Category: All in the Mind

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Blaming the Messenger

Spiked Online are at it again, jumping at the chance to blame common atrocities on the spectre of green fascists. To the likes of Frank Füredi and Brendan O'Neill a green fascist is anyone who doesn't believe in their technocratic vision of unlimited human and material growth, if indeed they believe their own propaganda. More is always better and anyone who says otherwise opposes progress.

A couple of weeks ago a school shooting in the Finnish town of Jokela captured the imagination of the European and North American media. A loner with the Internet pseudonym of NaturalSelector89 who had published a gun-toting video on YouTube, advocating the culling of much of the world's population, shot dead six fellow students and then completed his cleansing of the human race by turning on himself.

Although the importance of school shootings pales numerically in comparison with the slaughter taking place in countries ravaged by foreign occupation and civil wars, they form a regular part of a media spectacle obsessed with violence. Over the last few weeks the British popular media has entertained the gullible public with the latest on the murder of a female English student in Perugia, revelations of sex fiend responsible for the murder of Vicky Hamilton over 16 years ago, more on the Madeleine McCann story and, if that did not sate the appetite of necrophiles, the copycat accidental throat slitting during a sex game by the daughter of a wealthy businessman, now two-timing as a New Labour MP. Once you've consumed the appalling tales of shock and horror violence in the tabloid press, you can switch on the telly or game console and consume yet more, always portrayed as the acts of psychopathic individuals or justified revenge by their victims or their saviours. Indeed the two genres of media violence are often interpolated with ads for violence-themed movies alongside news stories and gory titbits of domestic news in the break between segments of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Whoever may be directly responsible for these atrocious acts, the media guides us subtly to the conclusion that we need to grant the state even more control over our lives. If Madeleine McCann had had an RFID chip implant, we might know her whereabouts by now, and if a CCTV camera had been installed in her bedroom we would have video footage of her abductor or killer. So why not go ahead and implant RFID chips in all children and CCTV cameras in all bedrooms. Honestly, it will not be long before child abuse awareness raisers make such absurd calls. Without thinking some of us are letting the authorities turn this country into a police state way beyond George Orwell's wildest imagination, all because law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from a freedom-and-democracy-loving establishment. Yet the very same establishment that purportedly wants to protect us against psychopaths also promotes a lifestyle that breeds insanity and extreme disillusionment. Few of us can meet the high expectations set by a combination of the mass media and peer pressure. 'I must have a Wii gadget because I'll be the only person in my class without one and if you don't buy one you're a child abuser'. We can hardly claim that many Europeans lack the financial means to acquire essentials like food, water and shelter. Indeed malnutrition nearly always takes the form of eating disorders amid an abundance of readily available junk food and anorexic supermodels.

I can think of many problems that afflict today's youth, but somehow over-intellectualisation is not one of them. This should not come as a surprise to the author of 'Where have all the intellectuals gone?' and the founding father LM Mag group, Frank Füredi. Most youngsters are either too immersed in pop culture or wrapped up in their own personal issues to worry about the wider world. I don't see green fascists roaming the streets at night mugging innocent pedestrians or developing 3D simulations of a depopulation campaign to save mother nature from the curse of humanity. Instead, I see disenchanted youths joining gangs in inner-city ghettos and millions more alienated youths totally enraptured by virtual reenactments of fighting. One buys a 40-inch plasma screen in order to view gory scenes in their true glory, not apparently to view a documentary on climate change.

As Paul Flynn, one of the few critically thinking Labour MPs left, notes in his blog 'No British coverage I read mentioned anti-depressants, yet that have been a factor in 28 school shootings and stand-offs including the killing of 10 students in Columbine and 5 in Minnesota . The website www.ssristories.com/index.php has published the full lists.'

Now let us just briefly ponder on Brendan O'Neill's thesis. He claims that Pekka Erik Auvinen was somehow inspired by Finnish fisherman and ecofascist intellectual Pentti Linkola. The extreme pessimism and politically incorrect support for eugenics and authoritarian rule to bring the population down to more manageable numbers suits the arguments of technocratic polemicists fine. Pentti honestly believes humanity is doomed unless we urgently cull most of the world's human masses, but we should at least distinguish warnings from extreme reactions.

Tale of the Titanic

Consider the infamous Titanic ocean liner as a metaphor for planet Earth. The ship has a revolutionary new unbreakable hull and is heading full steam ahead for iceberg-infested water just to the south of Greenland. Like the global population, the ship contains a huge economic disparity of passengers, some occupying the upper decks with luxury cabins, private bathrooms, dance halls and room service. Others occupying the lower decks packed like sardines. As nobody expected the unsinkable ship to go down, lifeboats could only save a small minority of passengers. As it happened they did not even suffice to save all the first-class passengers let alone those in the lower decks.

Now, what would you have done if you had spotted the infamous iceberg in time? In hindsight, most humane people would have done everything possible to alert the crew so they steer the ship clear of the iceberg and alerted as many passengers as possible so we could make the best use of available resources to save as many people as possible. So what would the position of the Spiked sect be? In a nutshell, don't panic! Place your trust in the wonders of human technology and enjoy the cruise. Those who claim the ship will sink and kill off 90% of the ship's passengers are misanthropic green fascists. Now the likes of Pentti Linkola, a rare specimen indeed, might advocate shedding excess passengers even before we hit the iceberg and might not attempt to steer the ship clear of the near-certain calamity, but most environmental realists would accept the harsh truth that we'd better adapt in time or face high excess death rates. If I advise you not to cross a busy motorway on foot because you might die, that's a warning. But if I drive my car at 70mph (112kmh) through a quiet village and run you over, that's called murder. Whichever way, Pentti Linkola's musings represent the mind of melancholic cynicism that can appeal to alienated individuals with an axe to grind. If you are bullied at school and treated as an outcast, you can hardly be expected to have a very optimistic view of humanity, a subject to which I'll return in my next piece 'Is another World Possible'. But let's be clear Pekka acted as a paranoid pushing innocent passengers off the upper decks of the Titanic long before the ship had approached icy waters. The analogy might not be perfect, but we still have time to avert disaster and the likes of Pekka and those killed by his deranged shooting fell victim to technocratic means of mind control.

Population Pessimists

You see the position of population pessimists, as we call the likes of Paul Ehrlich is quite simple to summarise. Human population took thousands of years to climb gradually with ups and downs, from a few hundred million (estimates for global population circa 0 AD average around 300 million) to 700 million at the dawn of the industrial revolution. It then took another 150 years through famines and widespread ethnic cleansing in the epoch of colonial expansion, to climb to around 1.2 billion, circa 1890. All subsequent growth in little more than a century can be attributed to the petroleum revolution that significantly boosted agricultural yields and enabled regional specialisation through global distribution. So if this age is about to come to an end for hard scientific reasons, we may be in dire straits and thus need to adapt to lower aggregate consumption, an equation with two main variables per capita consumption and human population. Does that mean killing surplus people? No because if the pessimists are right, nature will take care of all human culling measures required to restabilise the ecosystem. The pessimists are merely predicting disaster. It's up to us to apply centuries of collective experience to avert this disaster or, at least, minimise the catastrophic consequences. Death and destruction are precisely what we want to avoid, but as I've pointed out in many other articles, will happen on a much greater scale if we fail to readapt to a post-petroleum age by consuming less and planning smaller, but viable and cohesive, families. So what if the population pessimists are wrong and, as the 1999 Channel 4 documentary, Against Nature, claimed the earth can genuinely support 32 billion human beings all with private motor vehicles, fridges and washing machines? What if hidden somewhere below the earth's crust are trillions of cubic metres of abiotic oil and we will soon develop the technology to tame Mars's environment? Well in that unlikely scenario, we still have plenty of time to grow and fill the void. It's planning for continued growth that's so drastically wrong.

Upside-Down Thinking

In my humble opinion neither the extreme pessimists, those who claim the earth can support only a few hundred million, nor the extreme optimists, those who claim we can happily embrace billions more human beings into our mass-consumer lifestyle, are right. Personally, I'd rather see a significantly lower consumption in the opulent world than significantly higher mortality through disease and starvation in the poor world. I kind of think on a purely pragmatic level we need to set priorities. We are already so interdependent that a prolonged power outage in a large city like London could kill thousands within days. Hospitals would shut and soon run out of supplies for emergency generators, refrigerated goods would rot, supermarkets would shut as would most places of work and education. Water pumps would fail and all supplies of bottled water would run out within hours. The whole place would grind to a halt and millions unable to flee. Indeed a tragedy could only be averted if other large organisations intervened promptly with a huge expenditure of resources. Just consider the fate of New Orleans in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina in times of plenty. The first victims are always the urban poor. If the United States can spend upwards of 400 billion bucks on invading and occupying Iraq, surely it could have devoted a small fraction of the quantity to saving its own citizens in its own territory? Apparently not, US multinationals need more oil to continue their addiction to economic growth at all costs. They don't really need 10,000 poor Louisianans as there are plenty more potential consumers and workers elsewhere. Their disappearance can be written off as unfortunate collateral damage of natural events beyond our control and possibly bad planning. You see as the human population becomes less sustainable, individual citizens become more expendable. Conversely, the more sustainable the economy is in the long term, the more valuable its citizens. This is why the blind optimism of perpetual growthers relies so much on upside-down thinking. If, like me, you loathe the prospect of mass famines, internecine warfare, an encroaching police state and widening rich-poor gap, you'd favour powering down, consuming less per capita and stabilising population by lowering the birth rate. If, however, you don't care, are too concerned about your private high consumption lifestyle, taking cheap flights and one car per adult for granted, and would rather buy into the notion that a finite planet can support unlimited growth, then expect the worst. But high-profile pseudo-intellectuals like Brendan O'Neill should know better. They know green activists abhor violence and the multibillion pound mass entertainment business is controlled by a tiny elite wielding enormous power over consumers. While Brendan O'Neill probably reads the Guardian and Independent and pretends to see elements of fascism in the likes of George Monbiot (in reality a very conformist moderate), the masses consume a diet of the Sun, Sky TV, Ryanair and online gambling with plenty of boozing and video-gaming opportunities. Indeed the very unintellectual masses are deluged daily with Shop-Until-You-Drop propaganda, so much so that UK consumer debt has reached 1.3 trillion pounds. Are we seriously to pretend that Rupert Murdoch, a key supporter of Thatcher, Blair, GW Bush and Howard as well as the tyrannical Chinese regime, has the best interests of ordinary working people at heart. Yet it is in his media outlets that we hear the most outspoken Growth at any Price propaganda. Has Spiked Online offered Jeremy Clarkson a column yet? Your average gas-guzzling motorist doesn't want to personally kill innocent Iraqis, Iranians or Venezuelans, but is perfectly prepared to believe a warped version of reality, in which they are victims of evil dictators whom our benevolent leaders have always opposed. Europeans driving across the wilds of Tanzania in their 4x4 Landrovers may wish car-less African villagers all the best, but are seldom prepared to admit that their lifestyle relies on resources that others are denied. Africa in the early 21st century has become a battleground between Chinese, European and Anglo-American energy and commodity corporations.

