Category: All in the Mind

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All in the Mind

Alternate Reality in the Post-Enlightenment Era

Is scientific censorship leading us back to the Dark Ages?

Flying over Antarctica's ice wilderness.

I’m all for challenging orthodoxy, especially when powerful forces seek to enforce their narrow interpretation of observable reality to protect their vested interests and drive hidden agendas. I’ve long argued that intellectual freedom is the best way to let good science, grounded in verifiable reality, win over bad ideological science. It’s the ultimate form of democratic peer-review. Yet at the dawn of the artificial intelligence revolution, many opinion leaders would have us believe only a select group of authorised experts may decide on the key scientific questions that affect our everyday lives as free-thinking autonomous human beings. Once we lose the right to challenge authority over matters such as healthcare, farming or town-planning, our technocratic masters hold the power of life or death over us. This foreboding sense of helplessness leads critical thinkers to distrust all official information.

I fear the more trend-setting influencers push alternate realities at variance with our first-hand experiences, the more a growing minority of confused malcontents will begin to question the very foundations of the scientific enlightenment that enabled modern civilisation to thrive. If new schoolbooks redefine basic human biology by teaching impressionable young children gender is merely assigned at birth rather than being an immutable trait embedded in every cell of our bodies, why should we believe mainstream cosmology? When science becomes dogma, enforced by an army of censors, fact checkers and skewed statistics, some will fall prey to deceptive but superficially appealing counternarratives that serve only to bewilder us.

It should hardly surprise us that just as gender theory goes mainstream with primary school children exposed to drag queen story time, flat-earthism and young-earth creationism have made big comebacks on social media, especially among devout Christians, and perhaps in an ironic twist of fate, among many strict Muslims too.

In a make-believe world where men can become pregnant, why should we not fantasise the boundless opportunities of a flat disc extending infinitely beyond an ice wall that globalist geographers have apparently mislabelled Antarctica? With the advent of AI-enhanced interactive virtual reality, almost anything is possible. Tartan army foot soldiers might want to relive the 1978 World Cup with Scotland beating Iran and Peru to qualify for the second round and then to go on to beat Argentina in the final. Such a fantasy might also feature the Winter Olympics in the majestic snow-capped Cairngorms with 4000-metre peaks and state-of-the-art cable cars outclassing the best the Swiss Alps may offer. Indeed, why bother spending a small fortune to experience the natural wonders of remote Pacific atolls, the Amazonian rainforests or idyllic Tibetan villages, when we could explore idealised three-dimensional simulations of these locales via VR-goggles and haptic suits. Modern technology can easily simulate weather and terrain too, but I anticipate brain implants may do away with the need for complex machinery altogether and send haptic feedback signals straight to our cerebrum as if we were walking, running, swimming, kissing or even making passionate love with an erotic deity. We could, with new superhuman powers, climb Mount Everest, dive deep into the Great Barrier Reef and enjoy an exquisite feast of freshly caught lobsters washed down with champagne aboard our private yacht from the safety of our bedroom, with our atrophied flesh-and-blood body reduced to a life-support system for our online activities. Future transhumans could re-enact almost any alternate reality with radical revisions of history and geophysics to suit our cultural predilections and belief systems.

You may wonder why I bother debating with pseudo-intellectual flat earth theorists. For all I know, they could be either AI bots or digital agent provocateurs sowing the seeds of confusion in an age of heightened media manipulation. A few may be genuine biblical literalists or victims of subterfuge. Yet I feel strongly anyone concerned with objective truth amid so much deceit should call out both official and unofficial pseudoscience.

In my brief online exchanges, random flat earthers have questioned why passenger aeroplanes do not fly over Antarctica. The real reason is the only viable commercial route to cross the Southern polar region, from Sydney in Australia to Santiago of Chile, follows a natural path that skirts around the unforgiving ice-clad continent with much higher survival rates at sea in the event of an emergency landing. However, for a mere $100,000 (USD) you can buy a chartered flight to the South Pole and stay at the Amundsen-Scott Station. If you stay long enough to the start of long polar night, you may observe in an extreme cold of -60ºC at 2835m above sea level the night sky with its aurora rotate at 24 hour intervals.

