we affirmed the position that imagination is constitutive of reality, not as a corrupting force but as an indispensable aspect.

If only Descartes had known how to imagine with his eyes open. The power of our imagination is so great that, even without the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, we can choose to see things that are not present or change the color of an object that is (as Edmund Husserl documented phenomenologically). Likewise, Martin Heidegger writes in Being and Time that our moods color the world around us. For example, on a bad day it seems as if the world is darker, the trees are weeping and the clouds grimacing. But if we suddenly get some good news, the world lightens up and the clouds look more like smiling faces than menacing grimaces. Thus, if our moods are being artificially influenced – through advertising, for example – we can expect that our external reality will also be influenced. From the perspective of mental environmentalism the concern is not with the imagination’s impact on external reality but on external reality’s impact on imagination.

We must dispel immediately the notion that our mental environment is unique to each individual. Just as we share our natural environment, we also share our mental environment, which is crafted through the culture we consume – the television shows we watch, the websites we frequent and the symbols and concepts that comprise our thoughts. (Heidegger referred to this shared aspect as our “they-self”.) Thus, the mental environment is not something entirely within us but is instead something that is outside of our complete control and shared among a culture. The danger, and opportunity, here is obvious. If there is no strict division between my internal world and the external world and if I am not in complete control over my internal world then the way the world appears to me is contestable.

In other words, if we engage in an activism of mental environmentalism it need not be construed as a politics of solipsism, or an attempt to dodge the imperative of “direct action”. Instead, developing another way of thinking that places the role of imagination back into the forefront and denies the right of corporations to influence our mental environment may be the most effective strategy of cultural insurrection in the twenty-first century because it directly influences the manifestation of our natural environment.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He lives in Berkeley, CA and is currently writing a book about the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

Experts agree that we are experiencing perilous climate change that calls the fate of our experiment in civilization into question. As severe weather strikes one continent and mysterious die-offs occur in another, the death rattle of the natural environment grows louder. “Where have all the fireflies gone?” we wonder, and then the scientists confirm that they have noted their absence as well. Once the so-called experts step in and the media assures us that abnormal things are indeed happening, we suppress our alarm and resume sleepwalking through ironic consumption. Is this the only way we can experience climate change?

“Experience” is a word we use everyday so it should be easy to define what it means. Some would argue that to experience climate change is to acknowledge its existence. They see experience as living through an event, and they hope to weather what awaits by maintaining the lifestyle that brought us this historical, ecological moment. Those who treat an experience as something to be survived see climate change as something that can be dealt with using the tools of advanced technology, international diplomacy and public education campaigns. “We can get through this,” might be their admirable motto and most of our society could be counted as their supporters.

But “experience” has another meaning that we ought to consider. The words “experiment,” “expert” and “experience” are related: an expert is often someone who gains experience through experiments. The expert need not be a scientist; we also gain experience by submitting ourselves to life-experiments like outdoor adventures, risky activism or dangerous thinking. After one of these experiences, we’ve transformed ourselves and come closer to our full potential. Experience, it seems, has some connection to a test that puts our self into question.

It may not be a surprise to learn that the common root which “expert,” “experiment” and “experience” share is the Latin word experiri, which means “to put to the test.” In fact, we can go one step further and say that every experience is a dangerous test. I do not say this without cause but instead am referring back to the Latin root experiri, which comes from periculum meaning test, trial, risk, danger or, as it is commonly translated: peril. The other meaning of the word experience is thus to be in peril.

Those who understand experience in this second sense will grasp climate change as a perilous existential and civilizational trial. Nature, via climate change, is charging us with ecocide and we must respond if we want to avoid the death sentence. It is no defense to cling to life as it was before today in the hopes of surviving the weather of tomorrow – that is merely blind denial to the trial taking place.

Instead, we must put our selves, our minds, our souls and our way of life under review. We can respond to the charges brought against us only by renouncing the industrial, consumerist worldview that brought us to this catastrophic point. To experience climate change is to be called to take part in an experiment after which the world as we know it is forever changed.

Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org