Remember when you could smoke on the London Underground?

The first time I travelled on the London underground, sometime in the mid 70s, passengers smoked nonchalantly. This was just before separate smoking and non-smoking cars had been introduced and would be unthinkable today for two reasons. First, because the non-smoking majority no longer tolerates tobacco pollution, but more to the point, because attempting to light up on most tube lines anytime between 7:30 and 9:00am could very easily ignite other passengers as the mean gap between standing persons is seldom more than an inch. Banning smoking on public transport led to a temporary improvement in air quality, soon offset by a higher density of passengers. You see if I don't have to share the same room with you, personally I don't care whether you smoke. Indeed if we share a large hall, I might tolerate your smoking fairly well, but if we have to share a metaphorical phone box, I might object. Spiked Online's panacea would have even more people happily choosing whether to smoke. We'd need to quadruple the London Underground network. First, we'd have to double it to cope with the current volume of passengers and then double it again to have separate networks for smokers and non-smokers. More people means subjugating ourselves to greater control over each others' lives. If you live in a small close-knit community you don't need extensive databases of sexual predators and potential terrorists, because everyone knows other members of the community and has time to vet occasional newcomers, but when people move house at the drop of a hat and few residents have any roots in the neighbourhood, we have to rely on the police, social services, CCTV cameras and RFID chips to defend us against dangerous individuals in our midst. Whether you like or not overcrowding not only reduces individual freedom and rights, but also tends to impact negatively on community relations.

Ironically the Spiked ' Sect tells would have us believe we can have our cake and eat it, i.e. we can continue to increase our burden on the ecosystem by relying even more on remote impenetrable technology and still enjoy personal lifestyle freedoms. Yet as sure as night follows day, technocratic elites take away our freedoms and put in their place a totally controlled fun culture.

A Note On the Spiked Sect

  • For those unfamiliar with Spiked Online, I'd better explain where it comes from. Posing as trendy progressives on the cutting edge of intellectual debate, the sect started life as breakaway faction from the old International Socialists, now Socialist Workers' Party, back in the mid 70s. They formed a far-left clique called the Revolutionary Communist Party, which took, shall we say without fear of contradiction, extreme stands on burning issues of the day, chiefly the civil war in the North of Ireland, steadfastly supporting the IRA and Sinn Fein even through some of the most indefensible atrocities against civilians. You name the issue and they tried to trump the rest of the radical left by assuming a more absolutist stance or dismissing more mainstream struggles as pointless syndicalism (like industrial action) or misguided counterrevolutionary revisionism. By the mid 80s they had honed their identity as the ultimate defenders of Marxist progress, seen purely in the simplistic terms that socialism represents not so much an alternative to the current world order but the next logical step in humanity's relentless progress from nomadism, through feudalism to capitalism and onwards to the dictatorship of the proletariat, guided by a vanguard party. Their vision of the future clearly reflected the prejudices of cosmopolitan Anglo-American elites. Rather than challenge rampant consumerism and large multinationals taking control of each and every aspect of people's lives, they embraced globalism as the ultimate humankind's destiny. Their focus moved away from the working class cause altogether as they attracted mainly upwardly mobile ambitious media studies students. However, they persevered with their role as the left's Devil's Advocate, especially when the left swallowed emotive humanitarian rhetoric on complex international crises such as the 1994 Rwandan democide, providing a semblance of radical anti-imperialism that appealed to small but influential clique of students.
  • By the late 1990s they had shed any pretence of competing on the far left, still dominated by the small neo-Trotskyite SWP. Their magazine, Living Marxism, became LM Mag and they began to campaign on largely lifestyle issues.
  • Just consider a selection of the Frank Füredi's clique's stances:
  • The human potential is boundless and thus any attempts to cut consumption, oppose technological solutions or plan for gradual population reduction should be opposed as reactionary opposition to progress itself. In any debate with RCPers on the environment sooner or later you'll be accused at best as a misguided opponent of progress and at worst of green fascism bordering on genocidal neo-Nazism.
  • Humanitarian disasters are often a figment of Western propaganda. The RCP campaigned vociferously to challenge media bias against Serbs in the Balkan Wars and against Hutus in the 1994 Rwandan tragedy.
  • We live a culture of fear, reluctant to embrace the technological solutions that could enable billions more human beings to enjoy the wonders of post-WW2 Western consumerism.
  • The adverse effects of modern consumer products, whether drugs, food or electronic devices, are hugely overstated and, with rare exceptions, greatly outweighed by their benefits. Here the latter-day RCP can appeal to many disillusioned with establishment control freakery over issues like smoking bans.
  • All regulation is bad. No nuanced position here as to whether we should call on the state to regulate us as private citizens or them as large corporate and state organisations. This stances places them in good company on the left on issues such as deregulation of cannabis or free speech, at one with the likes of Noam Chomsky. So they defend the right of racial supremacists to voice their scientific interpretations, but also dismiss the influence of mass entertainment on the minds of ordinary working people with little time to access to alternative media. So they say no to a ban on smacking, but also no limitations of the widespread prescription of psychoactive drugs. Ironically this stands in contrast with LM Mag's efforts to challenge media bias over Northern Ireland, Rwanda and Yugoslavia as your average Guardian reader would be depressingly unaware of the countercurrent perspectives that the RCP once championed. It would certainly appear that the new corporate-friendly Spiked Online brigade seem much concerned about defending the right of bug business to intoxicate and brainwash the masses through junk food and moronic electronic entertainment than they do about the freedom of genuine dissidents whose ideas are being silenced. Increasingly in the US and UK we see censorship of dissidents through an overload of mainstream disinformation and, where dissident ideas gain some currency, media belittling and bullying of all those who fail to sing from the right hymn sheet.
  • We have the universe to conquer. I recall this rallying cry from an RCP event I attended in 1985. Should appeal to Star Trek fans.
  • Multinationals are good and pave the way for a new borderless internationalism.
  • The Chinese and Indian economies are booming and poised to overtake Western European per capita consumption in the near future. Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your life's savings.
Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Persuasion Industry

In one way or another a growing percentage of workers in the UK are engaged in various sectors of the persuasion industry. Call it new media, education, publishing, marketing, sales, customer relations, call centres, advertising, entertainment, legal services, lobbying, consulting, advice bureaux, research institutes, awareness raising charities, they are all in the multi-billion pound business of persuading. These businesses try to persuade us to buy products, borrow more money, adapt our lifestyles, seek diagnosis for some previously unheard-of medical condition, support a political party, place our faith in large corporations, support government policies, panic about media-fabricated problems. Even those of us not directly involved in the media sector service it by providing its infrastructure in the form of satellite dishes, computer hardware and software, catering, cosmetic surgery, hairdressing etc.

Let us have a look at some representative team players in the 21st century persuasion industry:

Public information officer:
With various titles such people impart filtered information on behalf of their clients, the key word here being filtered. Far from redressing bias, they merely serve the highest bidder making sure the only opinions available through trusted establishment media outlets reflects the interests of their clients. Many such public information officers work for organisations that are technically charities, but in reality fronts for big business. Consider the moral universe of a mental health information officer working for a research institute funded in large part by pharmaceutical multinationals. Such a person may dismiss the organisation's spurious funding as corporate benevolence and deceive herself that her work is actually helping sufferers of emotional disturbance overcome their problems, when in reality she is promoting drugs to mask people's problems. People like to be do-gooders and greater conformism tends to suppress any critical analysis of the adverse side effects of our jobs.
Personal loan advisor:
They sell you the myth that we can keep expropriating resources from the rest of the world as long as we let banks create virtual money out of thin air, but to repay your debt you have to be a good team player within the system. An indebted person is usually a more docile conformist person.
Teacher:
As a front-line propagandist, a teacher is responsible for moulding tomorrow's loyal workers, but increasingly focus not so much on encouraging children to teach themselves, but to learn acceptable behaviour. These days good self-confidence and team-playing are considered more important than trigonometry or critical analysis. Children are trained to be good project managers, but not to create the things we really need unless that is part of larger enterprise. For more read the writings of John Taylor Gatto.
Project Manager:

They smile, converse and write reports to co-ordinate and motivate the people who really do the actual work. As such they have no particular concrete expertise other than excellent people management skills, but despite their apparent empathy they are trained to consider the real human beings who implement their projects as mere resources, expendable in the same away as computer hardware. Their real task is to hide the real purpose of a project from the various resources involved in different stages of its implementation. The ideal project manager is thoroughly brainwashed with a special talent for subconscious denial.

In some firms these account for 25% to 50% of office staff. Project managers are required to talk the talk, but with a few honourable exceptions seldom have to walk the walk. All PMs, often recentgraduates, have bosses, essentially project manager managers, who impart instructions on how to manage the human resources to whom they allocate the actual work that needs to be done. The whole American business management model is based on the notion that technical staff tend to lack the so-called social skills needed to negotiate with irate corporate clients. However, some megabuck clients may not be pleased to learn that at least in the world of commercial software development PMs account for a sizeable slice of the human resources budget. Typically a PM in the IT sector graduated in computer sciences and tends to know an awful lot of theory infused with corporate propaganda. The need for best practices in project management soon becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as consultants routinely attribute the failure of projects to bad project management.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Combatting Extremism

Years of conditioning have led us to believe our benevolent leaders and entrepreneurs want to protect us from all sorts of political extremists, commonly defined on the outmoded left-right spectrum or in terms of religious fundamentalism. That our leaders themselves may be extremists seldom dawns on the collective imagination of media pundits. Could we not describe our government's commitment to ever greater surveillance as extremist, given that the UK has Europe's highest density of CCTV cameras and growing databases recording every aspect of our personal lives from our spending habits to episodes of depression meriting a visit to our GP. Living in London for the last eighteen months has made me even more aware of the degree of personal monitoring. If the Police ever wanted to know my whereabouts (and I had to have my fingerprints taken after a recent burglary in the house where I rent a room), they could simply check the Oyster Card database or possibly ask my mobile phone company for records of all calls I made or received. I would also have appeared in numerous CCTV cameras. But amazingly this does little to deter the kind of petty crime that ruins the lives of the more vulnerable members of society.