While observations of sunrises, sunsets and lunar phases at different latitudes and longitudes led ancient astronomers to adopt the Round Earth model long before the development of modern navigation instruments, flat earthers persisted with their literal interpretations of sacred manuscripts, with heaven above us and hell below us. It is simply a myth that medieval scholars believed sailors would fall off the edge of the Earth if they ventured into unchartered territory. Ancient maps often portrayed the known world as a disc or segment of a larger sphere. In the second century BC, Ptolemy argued that the Earth is a stationary ball surrounded by a larger celestial sphere revolving uniformly around it along with the stars, planets, Sun, and Moon, thus explaining their daily risings and settings. Indian and Chinese astronomers visualised a dome rotating above a flat earth floating in a larger ocean. The worldview of earlier civilisations centred on a small portion of a surface that seafarers would later chart onto a sphere with amazing precision by the late 16th century.

The modern technology we take for granted relies on detailed knowledge of our geophysical and biological environments that has taken us thousands of years to acquire. We may yearn to expand our horizons to new undiscovered continents lying beyond a mythical outer ice shelf, but we have to make do with the 149 million square kilometres of land and 361 million km² of sea we have within the Earth’s atmosphere. The oceans below a depth of a few hundred metres remain largely unexplored as does the earth’s outer mantle. While new discoveries have called into question previous orthodoxies, such as the Big Bang or mathematical abstractions behind the hyper-dimensions of string theory, we can be pretty certain our home planet has a spheroidal shape and orbits our nearest star, the Sun.

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All in the Mind

Pronoun Creep

Sex is embedded in the DNA of every cell of our bodies

As a living language, English has no shortage of quirks and ambiguities but tends to adapt over time to fill the semantic gaps. However, there is a big difference between the natural evolution of language and compelled speech.

Unlike some other European languages, English lacks a generic gender-neutral pronoun such as the German “man” or French “on” for the third person singular, although the formal impersonal pronoun “one” may sometimes meet these needs. By and large, we find ourselves having to choose between he/him/his and she/her/hers when referring to an abstract third person.

Someone, anyone and everyone may take the third person singular verb, but have long, especially in everyday speech, been combined with they, theirs and them, e.g. “Someone has left their keys on the table” or “Everyone should take their belongings with them”. Older style guides recommended third person singular pronouns with “someone” or ”anyone” when they refer to one person only and until recently he/him/his was the default even if it could involve a woman. By contrast, "everyone" always refers to more than one person. Besides, the inclusion of “someone” or “anyone” in a sentence removes any potential ambiguity when combined with “they/them/their”, but this is not the case when a pronoun acts as a placeholder for a singular gendered woman or man.

Yet on the back of the gender-bending craze, third person plural pronouns are creeping into contexts where we’d expect singular forms unless many people are involved. I now get emails from LinkedIn with phraseology like “Angela Green has accepted your invitation. Message them now!”. As Angela is clearly a singular woman, will my private messages to her be sent to more than one person?

I’ve long observed that modern English has a stronger tendency to use people’s names in sentences where other languages would omit them, partly to avoid ambiguity in sentences like “Michael drove Bill to York in his car” where “his car” may be Michael’s or Bill’s. What happens if misplaced political correctness leads us not to assume Michael or Bill’s gender identities and instead opt for phraseology like “Michael drove Bill to York in their car”. Does this mean Bill and Michael share a car, but Michael drove on that occasion?

How could a language evolve without a means to identify a gendered person in a respectfully neutral way? The answer is simple. Human sexual dimorphism plays a central role in all traditional societies. Besides, gendered singular pronouns are deeply ingrained in everyday speech. Most suggested alternative gender-neutral pronouns either clash with common names or just sound hackneyed, especially as most people still like their natural gender identity.

The growing use of they/them/theirs for singular males or females dehumanises people. It promotes a rejection of our natural heritage as the offspring of a long line of women and men and blurs key distinctions between a group of people and a free-thinking autonomous individual rather than a mere subject of a genetic experiment.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics Uncategorized

Whom may you hate?

Gas the unjabbed (Send the unjabbed to the gas chambers) ! Graffiti by the radical wing of the Covid Cult in trendy post-modern Germany.

