by Ben Lawson

My favorite line from the Back to the Future trilogy was Doc telling Marty, “You’re not thinking forth dimensionally!” As a scientist, it was second nature for Doc to be running cause-and-effect flow charts in his head. On a chalkboard he drew a time-line showing that the 1985 world he and Marty went back to had been radically altered when a “tangent” occurred in 1955. A totally dystopic, corrupt, polluted, and oppressive future was set in motion from one temporal disruption. It was a nightmare that they’d do all in their power to avert. They were acutely aware of their agency in the matter. They knew that they must concentrate their efforts to subvert the tangent that led to the hell fate.

I love the constant passionate problem solving that both Marty and Doc exemplified. They embodied the absolute antithesis of apathy for the present and future. They contained essential psychological ingredients that anarcho-punks so often lack. They had a sincere heart connection to the/a future which put their minds fully in the cockpit of the present. They took full responsibility for their destiny and they combined their creative genius to strategize and map out solutions. Let’s try to take the Doc’s advice and apply some forth dimensional thinking to our temporal crisis.

Shamanologist Terrance McKenna believed that time is kind of like a multi-directional array of currents and that while most surge from past to present to future, there is always a counter-current running backward from the future. He notes that artists are sometimes thought to be the antennas that pick up these signals from the edge of the horizon and, through their creative works, guide the evolution of other sectors of society.

With this radical notion in mind, let’s embark on a thought experiment. What if the dreams and visions of the anarcho-punk movement were actually a kind of misty backflow of memories coming from the idyllic future of anarchy that’s portrayed in our lyrics and art? What if there was some kind of forth dimensional feedback loop spinning through the chaos of the cosmos? What if time was not simply a one-directional arrow? What if this crude over-simplified framework is just a convenient model that our limited untrained minds have created to make sense of a much more complex reality?

We’d have to pay more attention to the dynamic nature of the big picture.

Our every action or inaction in every moment is a power that adjusts the set, actors, props, and storyline into eternity. That power is what makes us all ourselves divine. We are co-creators of the universe. We are chaotigens. We constantly generate chaos that flows in all directions of space and time. There should be no doubt that the evolution of the anarcho-punk movement will continue as long as the sun rises, the only questions are what will its evolutionary stages look like and how active will we be in this moment to shape the evolution.

With the certainty of our role in evolution in mind, what if we also had no doubt that our liberation and autonomy would in some way be achieved? What if we actually had deep connections, as did Marty McFly, to a future that we love and would do anything to return to?

We’d give up the fear, the apathy, and the “no future, no hope” cop-out. We’d just get busy. Unfortunately unlike Marty, we have a long course to correct. We don’t have a time-machine to get back to our self-made anarcho-paradise. We are stuck here in linear time and we have to do the work on a daily basis for years and years, generations and generations to get “back to the future.” We won’t be able to just fix one thing then instantly skip over time to get to the end result of our present efforts. We have to accept the likelihood that our lifetimes will end before our subculture comes to fruition. All we can do now is prepare the soil, plant the seeds, and ensure that the roots grow deep. Perhaps we’ll reincarnate through the generations to enjoy the fruits of our 21st century labors. We just have to BELIEVE in the long range effects of our current efforts and have as much love and care for our descendents’ well being as we selfishly have for our fragile egos.

That’s the psychology behind the Iroquois protocol, “In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation… even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.”

This transcendental forth dimensional commitment is not easily housed by the individual ego; it can only comfortably reside in the infinite realm of spirit. The closer one’s identity moves from ego to spirit in a lifetime the smaller the fear of death becomes and larger the faith in the continuum of being becomes. This is the essence of holism, the notion that everyone and everything is a part of a larger whole.

According to the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, “Our myopic focus on this life and this life only is the great deception; the source of the modern world’s bleak and destructive materialism.”

In The Terminator it was warned that “the future’s not set, there’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” John Connor knew how absolutely vital it would be to instill empowering concepts in the skeptical and low-esteemed mind of his pre-revolutionary mother. He had Reese thank Sarah for her strength in getting them through “the dark years.”

Where is our strength to get us through the dark years? It’s more like the spare change to get us more dark beers. No offense, but I’m yearning to get back to the future of punks climbing apple trees and hand pressing home brew cider on orchards extending as far as the eye can see. That future can/does exist, but like Marty’s family photo, faces in the pictures of smiling future tribal families disappear everyday as they fade into oblivion in the present. Working with youth punks in L.A. has had this effect on my temporal photo album many times. For a moment you’re building a real future together, then in the next, the stronger current of punk tradition, that of self-destruction carries them away and the joyful singing and whistling starts to echo in the distance of time. Screams of agonizing liver failure, overdose, and vomit gurgling asphyxiation fade to silence. How many among us have faded out of that original smiling picture? I’m sure the older among us have had many a photo fade to black.

We don’t lack vision, we lack the consistent psychological state to take a vision and do the footwork to manifest our dreams into reality. Think of Marty McFly and Sarah Conor. Were they for even a second not at peak performance? Were they ever lazy and ambivalent about either changing or sustaining the future they passionately believed in? No! Not for a second, they were urgently active, they were on a mission. They were in mission mode. Failure to them was not an option. They were not going to just lay there passed out in the present making up weak excuses to be nihilistic and misanthropic. They had a Zen-like detachment from the present, yet a total commitment to it. They knew that their fulfillment and/or survival, while not to be found in the present, would be the direct result of the efficacy of their actions in the now.

