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The answer, from the perspective of 'radical happiness', is to reanimate lost histories of collective, communal ecstasy. Barbara Ehrenreich gives us the religious and Dyonisian roots of carnival, rock and dance. Segal connects utopias, alternative ways of living, from early socialists and feminists, Surrealists, soixant-huitards and Indignados, to moments of collective joy in which the utopia is briefly, autopoietically animated. The Acid Corbynites reprise Sixties counterculture, acid and the rave scene, in which consciousness was altered, bent out of its habitual grooves, and "raised".
These moments, in which flare up ancient ecstasies and future utopias, are moments of self-forgetting elation. It is not so much that participants in festivals, protests, carnivals and churches are happy, though they might be, so much as that they stop worrying about whether they are happy or not. St John of the Cross, a practitioner of what Coventry Patmore called the 'science of ultimates', speaks of his consciousness-raising ravishment thus: "All ceased, and I was not,/ Leaving my cares and shame/ Among the lilies, and forgetting them."
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