When hatred means only loathing protected categories, but it’s fine to direct your anger at new outgroups.

As the antithesis to love, hatred is a natural emotion as old as humanity itself. We hate people who, we believe, mean us harm. By “us” I mean our immediate in-group, ourselves, our family and our wider community. Hatred has its roots in distrust of perceived enemies and fraudsters, something we learn from an early age for the purposes of survival. There’s a reason we teach our children not to accept sweets from strangers. Can we ever justify hateful feelings? Can we ever forgive the perpetrators of heinous crimes? Some may argue that we should only hate evil deeds and give criminals a chance to repent and beg forgiveness. Others argue that some psychopathic criminals are beyond redemption and fully deserve lifelong imprisonment or early death. It may be culturally acceptable to hate irredeemable mass murderers and serial rapists, but organised criminals get others to do their dirty deeds. They also tend to have influential legal and public relations teams to protect them against any likelihood of prosecution.

Hatred is very problematic when it comes either to collective guilt or the demonisation of outgroups at odds with mainstream society, however defined. It may be wrong to tarnish a whole ethnic group with the crimes of their ruling elites, but such divisive tactics often serve the interests of the new ruling classes. The old British upper crust appealed to patriotism and civilisational superiority. They were happy for British settlers to displace the natives in far-off lands when it suited their expansionary purposes. To justify colonialism, the dominant organs of propaganda unpeopled the restless natives. Today they exploit migratory flows in the opposite direction for almost the same reasons, to undermine traditional ways of life, suppress self-sufficiency and subjugate everyone to their rebranded corporate dictatorship.

Back in the 1950s and 60s it was okay to hate practising homosexuals. As late as 1983 the mainstream media vilified Peter Tatchell, an openly gay Labour candidate, posing on the radical left, in the inner-city Labour stronghold of Bermondsey. He lost to the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes, who later admitted his bisexuality, after attempting to deny such rumours for over 20 years as a high-profile politician. Today, the same treatment is meted out to alleged transphobes, namely people who believe in natural procreation and biological definitions of man and woman. We witnessed this in the Scottish National Party’s recent leadership election contest. The same corporate media that 40 years ago had hounded Peter Tatchell as a dangerous extremist conducted a smear campaign against Katie Forbes, a devout Christian who had opposed the ill-fated Gender Recognition Reform bill.

Yesterday’s protected categories can become today’s outcasts. Germaine Greer has transitioned from being a celebrated feminist author, admired by the radical chic left and regularly appearing on TV, to a reactionary old bat that transgender rights activists want to de-platform. It’s now politically correct to hate TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) as we can observe in countless videos of screeching blue, green or pink-haired demonstrators attempting to stop natural-born women, such as the courageous Kellie-Jay Keen, from defending their gender-based rights.

It seems only yesterday when the woke left defended Muslims against Islamophobia. Now the spectre of Islamophobia has served its purpose in justifying the more surveillance and censorship as well as shutting down rational debate on mass migration, social engineers feel empowered to target fragmented religious communities who oppose the teaching of gender theory in primary schools. The Scottish government’s new hate speech law encourages children to report parents who express homophobic or transphobic beliefs. This pretty much incriminates followers of all leading faiths that preach the virtues of motherhood in the context of stable two-parent families.

Last but not least, we have the sizable minority of adults and teenagers who consciously decided not to succumb to unrelenting coercion to get vaccinated in order to participate fully in society. For the best part of two years, TV talking heads, celebrities, employers, politicians, academics, trade union bosses, social media influencers and religious leaders not only evangelised mRNA injections, they lampooned antivaxxers as ignorant, selfish and anti-science. Even Noam Chomsky supported the isolation of the wilfully unjabbed. At stake was much more than vaccine safety, but bodily autonomy, transparency and accountability. All of a sudden, people lost the right to disagree with state-mandated pseudo-scientific dogma. The left-branded progressive media now targets not so much the unvaccinated as those who question the vaccine narrative, including people like Dr Aseem Malhotra or Andrew Bridgen MP who had initially backed the vaccine campaign. It’s okay to hate the enemies of the Biotech Mafia.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Progressive Sycophants

Hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised freedom fighters protest against technocracy (London, June 2021), ignored by the mainstream media and the establishment left. There was not a single SWP placard in sight.

