The given is a prison

John Berger, in The Shape of a Pocket, often talks about how capitalism reduces the world to a marketplace.  Humans become buyers and sellers.  All images from the media become labelled.  Sometimes he refers to painters as providing us ways out of the labelling.   Here he talks about the effects of this culture and that the proper response is to resist and denounce.  He says that Hieronymus Bosch's Millennium Triptypch is "a strange prophecy of the mental climate imposed on the world at the end our our century by globalisation and the new economic order."  He says that the prophecy "is not so much in the details -- haunting and grotesque as they are -- but in the whole.  Or, to put it another way, in what constitutes the space of hell."

There is no horizon there. There is no continuity between actions, there are no pauses, no paths, no pattern, no past and no future. There is only the clamour of the disparate, fragmentary present. Everywhere there are surprises and sensations, yet nowhere is there any outcome. Nothing flows through: everything interrupts. There is a kind of spatial delirium.

Compare this space to what one sees in the average publicity slot, or in a typical CNN news bulletin, or any mass media news commentary. There is a comparable incoherence, a comparable wilderness of seprate excitements, a similar frenzy.

The culture in which we live is perhaps the most claustrophobic that has ever existed; in the culture of globalisation, as in Bosch's hell, there is no glimpse of an elsewhere or an otherwise. The given is a prison. And faced with such reductionism, human intelligence is reduced to greed.

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What the painting by Bosch does is to remind us -- if prophecies can be called reminders -- that the first step towards building an alternative world has to be a refusal of the world-picture implanted in our minds and all the false promises used everywhere to justify and idealise the delinquent and insatiable need to sell. Another space is vitally necessary.

First, an horizon has to be discovered. And for this we have to refind hope -- against all the odds of what the new order pretends and perpetrates.

Hope, however, is an act of faith and has to be sustained by other concrete actions. For example, the action of approach, of measuring distances and walking towards. This will lead to collaborations which deny discontinuity. The act of resistance means not only refusing to accept the absurdity of the world-picture offered us, but denouncing it. And when hell is denounced from within, it ceases to be hell.