Every problem publicised by the mainstream media, whether of the tabloid Sun variety or the pseudo-intellectual Independent kind, ranging from rampant paedophilia, racism, Islamic extremism to credit card fraud seems to require the same solutions, more surveillance and more intervention by remote public and private sector bodies. If only, the parents of the abducted toddler, Maddy, had installed a CCTV camera in their children's holiday bedroom? If only Portuguese Police had an extensive database of all citizens likely to commit heinous acts of abuse against young children.

The Blair/Brown government is extremist in many other aspects too. Consider their attitude to the future of British manufacturing and agriculture, both essential for any populous country with large nutritional and material needs. They support a rather extremist variant of globalisation, in which nearly all traditional primary and secondary sector jobs (which means engaged in the extraction or production of the food and goods we consume) are either outsourced or rely on cheap seasonal labour imported from Eastern Europe. Again the UK economy has seen the most extreme transformation in the post-industrial era. If for any conceivable reason the rest of the world imposed a complete embargo on the UK forbidding the trading and movement of all goods to and from the country, its population would starve within months. Deprived of the financial gains of the superfluous service sector, supermarket shelves would begin to empty very quickly. No other European has taken such an extremist approach. The French would fair quite well from international isolation, able to produce most of its food, but Britain's economy would crumble, soon unable even to acquire the fossil fuels it needs to maintain agricultural production without resurrecting the Coal industry. Only nine miles away from my former home in Fife is the Longannet Power Station, which since 2001 has used Polish coal following the flooding of Scotland last deep vein coal pit.

The Blair regime's slavish adherence to US foreign policy is yet another example of political extremism whose consequences do not need repeating here. Last but not least is the goverment's attitude to the mass entertainment sector. Despite overwhelming opposition from the more cautious and lower-cased conservative sections of the public the government pushed through the most radical deregulation of the gambling, advertising, TV and booze sectors in a country with a personal debt of £1.3 trillion. That 1.3 times ten to the power of twelve. Just how providing more gambling opportunities will improve the lives of children already deprived of their parents company often working asocial hours is beyond me. If your social ideal is family with one parent dedicated to child rearing and housework and both parents dedicated to each other and their local community, then New Labour has certainly taken an extreme anti-family stance by removing married couple's tax relief and encouraging more women to return to work as soon after childbirth as possible by heavily subsidising childcare and empowering social services to intervene in problem families. Has anyone noticed the huge rise in children taken into care, often costing local council as much as £90,000 a year.

Wherever you look the government takes some rather extreme positions. On free trade the government unashamedly backs large multinationals. On pharmaceuticals and genetically modified food, surprise surprise it takes the same stance. The only concessions seem to relate to public relations and mitigating the socially destabilising impact of its policies, something often referred to as change management.

May the real Extremists please stand up

When the mainstream refers to extremism, it never means corporate extremism or surveillance extremism. Instead it refers to right-wing nostalgics of defunct authoritarian regimes, old-time socialists advocating nationalisation of industries and redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, little nationalists valuing cohesive mono-cultural communities, religious fundamentalists opposed to the governments women's or gay rights agenda and dissident researchers who fail to believe the orthodox version of recent events or scientific analyses (e.g. on 9/11 or the AIDS/HIV link). In short anyone who interferes with their notion of change management is an extremist. Anyone who goes with the flow and takes a positive attitude to their social engineering agenda is called a moderate. Thus a moderate is extremely in favour of outsourcing the manufacture of vacuum cleaners to China, but an extremist would rather preserve the status quo or possibly return to the recent past when most vacuum cleaners bought and used in the UK were actually made here.

Semantics

At best the mainstream media's use of the words extremist and moderate mean anticonformist and conformist respectively. At worst they mean conservatively opposed to our agenda and extremely enthusiastic about our change management agenda. Thus moderates get labelled extremists and the real extremists are rebranded realists.

The convenient extremism label enables pundits with a liberal reputation to confuse the public mind, likening racial supremacists with migration realists or UFO nuts with 9/11 sceptics. Consider if you will the Independent's front page description of the South African president as an AIDS-denier. Thus the debate as whether the undeniable rise in mortality of much of Sub-Saharan Africa due to common diseases like Tuberculosis and Malaria can be attributed to HIV and require expensive AZT drugs is simplified to denying the existence of ADIS. At stake are the lives of millions of poor Africans who could be killed not by the presence of HIV antibodies revealed by AIDS tests, but by their medication, while Western pharmaceutical multinationals reap billions, even at the huge discounts they are alleged to have offered. Many polemicists or gatekeepers imply anyone disputing the orthodox line promoted by media-savvy experts and numerous TV documentaries has mental health issues or their own axe to grind. The mere mention of the term, conspiracy theory, suggests any believers or sympathisers are by definition seriously deluded.

Off Topic

The 1960s and 70s were in many ways the heyday of free speech and social wellbeing in what we then called the Western World. One could hold opinions on all sorts of subjects without being subject to suspicion of madness and/or political incorrectness. In around 1970 one could debate the causes, morality and history of homosexual behaviour without being accused by misanthropy or extreme intolerance. One could debate the pros and cons of psychoactive medication in the general population without being accused of denying the reality of various psychiatric disorders. Political correctness emerged largely in the 1980s, ironically in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The basic tenet of political correctness is indisputable, some terms are offensive. Just consider these common dismissal of critical thiking:

Issues, Media labels and Suggested associations

Responsibility for 9/11 attacks
9/11 Conspiracy theorist, 9/11 truther, 9/11 nut Far leftist, anti-government rightist, Islamic fundamentalist, Internet-addicted loser
HIV/AIDS link
AIDS denier Religious fundamentalist, conspiracy theorist, racist, homophobe
Widespread prescription of psycho-active drugs
Anti-psychiatry nut, opponent of modern medicine, Langian, mental illness denier, religious fanatic, anarchist, psychopath apologist
The big bang theory is scientifically implausible, e.g. what triggered it.
Outmoded believer in the steady state theory, misinformed geek heretic
Sexual orientation is mainly influenced by psycho-social factors
Homophobe, gay basher, Religious fundamentalist, right-wing extremist, extreme sexual libertarian, paedophilia apologist
Climate change scepticism Climate change denier
Big oil apologist, political extremist, fantasist

I deliberately add the last item because ironically I tend to agree with the wishy washy liberal establishment in Western Europe on this, namely the onset of rapid climate change is in all likelihood man-made. I'd also agree that the Earth is spherical and orbits the Sun, creationism is a load of nonsense and UFOs are just apparently flying objects that observers fail to identify, but whose appearances have perfectly rational explanations very close to planet Earth. Personally I do not see the need to attend a debate between a creationist and the much publicised intellect of Richard Dawkins, but I'd hate to live in a world where one may not challenge Prof. Dawkins' interpretation of evolutionary biology. I'd also rather have dinner with a creationist pacificist than with a neo-Darwinian warmonger. Scientific rectitude does not always lead one to wisest practical decisions, especially when one's faith in the supremacy of human technology conceals the limits of one's own understanding of the way nature works. Judging from the prominence that bookstores and media outlets afford him, Prof. Dawkins enjoys a messianic status as a beacon of wisdom. Thus anything he says, whether he intervenes on the MMR controversy or on the HIV-AIDS link in both cases vehemently supporting the status quo, is taken as the gospel, rather odd for a confirmed atheist.

Think for yourself

In a surprisingly mild-toned Al Jazeerah Documentary titled Iraqi Oil Factor on the new Petroleum Law, a UK minister at the Foreign Office Kim Howell'ss recycled the line that the occupying Coalition forces have no interest in controlling Iraq's oil, but poignantly accusing those of us who believe in the primary role of oil behind the US/UK invasion of Iraq of "manipulating data to feed their own wild conspiracy theories". So there you have it, never mind the evidence, just stick with the safe information disseiminated on BBC News and the Guardian and steer clear of any information suggesting the criminality of our own leadership. However, many armchair lefties raised on the Independent and Channel 4 documentaries somehow expect sooner or later the true horror of our ruling class's crimes will be broadcast on prime-time TV, especially those of us who stayed up till the wee hours of the morning to watch John Pilger's prioneering documentaries. After all we live in a liberal democracy, don't we? In reality to suggest oil played no role in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq is tantamount to believing in the flat earth theory after viewing the curvature of the earth during a high-altitude transatlantic flight. The evidence is there for anyone to see. They could censor the whole Internet, TV, Radio and print media, and yet the connection could still be made by anyone prepared to dedicate their mind to their country's foreign policy.

Categories
All in the Mind

A Very Human Animal

What is in your genes and what is not?

The nature versus nurture debate has long presented us with a false dichotomy as nurture, i.e socio-environmental influences, is very much part of nature. But many commentators have narrowed the definition of nature to refer only to genes, the mere blueprint or genotype that determines our potential subsequent development. To simplify matters, consider a newborn girl. Assuming she does not have pervasive brain damage, her future depends in large part on her upbringing and a multitiude of socio-economic and other circumstantial factors. Whether the girl becomes a university researcher twenty five year later or ends up as a prostitute roaming the streets of a foreign metropolis depends not on her inherent intelligence, but on the opportunities that arise in her life. Yet sadly the great advances in our understanding of human behaviour and intelligence are undermined by an obsession with behavioural or rather psychiatric genetics. Every day the mainstream media entertains us with news of new discoveries linking behaviour and facets of intelligence with genetics. Of course, in true PC form ther suggestion is seldom spun in terms of the genetic causation of intellectual superiority. and thus of ethno-racial superiority, but certainly takes us down that slippery slope. Is your child not doing very well at maths? Don't blame the teacher, TV, computer games or a culture of instant gratification, it is, or so we are led to believe, all down to his or her genes.