How billionaire transhumanists captured the middle-class left

I’m so old I recall when the left stood up against the ruling classes with their endless war games and knavish tricks. Now they screech against the spectre of the evil far right, amplify voguish mainstream propaganda and demand the suppression of all traditional outlooks. It only seems yesterday when the radical left championed investigative journalists like Julian Assange and Seymour Hersh and demanded greater transparency from the military industrial complex. We also instinctively distrusted any large multinationals with multi-billion-dollar marketing budgets. Many Western socialists never really forgave the working classes in the 1970s and 80s for their newfound love of cars, gadgets and package-tour holidays that only free-market capitalism seemed able to provide. They fell out of love with the great unwashed and turned their attention to new victim groups.

Broad left-of-centre coalitions may have exposed grotesque injustices and challenged the vested interests of regional elites in the great civil rights campaigns against segregation in the United States and South Africa. Yet when the international corporatocracy embraced racial and sexual diversity in the 1990s after the eclipse of the Soviet Union, affluent trendy lefties moved onto new cultural battles setting themselves at odds with the reactionary working classes, whom they held responsible for centuries of misogyny, homophobia and racism. They even blamed the underclasses of European descent for the historic wrongs of slavery and cultural imperialism. Ironically the forebears of the socially conservative lower classes in the British Isles, the kind of people who supported Brexit, endured extreme hardship and had to work ten to twelve hours a day to feed their families. By contrast, many virtue-signalling progressives can trace their roots to the well-to-do professional and missionary classes who helped administer the Empire and civilise the restless masses for the greater good. All that’s changed is the church has gone high-tech and woke, while the rebranded rainbow empire now spans the whole globe. Today’s progressive managerial classes promote LGBTQ+ Pride month and climate alarmism with the same zeal that their forebears once spread Christianity and allegiance to the monarch among pagans. Indeed, even the new British King struggles to hide his allegiance to the World Economic Forum. One could be forgiven for believing King Charles III has the same speech writer as Greta Thunberg.

The Big Switch

Many argue the Western left began to cast aside its traditional blue-collar base in the 1960s. However, most leftists still believed in a fairer and kinder world with a substantial transfer of power away from boardrooms to grassroots organisations. The Green Left, as it evolved in the 1980s and 90s, attempted to offer an alternative to unsustainable economic growth and rampant greed. They seemed to stand against the vested interests of the big corporations who wanted to expand markets and lock workers into a vicious cycle of debt and mass consumerism. Lower living standards have never been great vote winners, especially when car manufacturers, supermarkets and airlines collude to sell the dream of automotive bliss and fashion fetishism. Throughout the New Labour years (1997-2010), the economic growth mantra reigned supreme. If dissident economists dared to suggest that endless debt-driven expansion of the money supply will ultimately implode with catastrophic social consequences, they soon got shouted down. Despite all the green rhetoric car ownership and foreign travel continued to rise in Western Europe until the 2008 credit squeeze. Sales crept gradually up again until 2020. Since then, there’s been a steady decline. Twenty-twenty may go down history not just as the beginning of a virus-themed technocratic coup, but also as Peak Car. It was the year the big global banks decided to put mass motoring into reverse gear. For decades, lenders literally created money out of thin air to help young adults onto the car-owning ladder. Governments spent billions on multilane highways intersecting an urban sprawl of housing estates and retail parks hostile to humble walkers and cyclists. Now the big banks and energy cartels advertise the wonders of the green economy and our transition away from the era of material growth with effortless travel to a low-consumption digital future with compact 15-minute neighbourhoods serviced by drones. The tech giants support universal basic income because they know most monotonous clerical and manual jobs will soon be fully automated. Last but not least, the same biotech industry that facilitated covid tyranny also bankrolls the transgender and neurodiversity lobbies. The Wellcome Trust funds both the purported neurodiversity movement and transgender inclusion. While the old ecology movement backed local organic farming and herbal remedies, the new green-branded corporate left champions genetic engineering, global supply chains and lifelong dependency on dodgy pharmaceutical products.