It is true we are all broken hearted and broken minded, we have little reason to believe in and hope for a future that is better rather than worse, we have plenty of pain to chew on and the future fulfillment we salivate for we’ve barely sampled in our lived experience. So how can we synthesize Marty and Sarah’s passion? How can we get in the zone and be driven to create our own autonomy step-by-step, moment-by-moment, day-by-day? How can we transcend our very real disempowerment and the very real pits of despair that “the self” inhabits?

The self, broken out of the tribal matrix of interdependence, interconnection, shared love, communal living, intergenerational villages, etc. is a deeply troubled thing. Without those forth dimensional bonds it rots alone. Without a sense of honor for the ancestors, the history of the sacred land, and the sacred future generations, you’re stuck only valuing your grossly devalued personal life. Capitalism has popped most of us out of nature and the human life cycle where all meaning, purpose, joy, love, sustenance, and fulfillment is found and left us in a maze of commodities to consume in search for a soul.

After so many years of ceaseless suffering, fleeting fulfillment, conditional love and happiness, it became clear to me that perhaps I won’t ever be totally free, healthy, and happy in this life-time. Maybe I won’t be cured of the pain. Maybe the wounds will never heal. For a lone individual, that cold realization is enough to want to do yourself in, but for one who is part of a whole, the whole chain of life, there’s a new dimension of purpose, meaning, and responsibility. If my pain can be learned from and possibility avoided by my subcultural descendents, then my suffering is not in vain, it’s an invaluable part of cultural evolution. If my life lessons can be preserved and eventually be a piece of the mosaic of cultural wisdom, then I can carry on in this life with strength.

A book was written by psychotherapist and Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl entitled Man’s Search for Meaning. It describes how it was those in the camps who were able to find a self-transcending purpose who were able to survive and endure the pain. Some sustained the will to survive the camps by deciding that a continued life could be dedicated to educating the world about the horrors and thus ensure such atrocities would never happen again. Frankl writes, “When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Just as the holocaust survivor, the AIDS patient knows that they’ve been put on mission to stop the spread of the pathology that victimized them. Just as the AIDS patient, the rape victim knows they can find spiritual healing and strength in becoming prevention activists.

This is the power of forth dimensional psychology: the agency in the present to affect a more positive future thereby invigorating the now and healing the past.

So the poor nihilistic, apathetic and depressed anarcho-punk visionary can defeat the psycho-pathology that plagues them. To preserve the sanctity of the dreams and visions of the next generation, to preserve “one possible future,” we can transcend our cynicism and imagine ourselves as survivors of the hellish 21st century.

We can plant a garden today and give it a name and as we’re naming it think of the future generations who will be nourished by it. They’ll be reliant on it, it will be sacred to them and an eternal symbol of the strength, resilience, and dedication that some of us found in the present. Our descendents will be eternally thankful that not all of us “died in the gutter,” that some of us gave enough of a fuck about them that we finally broke the cycle of self-destruction. We finally decided that for any future to exist, our scene had to take real steps to evolve into a culture and into self-sufficient ecologically viable populations.

The evolutionary leap from partying to paradise will be the subject of future writings. But the forth dimensional psychological mutation must occur otherwise there will be no impetus to evolve. We’ll be the same pathetic, ineffectual, reactionary, powerless, consumeristic, entertainment addicted party scene until we connect ourselves to the forth dimension. In that mind frame we can find power and meaning in the now and actually begin pulling the future toward each moment until one day we (the culture) wake up and we’re there. Like when Marty returns home and everything is actually better than what he left because of all of the positive transformative tangents that he unknowingly released (“If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything!”). To him everything was great. Imagine working as he did to secure a life he believed in with all his heart.

To our future generations, the times of self-destruction, apathy, nihilism, and misanthropy will all be just ghost stories and scary bedtime stories used to reinforce tribal bonds, daily responsibilities, togetherness, love, sacred and respectful use of intoxicants, etc. The dark years will be something that future generations wonder about. It would be unfathomable to them to try to imagine their ancestors (us) constantly poisoning ourselves with the sacred nectars of mother Earth. It’d have to be explained that it killed a great many of us and rendered most of us completely useless. They’d have to try to imagine a world filled with so much pain that to deliberately poison yourself to the extreme would actually be more pleasurable than simply enjoying in balance and moderation the pleasures abundant in culture and nature.

I’ll end with the words of Charles Dickin’s infamous fictional forth dimensional psychological voyager Ebenezer Scrooge. After a mortifying trip through time he comes to find his power to proactively alter the present and future. He wakes up to a new world, a new self, a new purpose, a new love of all his relations and says, “Oh, it’s a wonderful morning. So much to do. So much to do!.”

Can we make the effort to neuro-associate pain to our faults and weaknesses and pleasure to our power and strength to change ourselves, the present, and the future?

The ghost of Jacob Marley haunts me through my punk brothers and sisters lost to suicide, drug overdose, and the mainstream. He warns, if we do not change now, our chains will only get heavier…