An Arithmetic Digression

Mathematical aptitude varies enormously among the general population. Some of us can perform amazing tricks with mental arithmetic. We probably paid attention in primary school maths lessons, learned our times tables and have continued ever since to make numerous conversions and comparisons. If I read the government has spent two billion pounds on something, before I scream what a waste of money, I work out how much that is per affected citizen. Thus if 2 billion were the annual expenditure on NHS-provided dental care for the whole of the UK, that would be fabulous value for money at just around £33 per UK citizen. Two billion is a very large number but divided by sixty million people yields a much smaller number, barely enough to employ a single dental assistant for an hour and without counting the cost of equipment, supplies and administration. Yet apparently some of us fail to reckon in such large numbers. The psychological impact of a Sun headline lamenting a government overspend of 20 million would probably differ little if the quoted figure were 20 billion, as your average casual reader just gauges 'a very large number'. Of course all this pales into insignificance when compared with the national personal debt of over 1 trillion (10 to the power of 12 or over a million millions), but that's whopping £16,600 per citizen or around £36000 per worker (all 28 million of us). Million, billion, trillion or quintillion? Who could care about the additional zeroes? The truth only a minority of us actively apply our minds to these problems on a regular basis, but could if the results justified the mental effort. Much is down to early training, but new skills can be learned with a slightly greater application of one's mind in later life too. If you understood basic concepts early on in life, you'll probably retain a comparative aptitude for number-crunching throughout your adult life. By contrast if you failed to grasp these concepts as a child due to lack of motivation, you might forever claim a natural or possibly inherited deficit in all matters of arithmetic and readily believe that the brains of number-crunching geeks differ fundamentally from yours, wired for managing relationships. Ever heard someone claim "I'm just not very good at languages", which basically means "As I can get by quite well in my own own language, I just couldn't be bothered to learn another. I'd rather apply my mental effort to something more rewarding.".

Precious little evidence reveals any biological basis for dyscalculia or innumeracy, in all but the most extreme cases with obvious intellectual deficits. Indeed numerical skills vary enormously across both cultures and historical epochs. Anglo-Saxon lacks words for number units greater than a thousand. Units greater than that are expressed with Latinate words like million, while Sanscrit-derived languages all have words for a hundred thousand (lakh) and ten million (crore). By contrast many languages of remote ethnic groups isolated from the rest of humanity until recently, lack words for numbers greater than ten or in some cases two or three. The entire Roman Empire was built without place-value notation or the concept of zero. Both modern decimal and binary notation use a place value system, e.g. 100 in decimal represents ten to the power of two, while in binary it represents two to the power of two or four. The ancient Romans used letters to represent the most common decimally rounded numbers and as a result the numeral representing 73 => LXXIII was counterintuitively longer than the letter C representing 100. Yet if we expressed all numbers in binary, few would confuse a personal debt of £100 0000 0000 (1024 GBP) with a corporate debt of 1 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 (1,048,576 GBP). If we were to express the World's human population circa 2000 in binary it would be staggering 1 0110 0101 1010 0000 1011 1100 0000,0000, plenty of room for cultural diversity without adding another zero. My point here is that systems of representation shape the way our brains process complex phenomena. A computer program to represent the geometric movements of a walking human being could in its finest detail contain thousands of instructions, but more commonly this is simplified by calling standardised routines, limiting the same program to less than a hundred lines. However, your average person performs this action apparently without any greater expenditure of valuable intellectual resources.

Culture and Numeracy

Are we to conclude that remote tribes of Papua Guinea with only basic numeration lack the inherent calculation skills that come naturally to ten year old Indonesian money changers, informing tourists in two or more languages of the exchange rate of their chosen currency (Euros, Yen, AUD or USD) in seconds, putting to shame most modern British school kids still struggling with their 7 times table? How do we explain that most British school kids circa 1960 had mastered their 12 times table before the age of ten and would learn to calculate the height of a tree in feet with a yardstick, clinometer and tangent table, while modern teenagers often struggle to accurately calculate how much change they should get from a tenner? Genetics explains very little here, yet arithmetic performance varies considerably. As a case in point, until nine years ago the world of programming remained a mystery to me. I sort of understood the transformation from rudimentary instructions into simple routines, which could then be handled as objects, but I would have struggled to interpret a simple Javascript function. Much that seems obvious to seasoned programmers appears quite daunting to otherwise intelligent newbies. Yet once you've got your head round one C-derived language, you can easily learn another. For me PHP proved a godsend (metaphorically speaking) because it let me experiment with procedural code and simple functions to produce meaningful and rewarding results. In the last three years I've transitioned to object-oriented PHP, Java, C++, Python and C# and am currently learning Ruby. At some stage something clicked. I successfully transferred a set of mathematical and linguistic skills I had developed for other purposes to a new domain. So I didn't learn vectors, matrices and quadratic equations for nothing in my high school years. All this dispells the myth that people are somehow born to excel in a given subject.

What Genetics does determine

We'd be mistaken to conclude genetics has no bearing whatsoever on the formation of our personalities and intellect, just that most of us have tremendous untapped intellectual potential, which will probably never be fully exploited except in the most fortuitous of circumstances. What exactly does a marketing consultant do, that millions of other humble souls cannot? He or she can simply offer experience and more important is well integrated into a network of like-minded professionals. I've personally witnessed project managers for IT companies give their mega-buck clients factually contradictory technical explanations, but embellished with fanciful buzzwords and pushing all the right psychological buttons. They are more concerned with persuasion, spin, public relations and perceived customer satisfaction than providing clients with key information about software development process. I've met a KPMG e-government expert who had no knowledge of HTML tags let alone XML, but could quote the percentage of businesses who use Microsoft Word (â„¢) to justify the premium rate office suite's continued use in the public sector where free alternatives are available. Yet without HTML tags the Web would be little more than a disorganised directory of unlinked files. Next time you buy a washing machine, ask the sales assistant what an electric motor is. Despite considerable dumbing down, I think most store assistants realise a washing machine needs one. Yet consultants, often earning way in excess of £100,000 a year frequently display the most amazing levels of ignorance in the very subjects, on which they are supposed to advise local councils. Why? Because they lack the motivation to learn such trifling details and can attain much better results by remaining faithful to their bosses and focusing on what we tend to call people skills and report writing.

So do we explain that person A became a high-earning consultant, and his sibling, person B, ended up teaching English abroad in second rate language school before retraining as a programmer? Do they have fundamentally different brains or have circumstances just programmed their respective brains to concentrate on different aspects of life? I would suggest that with the exception of individuals born with severe brain damage, our genetic differences determine mainly physical and motor-sensory attributes. While access to sports facilities and training play an important role in deciding who will belong to the next generation of tennis champions, undoubtedly a high proportion of us will never attain such heights of dexterity no matter how hard we try. In cruder terms the World's fastest sprinter can run a thousandth of second faster than the next fastest man and probably within one hundredth of a second of scores of other athletes who have undergone a severe training regime in their physical prime. That the difference in performance among the world's top athletes is so minute belies the conspicuous fact that this more than almost any other pursuit is the most dependent on genes and most prone to subtle genetic variations between different racial groups, e.g. most of the world's top sprinters carry genes from Sub-Saharan Africa, while most of the world's top swimmers are either of European or East Asian descent. Minor adaptations have thus led to huge differences in competitive sports within the same species.

Somatopsychic Affects

Many of use understand the concept of psychosomatics, the way our state of mind affects our bodily functions. If you feel depressed for whatever reason, you may change your eating and self-care patterns gradually losing the will to live or may succumb to the lure of recreational or psychoactive drugs with equally deleterious effects on your longevity. However, less well understood is the concept of somatopsychology, the way your body influences your state of mind and development of your personality. The two obviously interact in a vicious cycle, in which your sadness causes you to neglect care of your body, which changes the way others treat you and may fuel downward spiral of depression. However, we are not all blessed with a photogenic, hypersexy and athletic physique that may compete with today's role models. The media inundates us with images of what we should look like, which features are most treasured. Despite all the empty rhetoric about tolerance and diversity and just being yourself, if you lack the implicit qualities required to compete socially and fail to develop the necessary compensatory skills, life can get very tough. An extremely high percentage of jobs in postmodern postindustrial countries like the UK require either excellent client-facing or teamwork skills. Both require you to act out complex social rituals, heavily reliant on your cultural integration, sense of self and mastery of numerous gestures.

Using Genetics only when it suits an agenda, but downplaying it when it doesn't.

It comes as a perverse irony that today's corporate establishment adapts the genes versus memes debate to suit its own agenda. If it wants to sell mind-altering drugs, then emphasising the role of genes works best, but if it wants to sells cosmetic surgery, for some reason the role of genes is deliberately and counterintuitively downplayed. Otherwise those who need cosmetic surgery most to compete in a society obsessed with superficiality might claim state aid or guaranteed places of work. Thus if you have ugly teeth, acne, a slightly crooked nose, wrinkles, small breasts, a small penis or are going bald, you do not simply exhibit a perfectly natural variation of the human condition, but suffer from a degenerative disease caused in large part by your lifestyle or failure to follow the advice of dentists and social workers. Of course, diet, exercise and basic self-care affect your general appearance and health, but anyone whose travelled to the remotest and financially deprived regions of Africa only to see smiling people with gloriously white teeth should cast some doubt on the theory that bad teeth are caused solely by a lack of oral care. Like it or not, some of us are just blessed with ultra-resilient teeth. Some of us fall victim to tooth decay despite regular brushing and modest consumption of refined sugar, while others can get away with a relatively carefree attitude to dental care and still flaunt white teeth after happily devouring cakes or boozing all night long. As an inherently physical feature it stands to reason that teeth, hair, skin and genital organs are subject to genetic variations, all of which need not matter in a tolerant society that emphasises people's inner beings rather than their exterior manifestation. Maybe we should insist on TV presenters with stained and misaligned teeth, but once a critical mass emulates Hollywood looks, the sheeple will follow suit.

Multiphrenia

Over the last three to four decades our whole sense of self has metamorphosed. Kenneth Gergen theorises that the modernist, rational and firm sense of self has given way to a postmodern multiphrenia, in which we adapt our sense of self to the occasion as we engage with an ever-widening multitude of people in different locales and contexts, something known as social saturation. One markets oneself in the same way as one markets a consumer product.

Look at me! I'm youthful, into fun culture, have shining white teeth and a degree in project management and am fully trained in Microsoft Office TM. I'll impress your clients and bond with my colleagues.

We all love to declare our politically correct devotion to tolerance and diversity. Unfortunately this tolerance does not extend to those whom the system cannot fully exploit, somehow out of sync with the new social hierarchy unable to accept the superiority of the new class of people managers and manipulators.

Categories
All in the Mind

The Hidden Paedo-Scare Agenda

Hardly a day passes in the modern mainstream British media without a peadophilia-themed scandal, whether it be police discovering hundreds or thousands of child porn images on some poor soul's hard drive, a young woman's revelation about her parents' role in childhood sexual abuse, a high-ranking official or celebrity using his (or her) credit card to view child porn, a young female teacher seducing a 13 year old boy, a 13 year old girl, claiming to be 18, being groomed by a 50 year old male, claiming to be just 24. At times the hysteria reaches such extremes that one wonders why we don't just arrest every adult preventively on suspicion of child abuse?