Collectivism is the main thread that binds the old based anti-establishment left with the new woke conformist left, but they appeal to very different collectives. The old left of my youth still sought to emancipate oppressed peoples exploited as workers or colonial subjects.

We could broadly split the old radical left into two main camps. Syndicalists, who viewed workers as the main vehicle of change, and idealists, who appealed to the collective conscience through political activism and cultural vanguardism. They came in various flavours, from Christian socialists to pacifists and anti-imperialists. Many, especially in the trade unions, sympathised with the former Soviet Union, China or Cuba. Others took their lead from the disciples of Leon Trotsky or fantasised the Swedish model of luxury social democracy. Yet despite these differences, the various factions on the left agreed on the need to redistribute power from the rich to the poor.  In the West, the mainstream media regularly ridiculed and smeared left-wing dissident thinkers who challenged the hegemony of vested corporate interests. I recall vitriolic media campaigns against the former leader of National Union of Miners, Arthur Scargill, and his communist ally, Mick McGahey, during the bitter 1984 Miners’ strike. The NUM leadership seriously misjudged the Tory government’s resolve. Their year-long battle, mythologised by the student left across Europe, helped the British ruling classes downsize the mining industry and clamp down on trade union rights. To add insult to injury, the Thatcher government imported cut-price coal from Socialist Poland, as it repressed strikes by the anti-establishment Solidarność  movement. Yet, a hard core on the Western left still believed workers could only be masters of their destiny by seizing control of the commanding heights of the economy. Arthur Scargill remains unrepentant to this day. As the leading light in the tiny Socialist Labour Party, he speaks out against the insanity of closing coal mines, but seems oblivious to the struggles against technocracy, hailing the disputed election of Lula da Silva as a victory for international socialism. Yes, that’s the same Lula who wants to jail people for spreading counter-information about mRNA-injectables. In his heyday, Arthur represented a mainly male workforce, believed in families and seldom uttered a word about gay rights. I recall as a student visiting a group of striking miners near Swansea in South Wales. Over breakfast our host expressed his dismay over the antics of a gay rights group, who, he claimed, had brought his struggle to save his community into disrepute. While the student left yearned for a rainbow revolution, most militant trade unionists wanted to protect their communities against global corporatocracy.

The Corbynite left drew most of its active support from the social management classes angry about obvious injustices. They may have championed the Palestinian cause or protested against wars, but all too often they served as gullible foot soldiers in the woke revolution that ultimately only benefits the technocratic classes. With a few noble exceptions such as Jeremy Corbyn’s lesser-known brother, Piers, the trendy left swallowed the covid narrative hook, line and sinker, calling only for more PPE (an acronym seldom heard in everyday speech before 2020), more generous furlough pay and longer lockdowns. As usual, the BBC, Guardian and assorted high-profile influencers guided their groupthink. Not a single trade union leader called for strikes against lockdowns or opposed jab coercion. The opposition came from a new alliance of free-thinkers and social conservatives that transcends the old left-right divide, uniting small business owners, many of whom belong to Labour’s beloved ethnic minorities, libertarians and latter-day hippies who still respect mother nature and bodily autonomy. Aerial footage showed hundreds of thousands at the big London protests against vaccine passports of 2021. Yet they barely figured in mainstream news bulletins. Any reports in the legacy media referred to a few thousand antivax protesters and highlighted peripheral scuffles with the police. Unlike other large demonstrations I’ve attended over the years, there were no printed placards from the trade unions or suspect organisations such as Socialist Workers Party. On the way back from a freedom protest in Glasgow, I encountered a masked Socialist Worker seller. The SWP’s main bone of contention with Big Pharma related to the perceived shortage of their mRNA products in the developing world and not to the safety, efficacy or purpose of the multi-trillion-dollar global injection campaign. I asked whether the SWP now supports UBI (universal basic income) and, not entirely to my surprise, they do as a transitionary measure on the road to the full socialism. The next question flummoxed the humble young Trotskyist: “How could people on UBI go on strike if the managerial classes were, heaven forbid, to abuse their power?”. She had no answer other than to claim we could rise up and seize control of the means of production, but I quipped they “could just declare a health emergency and block people’s bank accounts or access to any form of transport if they protest, you know, just like they do in China”. The conversation ended there. While organised groups of essential workers may counteract the hegemony of mega-corporations, the welfare classes can only beg for more social credits.

