The Politics of Waking Up
Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age
An astonishing and deeply moving political vision as well as a concrete road map to a better, more meaningful, deeply democratic, equal and awake society with just the right daring dance between mind, soul and body. Between I, we and the world.
In short: I was blown away after reading this book. You will be too.
Uffe Elbaek, founder of Kaos Pilots education and co-founder of Alternativet and Independent Green political parties, Denmar
The Politics of Waking Up invites us into a deeply personal conversation about how we can transform the world today to create a thriving society and planet. Indra Adnan’s fractal approach to politics is a promising response to the fragmentation, polarization, despair, and disconnect that many people are feeling. This is democracy for the future, and it involves all of us, right here and right now. As Indra puts it, “wanting is not enough: it needs organization.” The book is full of real-world examples of our potential for quantum social change, and it wakes us all to what is possible.
Karen O’Brien, Professor of Human Geography, University of Oslo, Nobel Peace laureate with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.
The Politics of Waking Up is not just brilliant and disarming, it’s genuinely different. Instead of merely affirming hope, Indra Adnan provides it. She breaks genuinely new ground by sharing the living, embodied process of a new post-patriarchal political paradigm, the radical soft power of coming together humanly, to take care of our shared cosmolocal lives and future.
Terry Patten, author & founder of A New Republic of the Heart & co-author of Integral Life Practice
Everyone thinks they know what it means to be “woke”, whether they’re proudly declaring it, or angrily attacking it.
But writer, political entrepreneur and psychosocial therapist Indra Adnan has written a comprehensive and necessary account of “waking up” – to the realities of the climate crisis, social breakdown, and personal agency – which implicates us all. In the internet era, no-one escapes the global revolution of learning, connecting and mobilising and its entangled consequences.
This reality demands a political response. But our current politics – led by fractious parties and their exhausted ideologies – are clearly broken and dysfunctional. Only 2% of the UK electorate think it’s worth the time or money to join a political party.
How do we put the full spectrum of a consciously awakening humanity at the heart of society, economy and politics? As social bonds fray and the planet burns, a politics of “waking up” is more urgently required than ever.
Informed by decades of public advocacy, transformative work with both local and global communities, as well as her lifelong commitment to inner wisdom, The Politics of Waking Up lays out Adnan’s practical, beautiful and urgent ways to redesign politics for an era of people power.
Drawing on her years of political entrepreneurship as co-initiator of The Alternative UK, Adnan shares a compelling vision of a “fractal” politics with an emphasis on new patterns of behaviour and viable prototypes of social progress that can be copied and replicated everywhere.
The Politics of Waking Up presents a coherent and radical alternative to our current socio-political turbulence. One that is there for the taking.
The book will be published with Perspectiva Press in June 2021. You can order here.
Illustration from The Politics of Waking Up