Many others have commented on and indeed satirised the media's preoccuption with rampant paedophilia. It seems literally that one is hiding under every child's bed. Such is the hysteria that anyone ringing alarm bells at the Draconian legislation passed to combat this phenomenon (e-mail snooping, telephone tapping, psychiatric screening and the maintenance of extensive databases with confidential information) is soon accused of downplaying the paedophile threat, tacitly condoning the activities of sex fiends or even conniving with these social outcasts in the abuse of vulnerable minors.

Some of us seem to have short memories. As media stories about sexual abuse in religious and state institutions in 1970s and 80s abound, one wonders why we heard so little about it then. Was it because, as some might rather naively assume, few were prepared to speak out against this social taboo for fear of upsetting respected institutions such as the Church, the Scouts or social services, and only now in more enlightened times can we protect our kids from domestic and institutional sexual abuse. I would be the last one to downplay the effects of any form of physical and/or sexual abuse on children in key stages of their emotional development.

As the long-term effects of sexual abuse are mainly psychological, if we leave aside extreme cases with significant physical harm, early sexualisation promoted by the media and peer pressure tends to create an enviroment in which atomised children can easily make themselves vulnerable to atomised and sexually repressed adults. Indeed the whole notion of sexual repression is yet another misunderstood concept. Most of us maintain a considerable degree of sexual restraint, mediated by societal norms and expectations. We may view a person's sexuality from multiple perspectives. I may appreciate the sexy physique of my teenage daughter or younger half sister, and indirectly consider their suitability as a lucky man's girlfriend or spouse when the time is right. Indeed deep in the subconscience of any heterosexual male is the sexual desirability of any young girl. When you contemplate the beauty of your three year daughter, you consider her potential adult physique. We could think of children as adults in waiting or in the making, rather than mini-adults attempting to emulate the behaviour of their parents and media role models. The current emphasis on genetic psychiatrics leads us the mistaken conclusion that paedophiles (and I take the media's usual modern definition of this word) are somehow a subspecies. We simply need to identify, isolate, rehabilitate and/or chemically castrate them. But as all men are potential rapists, I submit that all sexually interested adults are potential child molesters. There has always been a sexual underclass, those who for physical or psychological reasons find it harder to satisfy their biological needs through consensual relationships with age-appropriate partners. On a personal note I've experienced both periods of frequent intercourse and period of relative abstinence, yet it has never dawned on me to exploit a vulnerable person, always seeking to establish an emotional bond and mutual understanding of the role of sex in the relationship. Certainly I've witnessed rival males, in the crude terminology of sexual competition, score with minimal effort. I've learned to take a philosophical approach, but understand some other males in a sexually obsessed society feel an urge to pursue every possible avenue for sexual fulfilment.

Whatever the media tells you, there are surprisingly few cases of loners lurking behind the bushes by playgrounds waiting for the right moment snatch and rape a child. In the vast majority of cases of childhood sexual abuse, children fall victim to adults who have won their confidence. Indeed in an alarming number of cases they are not fully aware of the consequences of their actions. Such is the hysteria surrounding paedophilia that there have been more cases of teachers falsely accused of sexual abuse than teachers who have actually sexually assualted a child. In the narrowest definition of the term, sexual assault of children by teachers is statistically a very rare occurrence, but age-inappropriate sexual liaison has thanks to early sexualisation become increasingly common. A number of cases have emerged of false accusations lodged against unpopular teachers, especially those that students consider uncool or too strict, while some female teachers have seduced teenage male students. In modern Britain most children over ten are not only aware of the birds and bees, but also of numerous sexual practices (fellatio, cunnilings, anal intercourse etc.) and orientations and with mounting media and peer pressure to go out and score with an alpha male or hot babe. That certainly was not true in the relatively carefree 1960s and 70s. At the tender age of ten I showed zilch interest in porn and on reaching puberty limited myself to private exploration of my sexuality until I met a consenting partner. Although we had some sex education at school, we learned most through gradual discovery of sexuality, mainly from older friends and relatives (ideally cousins and uncles rather than siblings or parents) or perhaps through books available at the local library or in the family bookcase. Around 1978 (at the tender age of 14) I learned an awful lot about sexual positions from the Sunday Times supplement complete with sketches. I can cite a couple of unfortunate experiences, a male seven years my elder, who forcibly penetrated me with my reluctant consent (considering myself at the time bisexual and theoretically open to experimentation) and a one night stand where my female partner was simply too inebriated to reciprocate, an occurrence that, I suppose, is all too common for today's partying youth. Yet despite times of considerable emotional instability, I had a clear view of the bounds of acceptable behaviour, whatever my wildest fantasies might have been. I became aware of non heterosexual orientations mainly through school taunting, a few media allegations about public figures and later involvement with fringe neo-Trotskyite groupings. In all honesty the concept of paedophilia completely escaped my attention before my mid teens and continued to play an exceedingly peripheral role until the great paedo-scare raised its ugly head in the mid 1990s. Did my father secretly abuse in the bath at the age of seven? To the best of recollections, the only fear I had was the prospect of shampoo seeping into my sensitive eyes for sex in any form meant absolutely nothing to me. Shame of the human body and prudishness are learned and thus culturally mediated behaviours for reasons of social control.

To put it bluntly, the paedophile scare is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we obsess about it, the more we warn children of insidious adults harbouring paedophile tendencies, the more it becomes a problem that needs be addressed by all conceivable means. Childhood innocence is a treasured time in our lives when we need not worry the huge emotional wranglings that erotic desire and sexual competition unleash. Why should a seven year old girl, often encouraged by her cool parents, want to dress in a sexy manner? Why can't she just be a cute girl, completely oblivious to her potential eroticising powers? Rather than protect vulnerable children, which thanks to a large increase in the numbers of single parents abound in this country, the paedo scare empowers institutions to regulate family units. Consider the outgoing Home Secretary's latest proposals to combat the paedo danger. Not only will some paedophiles be offered drugs, yet another boon for big pharma and the psychiatric lobby, but a mother will be able to find out if her new partner is in the sex offenders' database. In what kind of society do we need to rely on the police or social services to ascertain the moral integrity of our partners, friends and family? The term police state springs to mind. Just imagine the scenario:

Enquirer: Hello, my name is Freda Blogga, ID card number AB 2334543892 HU. I have a new partner I met at the new casino in Manchester last week. We had such a good time and I'd like him to come and live with me and my 13 year old daughter, but I'd just like to check he's a safe pair of hands. His name is Fred Bloggs, ID card number XY 6789400 HY.

Police helpline assistant: Thank you, madam. I'm just bringing up his data on my computer. Apparently we can identify your new partner, the sixth one you've had in the last 2 years according to our records, as low risk on our standard paedophilia risk assessment criteria. We have no records of any paedophile-related behaviour. Over the last five years he has spent only 4.7% of his online time, as monitored by AOL, accessing adult sites, all of which are certified, 27.6% accessing first-person shooter gaming sites and 54.3% playing poker and backgammon, again as far as we can ascertain all via certified service providers. I can also reveal that in 1999 he received a diagnosis of ADHD, which if unmedicated may statistically represent a risk factor. He seems like a typical fun-loving guy, although he did once visit a conspiracy theory site, a little out of character I suppose.

Moral Hypocrisy

Morality, criminality and illegality have long been nuanced concepts. Illegality clearly refers to infringements of the law as it is applied in your local jurisdiction. Duplicating copyrighted music is technically illegal, but apart from denying musicians and record companies of revenue it hardly infringes anyone's basic human rights. Running a licensed casino in modern Britain is technically legal, but many (myself included) would argue its activities are immoral, a giant scam designed to strip people of their hard-earned income while raising their material and emotional expectations. As discussed elsewhere the higher our hedonistic expectations, the greater the disappointment when we fail to attain them. Criminality may comprise either acts infringing basic human rights or acts defying the law of the land. Thus the legality of bombing civilians in another land is simply a technical issue with little bearing on the act's morality or indeed its criminality if we apply the juridical interpretation of the word.

So where does paedophilia stand in moral stakes? In a society obsessed with virtual murder and revenge killings, the whole theme of the Kill Bill, it appears homocide is a lesser crime than child molestation. Certainly many Sun readers have been conditioned to consider the murder of a convicted paedophile a lesser crime than paedophilia itself. While first person shooter addicts and marketers alike have perfected the argument that no gamers would ever dream of reenacting their fantasies, the same argument does not hold true in establishment circles for occasional viewers of child porn, however defined. Personally I think both extreme child porn (i.e. depicting penetrative intercourse rather than certain body parts or mere poses) and virtual violence (i.e. glorifying and justifying mass murder) affect a person's behaviour, just like any other experience, whether first-hand or simulated, but someone cannot be convicted because of a mere fantasy or obsession until they act on it. The real answer to the moral equalivalency issue all depends on the severity of the acts performed. Does it refer simply to viewing images and fantacising underage sex (or perhaps fantacising oneself engaging in such acts as a child)? Is it confined to cases of overt intimate contact with aroused sexual organs? May it comprise fondling whose sexuality may not be obvious at all to immature and sexually naive children? Unfortunately the witch hunt mentality of the media lets us make few of these distinctions. A person may, in their eyes, either be a sex fiend or not. As a result many parents, teachers, close relatives and family friends now habitually avoid all comforting physical contact with younger children, something hardly anyone in the pre-paedo-scare era associated with sex. Just consider that in much of the world nobody bats eyelid about children sleeping their parents' bed, often into their early teens and in crammed living quarters a logistical as well as emotional necessity. Pre-school children sleeping in the matrimonial bed is the norm not just in Iran or Zambia, but in Italy and Spain. Your average 7 year old feels more secure tucked up in bed hugging mum or dad, than partitioned in a cubicle replete with technological wizardry. Yet surprisingly few young Italian adults take their parents to court over alleged child abuse. In the vast majority of cases it was the child, not the parents, who wanted to snuggle in with Mum and Dad. Then what about having a bath unclothed with your five year son. Again this was pretty normal behaviour until recently. Now the paedophile smear is at the back of every parent's or even every adult's mind. I've noticed some pretty odd behaviour in public toilets, with grown men sneaking into cubicles to avoid the embarrassment of temporarily exposing themselves in the presence of young boys, as if the boys minded, and actually inconveniencing others who might actually need a cubicle to dispose of solid waste. Certainly at the age of seven I was totally unconcerned about older men pulling out their willies to urinate. It was just the norm. To become offensive or abusive, an organ or act has to acquire a sexual value and the victim has to be intimately aware of abuse. Certainly any penetrative or otherwise painful acts could not escape the attention of any young child, however aware he or she might be of sexuality. These acts are indeed an extreme perversion, but most societies have successfully marginalised such activities by channelling sexual expression into meaningful consenting relationship between adults, however defined, all without the help of an all-powerful state overseeing every aspect of personal conduct.

To combat the very real dangers of emotional and physical abuse, we should first address the real causes, social instability and atomisation, rather than spreading fear in an already terrorised populace and turning us all into suspects.

Categories
All in the Mind

It’s official, Dissent is a Mental Illness

If you obsess with or consider stalking political celebrities, personally I think your fixations and potential actions are both ill-advised and in all likelihood counterproductive. Politicians not only thrive on publicity, the media would be quick to whip up a frenzy of hysteria should anyone attempt to threaten their life. An assassination attempt represents a huge a public relations coup for an unpopular member of the ruling elite. Admittedly some milder comical forms of stalking such as egg-throwing or carefully engineered stunts may, if reported accurately in the media, raise awareness of a dissident cause. After all to the best of my knowledge no politicians have ever died of custard pies or eggs being splattered all over their tailor-made suits. The trouble is these days politicians are just unthinking celebs, whose very rise to power depends on the approval of media moguls. A protest may be perfectly justified on a moral plane, but Sun readers will either be none the wiser or will be led to consider the protest as the antics of mentally deranged extremists.

Having instilled in the public mind that all sorts of inappropriate or nonconformist behaviours are caused by genetically determined mental disorders, often marketed as differences with benefits as well as downsides, diagnosing dissent as a mental disorder is the next logical step. According to an article, "Blair's secret stalker squad" penned by Jason Lewis, in the left's favourite bete noire, the Daily Mail, the government already employs psychiatrists to identify potential troublemakers. This is no longer wild conspiracy-theory territory, it's reality. However, it is true that psychological profiling can identify those most likely to channel their powers of critical thinking into active opposition to the agenda of the ruling elite. However, they merely identify people whose critical faculties have remained both intact and focussed on the misdemeanours of their own bosses, rather than on their bosses' enemies. A conformist in Stalin-era Russia would be a loyal Communist Party member happily spying on traitors and evil revisionists. The same mindset translated and adapted to the UK in the early 21st century would use her or his soft skills to identify extremists, conspiracy theorists and mavericks who might become enemies, as they see it, of our wondefully tolerant, dynamic and fun-loving democratic civilisation. Progress towards a neoliberal panacea of all-night smokefree raves and wheelchair-friendly casinos, conveniently located next to your local hypermarket, seems on par with the sales drive of your employer in the insurance business.

Notice how the British media have long described the last few remaining critical thinking politicians as mavericks, a term never used for politicians who toe the corporate or party line. Some even wonder why all dissidents are coincidentally mavericks. "Sure", some think, "I agree with much of what George Galloway/Tony Benn/Michael Meacher says, but he's just a maverick". Sooner or later the Guardian or Independent will do the nasty on any articulate person in the public eye who oversteps the margins of permissible dissent. Maybe this is one reason why so many otherwise rational commentators such as George Monbiot go out of the way to distance themselves from conspiracy theorists who fail to believe the official 9/11 story. Now I've met some of the assorted types who regularly attend 9/11 Truth group meetings. These events attract a fair number of individuals who would meet a psychiatrist's criteria for a pervasive personality disorder. Put simply your average happy-go-lucky working person, immersed in pervasive entertainment culture and preoccupied with their career and family (or whatever passes for a family these days), simply doesn't have time to consider the musings of fringe groups. They're more likely to settle for the conclusions of respected left-leaning commentators like George Monbiot, than actually think for themselves. What matters more is the calibre and prestige of opinion leaders. Read the moderated postings in the BBC's Have your Say forum or even musings in the Medialens forum and you'll soon notice the omnipresence of name-dropping and references to authoritative sources such as the BBC itself. Indeed some people in the UK refuse to believe anything until it's on Aunty Beeb (an affectionate, but often satirical nickname for the state broadcasting corporation). The Beeb is, of course, a massive organisation employing thousands of journalists and producers, many keen to investigate all sides of a story. Nonetheless some good stuff does seep through. BBC documentaries have revealed the side effects of antidepressants (Panorama on Seroxat) or in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq BBC 2 aired a documentary highlighting the role that oil plays in US administration's Mideast policy. But these tend to be the exception rather than the rule, and serve to reassure us, or the critically thinking minority among us, that Aunty Beeb remains a bastion of objectivity. This is the same BBC that consistently refers to the United States as a democracy and regularly talks of Anglo-American plans to extend democracy to Iraq, all without addressing the key issue of control of the country's oil.

Apparently some self-righteous left-leaning opinion leaders suffer a similar delusion, basically truth emerges from a consensus of high-profile experts given access to the BBC, CNN and a handful of other media outlets in the Anglosphere.

So who is more deluded? Those who challenge orthodoxy or those who swallow mainstream propaganda hook, line and sinker? In my humble opinion it is plainly naive to base your assessment of reality on the official or counter-current cult status of those advocating a position. Something is not true because MS-NBC has just aired a documentary debunking the controlled demolition theory for the vertical collapse of the World Trade Center, any more than it's true because Loose Change has some convincing video clips and David Ray Griffin seems an honest guy. What matters is evidence. If the evidence in favour of the official theory were so overwhelming, why would they seek to deny public access to so much incriminating evidence? Apart from applying one's understanding of science and politics, how can millions of mortal souls distinguish fact from fiction? While the motives of mainstream propagandists are clear, those of the 9/11 Truth movement are much less so? Some have suggested the whole conspiracy theory cult is a gigantic diversion from the real issues bedevilling humanity, such as resource depletion, nuclear war and climate change. Others view government complicity in acts of sabotage and psychological terrorism as crucial signs of a civilisation on the brink.

This morning (03/06/2007), the Aunty Beeb's news site leads on PM in Waiting Gordon Brown's support for even tougher anti-terrorism legislation, presented at a stage-managed conference in Glasgow with wonderful reassurances about checks and balances to safeguard civil liberties. Let's get this whole terrorism scare-mongering into perspective. The UK's capital attracts billions from global money laundering with sky-rocketing property prices requiring couples to earn jointly 75,000 just to buy a very humble modest 3-bedroom rabbit hutch, overcrowded transport infrastructure grinding to a halt with tube passengers packed like sardines and literally suffocating in each other's sweat and a huge influx of cheap labour and a steady outflow of native Londoners. To me, this would seem a recipe for disaster, easily exploited by gangsters, criminals and even would-be terrorists with an axe to grind against the financial or military elites. Yet unsurprisingly most residents of the sprawling metropolis are too busy competing in the rat race or coping with the sheer humiliation of not living up to the material and aesthetic expectations set by media role models, to even consider fighting the system. If Brown really cared about the safety of ordinary citizens, he might start by bringing in more socio-economic stability and thus defuse a state of of constant tension that his dynamic consumer-led economic model has instilled in us and simultaneously withdraw British forces from foreign ventures. Instead we get more of the same and worse and anyone who disagrees is labelled paranoid. The message is loud and clear. If you suspect the ruling elite may have it in for you, seek therapy, forget about your misgivings and return to your assigned role as a lowly parrot.

Categories
All in the Mind War Crimes

On The Nature of Violence

Consuming re-enactments of violence in various forms has long brought considerable pleasure to large number of people, especially but by no means exclusively, males. Quite clearly many residents of middle class suburbs in towns and cities across the prosperous world are relatively shielded from the real-world physical violence that millions experience on a daily basis in much of the world, but with extraordinary levels of intensity in regions where wars of resistance and internecine conflict rage. David Edwards of Medialens quite correctly contrasted the almost daily massacres in Iraq with the occasional school and office shoot-outs in the US and Europe. 36 dead i the Virgina Tech massacre is a tragedy, sure, but hundreds slain day in day out is an affront against humanity. However, many who have moved from some of the world's worst conflict zones to the obsessively consumerist dystopia of the wider American empire feel ironically under greater threat.

Violence means much more than the simple exertion of physical force with the intent to maim or kill others, it means the exertion of physical, sensory, mental or economic force to deny others of their livelihood, whose definition varies according to cultural expectations. To make a simple example, the only difference between machine-gunning a family of African subsistence farmers and evicting the same family from their land while failing to provide them with alternative means of sustenance is immediacy. In the former scenario they die instantly, in the second they starve slowly. So is society as it has evolved recently in the UK become more or less violent?

Nominally, it may have actually become less violent. Parents seem much less willing to resort to physical force to rein in their offspring, mindful of the consequences if their sheer frustration leads them to overstep the mark. As noted elsewhere crime statistics rely heavily on classification and reporting, but based purely on calls to national helplines there has been a huge rise in parents falling victim to physical abuse by their sons and daughters. The mass media, including the liberal establishment's BBC, also seems preoccupied with the spectre of child abuse, especially when attributable to outmoded institutions such as the Church and where the blame can be placed clearly with sad sexually deprived individuals who unleash their fantasies on the innocent. As usual such a narrow focus misses the details of a much bigger picture. Child abuse is an abstract concept. Certainly extreme deprivation leading to severe malnutrition, life-threatening disease and violence leaving permanent physical and psychological scars affect a person's long-term potential.

However, to the surprise of many wishful thinking do-gooders, back in the 70s school kids often preferred a quick dose of corporal punishment to the prospect of several hours detention or humiliation in front of their parents. This doesn't mean corporal punishment is good, but may often in the real world be viewed as the lesser of two evils. Seriously, how many children ever ended up in hospital as a result of excessive corporal punishment? Now compare this with the number hospitalised as a result of school or street fights. If teenagers are drawn into a subculture of pervasive recreational drugs, having to resort to theft or prostitution to feed their habit, who should we blame? The parents, society or some alleged genetic weakness in the kids themselves? Increasingly social workers and health professionals turn to the third explanation, but often blame controlling or traditionally strict parents. To compete in today's superficial social rat race, parents need to act and look as cool as the media role models their kids aspire to. To win your teenage daughter's trust, you may need to undergo cosmetic surgery or simply let her have her way when friends invite her for a night out on the town. In a community where most children respected their parents and were not under media-induced peer pressure to participate actively in a deceptively named fun culture of all night raves, life was easy for sensible parents whose only wish was to steer their children away from danger. But Blair's Britain is not like that. Open your eyes and ears in any shopping centre, remove yourself temporarily from your early 21st century bubble and you'll soon realise you're surrounded by technicolor, high-fidelity bullies unleashing incessant doses of none-too-subtle psychological torture. “Heh, you, you're not as cool as these dudes!". If you dare to complain about the unbearable rap beat in a clothes store or, as I did once, in a book store, expect to be either ignored or if you insist to receive a mildly reassuring talk from some lowly shop manager about marketing. In any case be in no doubt, that your aversion to a non-stop blur is your problem, not theirs.

Violence may be defined, at least according to the free dictionary bundled with my computer:

  • Behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
  • Strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force : the violence of her own feelings.
  • The unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force.

Based on the latter two definitions, provocative imagery and noise intimidate as much or even more than physical force. The media like to remind us of the importance of mental health, but fail to examine their own role in adversely destabilising our sense of self. The media frequently practices another intimidatory form of violence, humiliation by association. Over the last week the media has successfully whipped up hysteria against the alleged abductor of a three year old girl on holiday in Portugal with her well-to-do parents. In the recent past we've seen masses of Sun-readers engage in animated protests, sometimes resorting to violence, against real and alleged paedophiles. Thus anyone unknown to the community at large and whose behaviour may at times seem suspect may fall victim to a paedo witch hunt. That's an awful lot of people in our atomised island state, where close-knit communities are largely a distant memory. Only a few months ago the media lynched a lonesome resident of Ipswich falsely accusing him of the murder of five prostitutes and publishing details of his MySpace activities. Should we arrest the remaining millions of alienated adults whose social life has been reduced to virtual tomfoolery. Why not arrest all those idiots on person.com who broadcast masturbation live from their Webcams? All this socially divisive fear-mongering generates intimidatory violence against anyone who fails to meet societal expectations and withdraws into an alienated existence. Violence is anything that harms people mentally or physically. No society is devoid of violence, but where conflict is minimised, so to is violence in all its forms. Otherwise psychological intimidation and alienation can soon manifest themselves physically either through self-harm, drug abuse or direct attacks against the person.

Categories
All in the Mind

In Association with Pfizer

Someone queried the other day whether any evidence linked Stanley Feldman, co-author of Panic Nation, with Spiked Online. A quick Web search reveals a number of his articles and references in the infamous GMO-promoting, pro-Nuclear, pro-Drug and pseudo-libertarian Web site. But then something caught my attention, right on the front page. Spiked Online are running a What Inspired You? event, purportedly to raise awareness of scientific innovators, but conspicuously sponsored by Pfizer, manufacturer of Viagra, Zoloft and numerous other recreational and mind-altering drugs. Some of us may recall that back in the early 1980s Frank Furedi's gang posed on the extreme left in the Revolutionary Communist Party, frequently intervening at public meetings of the somewhat larger neo-Trotskyite group the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), but focusing its recruitment drive on ambitious students. They've certainly taken some controversial stances, often geared to attract dissidents from the thinking left. Around 1987-88 they regrouped around their glossy Living Marxism magazine and simply became the Living Marxism group, later rebranded as LM Mag. However, gradually they abandoned all pretence of Marxism, whatever that meant anyway, and began to hone a line of unbridled human potential whose greatest threat was posed by a culture of fear. They jumped on the bandwaggon of activists and journalists seeking to expose media bias over the 1990s' Balkan civil war and more provocatively challenged the orthodox media's Hutu-bashing analysis of the tragic internecine Rwandan slaughter in 1994. Unlike most peace activists, they concentrated their energies not on opposing war per se, but on attacking certain biases prevalent among the wishful thinking left, e.g. UN and NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia was largely welcomed by left-leaning Guardian columnists and much reasoned opposition to the 1999 aerial bombings of Kosovo and Serbia proper swallowed much of the mainstream propaganda over the inherent evil of Serb nationalists.

Only four years later in early 2003, following military intervention in Afghanistan, millions came out on the streets to voice their opposition to the pending invasion, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was an infinitely greater thug than Slobodan Milosevic. Large sections of the thinking public had at last begun to question the emotional rhetoric over humanitarian intervention. More important, the intervention in Kosovo, sold successfully on humanitarian grounds, far from ushering in a new era of interethnic harmony and an end to ethnic cleansing, had put in power a bunch of xenophobic militants who relied on NATO troops to keep the peace and caused the exodus of tens of thousands more of Kosovans of all ethnic groups a fact the subservient British media failed to hide from the public. While NATO Had spent billions on intervention in the former Yugoslavia, it had turned a blind eye to a civil war in the newly renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo inflicting 3-4 million deaths, in the aftermath of Rwandan democide (okay pedantics here, but to call it a genocide assumes one ethnic group sought the elimination of another, while in reality the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was more of class or caste than ethnicity). Just as the public began to question the benefits of military intervention to tackle conflicts with economic and, dare I say, environmental causes, Frank Furedi's gang seemed more preoccupied with attacking Green Fascists, health fanatics and anyone else who challenges corporate technocracy, but in a deceptively counter-current way. Thus their campaign against smoking bans appeals not only to libertarians and critical thinkers, fed up with the media's obsession with one cause among many of cancer, but also reinforces their key message that technology can always undo the damage caused by other technologies. Worried about lung cancer, well why not wait a while for technocrats to give you a new lung? Worried about the carcinogenic effects of E-numbered food additives, why not wait for the latest and greatest anti-cancer wonder drug? The future is bright, the future is .... shiny happy people consuming pharmaceutical products supported by peer-reviewed research. More disturbingly, based on personal experience in online discussions, ex-RCPers tend to belittle those who cast doubt on technocratic claims (e.g. SSRIs have greater benefits than side effects and safe for long-term use) with accusations like "loser" or words to that effect. In essence, they consider green fascists to have their own agenda, namely to deny the masses of huge technological advances.

Stanley Feldman works at University College London, whose students, a captive audience for big pharma propagandists and mainly from wealthy backgrounds, flock to Planet Organic and tend to avoid most of the junk Mr Feldman claims is relatively harmless. It would seem that the RCP brigade live in a bubble filled with paranoid health freaks, rather than in the much larger British reality where millions of happy shoppers happily fill their supermarket trolleys with TV-advertised junk and visit their GP only to receive a prescription for some of Pfizer's or GSK's most lucrative products. Maybe people are panicking for the right reasons, but thanks to so much corporate disinformation often identify the wrong targets.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Scientific Orthodoxy and Scientific Fact

Open letter to George Monbiot

I just read your recent piece (3 May 2007) on Alexander Cockburn's anthropogenic climate change scepticism and his reliance on one scientist. Let me first state that broadly speaking I'm with you on this one. Irrespective of our exact scientific interpretation, it seems obvious that the exponential rise in humanity's overall impact on our planet's delicate environment (consumption and population) has had some effect whose full impact only future generations will experience.

However, your approach equating climate change deniers with 9/11 truthers worries me for several reasons. The only thing the two groups really have in common is that they challenge the received wisdom as popularised by the mainstream liberal media such as the Independent and the BBC. However, let us be in no doubt the former group enjoys large backing from corporate lobbies and pitifully little support from grass roots activists, while the latter group receives only limited funding from a few isolated entrepreneurs, but much more support from a large grassroots movement including many relatives of those murdered in the 9/11 attacks. Indeed it cannot escape my attention that in another recent piece (Guardian, 6 February 2007) on the purported insanity of 9/11 truthers you favourably quoted a Counterpunch investigation to explain how intense heat caused by burning aircraft fuel could have distributed evenly along 400m long piles causing the towers to collapse vertically from the bottom rather than bend and topple at the point of collision. Indeed please just consider the long list of those who doubt the official conspiracy theory (in which Osama Bin Laden ordered 19 mainly Saudi Arabian hijackers to kamikaze passenger jets into strategic buildings of US military and financial power) includes not only David Ray Griffin, who has extensively dissected the official 9/11 report and answered just about every scientific point you have attempted to make, but also Richard Heinberg, author of the Party's Over, Democrat representative Cynthia McKinney, Michael Meacher and Andreas von Bülow, former State Secretary in the German Ministry of Defence. History teaches us that the establishment has never had a monopoly on empirical truth, but your reply to Cockburn's article focuses not on scientific analysis of substantive facts, but on suspect concepts such as “peer-reviewed†research or a scientific consensus. Peer review merely means that research has been reviewed by someone else in a position of trust employed by corporate or state institutions. Peer-reviewed research has been used to support the safety of genetically modified organisms with terminator genes, deny the side effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or claim that new behavioural categories such as ADHD have genetic or polygenic roots (cf. Jay Joseph, the Missing Gene). The overall bias of peer-reviewed research tends to reflect the vested interests and bias of its funders. Currently, biotech and pharmaceutical multinationals represent a huge lobby perfectly prepared to spend billions in funding research and public relations to sustain whatever scientific thesis suits their interests. Pitifully little research money is channelled into investigating the psychosocial causes of childhood behavioural problems or the dangers of genetically modified crops, so dissident researchers are soon lampooned as mavericks or even as conspiracy theorists, whose work has not been peer-reviewed. If you go against the grain in today's world of intermeshed corporate, state and non-governmental entities, your work simply does not get peer-reviewed, little more than an establishment rubber stamp.

Second, we should take a quick look at Alexander Cockburn's motivations. Honestly, I think he's an old-timer who sees progress in terms of extending to millions of the world's poor the same prosperity we take for granted. As a brand of commercialised libertarianism has accompanied this steady rise in material living standards, some mistakenly see progress as evolution towards society in the most enlightened middle-class enclaves of the US and Western Europe. Consider the cultural microcosm of the aspiring intellectual elite who congregate in the Starbucks where I sit at the heart of a larger Borders store. Most would almost definitely consider themselves progressives, yet all are indulging in a form of politically correct consumerism, reassured their coffee, or at least some of it, is fair trade and very aware of most of the issues you raise in your regular Guardian columns. Indeed your books are often on prominent display alongside those of Naomi Klein. They have, if you like, been peer-reviewed or rather vetted as safe for public consumption unlikely to rock any boats.

Science does matter and it is surely too important to leave to a technocratic elite in bed with a historically deceitful corporate establishment.

By all means, polemicise against climate change deniers, but please do so based on science and do not suggest that only an elite in the pay of big business and big government have a monopoly over scientific analysis. Despite all the rhetoric we hear from very mainstream political and business leaders, I do not see any abatement in orthodox economists' addiction to continuous material growth. The government are forging ahead with plans to expand airports and provide more gambling opportunities with an economy based on abstract financial, marketing and personal services nobody really needs. The same ruling elite who preach a "don't worry, be happy and trust us" philosophy, also invest millions in belittling, subverting and as a last resort criminalising dissident intellectuals. Just because some popular conspiracy theories are plainly wacky, does not mean all unorthodox perspectives should be tarnished with the same brush or are even conspiracy theories at all. Let us not forget in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair described the "war for oil" slur as a mere conspiracy theory circulating on the Internet. On 9/11 it is the establishment, not their naysayers, who entertain the public with a grotesque conspiracy theory defying the laws of physics. The establishment can no longer deny the reality of climate change, because you cannot lie very long about medium-term weather forecasts and the human impact on the environment is undeniable to all but the most hardened followers of Frank Füredi's Spiked Online sect (who incidentally agree with you on 9/11, but never mind). As for motivation, while it may seem superficially plausible that US imperialism in the Middle East may have induced a bunch of extremists to perpetrate atrocities against the civilian American population and some have hypothesised that US has been drawn into a war that it cannot win, copious evidence, which you have yourself quoted, shows that US plans to conquer the world's largest source of cheap and easy fossil fuels in the Middle East and Central Asia predates the first (Persian) Gulf War at a time when the US oil imports accounted for less 50% of domestic consumption. Their actions are entirely consistent both with their high-consumption economic model and with the peak oil scenario (which the likes of Alexander Cockburn and Greg Palast also deny). History is replete with examples of governments instigating and perpetrating atrocities against sections of their citizenry to engender a climate of war and hiding this reality from their own population. Without such levels of government deceit the huge crimes against humanity such as Nazi Holocaust or the largely forgotten forced famines in Belgian Congo, Ukraine or British occupied Bengal in 1943-44 would not have happened.

If we accept that Bush and Blair are not motivated by high humanitarian ideals such as spreading democracy and women's rights, defeating tyrants or ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction, then we have to weigh the merits of two explanations for their behaviour: the systematic pursuit of power or inherent contradictions of our current model of development. I submit that the driving force behind the current wave of imperialist conflict is ultimately the latter but inevitably engenders the former with increased levels of ferocity as supply fails to meet the growing demand for limited resources on a finite planet.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Is the Crime Rate Falling or Rising

One well-designed Website, www.anxietyculture.com seemed worthy of a link exchange request as it was publicised in the forum of another site I respect Medialens. It claims to offer an antidote to the mainstream media with a special focus on the left's favourite bête noire The Daily Mail. I particularly liked the article on 'Team spirit Means Mob Mentality', but took issue with the site's general dislike for the work ethic, while agreeing wholeheartedly that probably way over half of jobs in the UK serve no meaningful purpose other than entangling everyone in a huge web of endless corporate promotion, deception and bureaucracy. The site peddles a simplistic line placing huge optimism in the future evolution of humanity given recent cultural developments, with only overwork holding people back from realising their full creative potential. Judging from the polished bespoke Flash design, I'd assume that a good deal of work has gone into the site's presentation. It offers myriad excuses for trendy student types and layabouts to justify their lifestyle and falls into the dangerous trap of extolling the virtues of economic model centred around consumption and entertainment. That's right hundreds of thousands of UK residents work hard in offices, advertising agencies, shopping malls, bars, nightclubs and casinos so much of the remaining population can indulge in materialistic dreams that are both unsustainable and unattainable to all but a lucky few.

Among the myths that the reactionary press allegedly perpetrates is the relentless rise in domestic violence and anti-social behaviour. Quoting the British Crime Survey (BCS) Anxiety Culture claims not only is crime at an all time low and any statistical increases can be attributed to greater reporting and changing definitions, but accuses the BBC and Daily Mail of scaremongering. The same logic is applied to the overhyped obesity epidemic and again there is a good deal of common sense in the site 's observations. Britons ate on average more calories three decades ago and many otherwise healthy people have lived into their 80s and 90s despite being clinically overweight or obese based on the simplified body mass index. However, in both cases just because the corporate and state media simplify and misstate the causes of evident issues that people experience in their everyday lives does not mean these problems do not exist. All power elites have their own agendas. Certainly the spectre of pervasive antisocial behaviour and rampant crime can serve to justify new Draconian legislation expanding surveillance in one of the most heavily monitored countries in the world.

However, the trouble with crime statistics lies in the definition of crime. If crime means petty theft, then the installation of surveillance technology, the transition to electronic transactions for all but the smallest purchases and, dare I say, a relatively buoyant economy, albeit unsustainable with a widening rich-poor gap, have led to a marked reduction. Very few people in this country carry more than £50 in hard cash and if their car is worth more than a few hundred quid it probably has an alarm. Indeed people spend more and more of their time at home, watching TV and surfing the net. Look through the windows of houses and flats in working class areas and you'll see gigantic home cinemas in almost every living room. Increasingly each member of a household has a personalised media delivery system in their bedroom, leading to a further disintegration of family life. At least in the 70s and 80s when families would tend to watch prime-time TV together in the living room each member would benefit from the others' insights and collective viewing would also limit certain indulgences, especially graphic scenes of murder and rape.

The corporate and state elites consider crime any acts that endanger their grip on power and may destabilise the delicate social order that keeps the masses loyal to the system and easily manageable. Drunk youths rampaging down high streets scaring the living daylights out of any passers-by suit the elite agenda just fine. First their behaviour boosts not only the multi-billion pound booze business, but is also excellent for the booming CCTV surveillance industry and justifies incessant calls from mainstream politicians for more police on the beat. More important it lets the system keep tabs on young hooligans, so after their Saturday night brawls they can safely return to grease the wheels of a corrupt corporate machine. If the same youths had spent their weekend reading Joel Bakan's The Corporation or attending an antiwar demo, they might not act as obediently when asked to enforce new diktats (conveniently labelled as best practice guidelines). The real troublemakers the establishment worries about are not yobs of any social class, serving a useful purpose both as scapegoats and as bullies they can later disown, but conscientious independent thinkers, the kind of people who get labelled mavericks, mad professors, extremists and just plain crazies.

An act is only considered criminal in law if powerful forces have not only put it on the statute books but are actually willing to enforce it. If we redefined crime as 'harming, robbing or unduly exploiting others' and 'infringing on the basic human rights of others', then megabuck corporations that dominate the City of London would be in the dock alongside the politicians who let them move trillions of pounds, dollars and Euros across the globe to boost their bottom line with little regard to the immense human consequences. Indeed in the UK the kind of lobbying that led to the trial in absentia of former Italian PM Bettino Craxi and arrest of his successor Silvio Berlusconi is perfectly legal. Whether the state is minimally concerned about the harm caused by toxic effluents produced by industry essential to our high consumption lifestyle depends largely on its analysis of the effects pollution has on social and economic stability. The establishment wish both to command the loyalty of its subjects through its public image of benevolence and needs workers and consumers to be healthy enough to participate in their business model. In recent decades the establishment in much of Western Europe and North America has been able to clean up its act on industrial pollution by outsourcing most of the really dirty jobs to low wage economies.

Whether you believe the BCS or the (in my humble opinion) more realistic picture painted in Francis Gilbert's Yob Nation, a true measure of social cohesion cannot be based on abstract crime statistics, but on people's selfishness or rather their propensity towards psychopathy. I don't care if my neighbour downloads gigabytes of copyrighted music, fails to pay her taxes or smokes an illicit substance as long as this behaviour does not affect my basic dignity. Some would have us believe as a result of such transgressions musicians would stop recording new albums because peer-to-peer file sharing has put them out of business, the state would fail to provide basic social services because nobody pays taxes or we'd be plagued with rampant cannabis-induced psychosis. In the real world record companies and pop stars make billions out of a select group of high profile acts, tax evasion by ordinary citizens accounts for a minuscule percentage of potential government income and psychosis induced by other perfectly legal drugs such as alcohol is a much greater problem than the latest potent strains of cannabis. What concerns me is whether my neighbour respects my personal dignity and participates as a conscientious member of the local community. If people distrust their neighbours, indeed are encouraged by the scaremongering media to regard any deviant behaviour with suspicion, then they owe allegiance only to themselves, possibly their immediate family, and remote entities such as their employer, musical or cinematographic idols, favourite sports team, nation, special interest sect, religion or even a supranational organisation, but not to their geographic community. Increasingly people feel they have less in common with their neighbours than they do with distant cyberbuddies, so it's no wonder that we care less about the welfare of other members of our community. Despite the oft-repeated rhetoric of mainstream politicians a combination of economic and cultural trends have led to the steady corrosion not just of traditional extended families, but communities. Much of the media attention given to domestic violence, antisocial behaviour and paedophilia serve not only to spread fear and distrust, but more importantly to assert the role of a vast state and corporate control structure, comprising police, social workers, psychiatric nurses and increasingly non-governmental organisations such as abnormal personality (aka mental health) charities. Recent initiatives such as parenting lessons for begetters of antisocial children and the extension of the definition of domestic assault to include verbal abuse fit wonderfully into this pattern. Children growing up in the late 1990s and early 21st century lack the respect that previous generations had for their primary caregivers, learning early on of their parents' fallibility, e.g. Mummy why are you smoking? Don't you know it's bad for you? or Daddy, you can't send me to bed at nine o'clock, that's child abuse!

A fairer measure would be the extent of social and personal injustice. With such a pervasive network of CCTV cameras it comes as little surprise that many forms of visible theft and disorderly behaviour have shown a steady decline since the early 1990s. Criminals have simply become smarter turning to credit card identity theft, loan extortion rackets for the heavily indebted and supplying technically illegal recreational mind drugs such as ecstasy, often tacitly tolerated by the establishment. Fear of reprimand has certainly changed the way husbands and parents behave. Rather than expressing their true feelings they will often act out scenes they have witnessed in movies and TV soap operas, resorting to antidepressants and other drugs to cope with their inability to assert their role at home, or simply distancing themselves from the family. So statistical reductions in the perception of crime as reported by the government-sponsored BCS do not necessarily mean greater social tranquillity and reciprocal trust, but merely reflect the effectiveness of the government's chosen means of controlling the populace. As the establishment only cares about maintaining its tight grip over the plebs, it favours measures that boost profitability and surveillance, while atomising and marginalising the population at large and destroying traditional allegiances to local communities and faith groupings. Moral criminality is inherent in a society like ours that worships consumerism encouraging long-term debt, is hooked on soaps, violence-packed movies and with large proportions of the youth regularly playing first-person shooter games and indulging in binge drinking and gambling.

Recent legal changes have effectively outlawed traditional safety valves for pent-up anxiety such as having a ciggy and shouting at your spouse, while making it easier to get inebriated 24/7 and then blow a fortune on a night at the casino, whose extortionate operations would have been illegal only two years ago. The big criminals have been given free reign, able either to bankroll lobbies or circumvent new surveillance technology, while the little criminals are treated like naughty kids and sent to the head teacher to take their medication.