Noam Chomsky’s support for biotech apartheid was the last straw. I could forgive him for taking different stances on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy or on the demolition of NYC’s iconic World Trade Center, but how could the author of Manufacturing Consent fail to question the extreme bias of the corporate media over medical martial law? How could libertarian socialists turn a blind to the biggest and fastest transfer of wealth and power from the working classes to a bunch of super-billionaires? Yet this is what happened. With rare exceptions, the whole conventional left from Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand to Lula Da Silvia in Brazil and from eco-vegans to the remnants of the Fourth International embraced the covid cult and, in doing so, aided and abetted Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset. Pseudo-intellectual neo-Marxist rhetoric makes little practical sense if you have effectively delegated humanity’s future to BlackRock and Vanguard.

Unlike its forerunners, the new corporate left seeks to exploit racial, sexual and neurological identities to guide the masses towards a micromanaged welfare utopia in lockstep with corporate NGOs. At best the postmodern left can demand higher taxes for the rich and more generous handouts for the poor, but the workless masses cannot go on strike. They are at the behest of the technocratic classes who seek to consolidate their control not just over the means of production, but over the whole of humanity. Rather than empower the working classes, the elitist left wants to phase out the labour force altogether.

The battleground no longer pits left against right, but bottom against top or rather natural human beings against technocrats. We need to build a new movement to challenge the greatest concentration of wealth and power in human history.

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All in the Mind

Neurodiversity

Alphabet soup

The Next Step in Social Engineering

Have you had enough of the endless promotion of transgenderism? Just as policy makers take heed of widespread public backlash against LGBTQ++ indoctrination in primary schools, they are shifting their focus back to mental health, a concept so broad that it affects everyone and may justify almost unlimited intrusion into every aspect of our private lives including our innermost thoughts. We could almost say mental health is the bandwagon that reaches people that other bandwagons cannot reach.

Slowly but surely, we have grown accustomed to a new set of subjective labels to categorise other human beings. Traditionally we cared about practical traits like biological sex, vocation or cultural background. We knew families needed a mother and father team and children needed love, affection and a sense of belonging. We respected people for their functional roles in life, whether they helped raise the next generation, tilled the land or repaired machinery. We also knew harmonious communities needed some degree of cultural compatibility and shared values. Now an army of corporate-state managers wants to take care of all that. They do not want independently minded adults forming loving two-parent families and passing their customs, skills and ethos onto the next generation. Long gone are the days when bureaucrats paid lip service to grassroots democracy. Unless you join trendy vanguard campaigns such as Black Lives Matter or Extinction Rebellion, the media-savvy progressive intelligentsia will smear your protests with accusations of political extremism or conspiracy-theorism. Behavioural scientists now view principled opposition to their concept of progress as social diseases that warrant proactive re-education programmes and justify censorship.

This brings us to another thorny question. Who gets to decide the diagnostic criteria for problematic neurodivergence? Once we equate mental health with physical health, the new umbrella term of health security takes on a new meaning. A temporary narrow obsession with stray genetic sequences has empowered technocrats to expand their surveillance grid. It beggars belief that the government would squander £37 billion on a contact-tracing app for the sole purpose of marginally reducing infection rates. The NHS app soon morphed into an all-encompassing digital health passport with full details of your mental health records accessible not only to the public health services, but to their partners in the global cybertech industry who could easily link your health service account with your social media activity, location, physical activity and spending habits. Even without CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies), Big Tech can easily track what we do and think. Google knows which YouTube videos you watch, reads your social media posts, eavesdrops on your private conversations and tracks your movements. Police forces supplement these spying operations with hate speech and radicalisation monitoring units. The 77th Brigade of the British Army intervened online to tackle the proliferation of counter-narrative information, portrayed inevitably as misinformation. Their operatives set up bogus accounts as medical professionals and concerned citizens, often replying to posts by dissidents with professionally designed diagrams and analysis supporting the official narrative. Their strategy is not to persuade us, but to distract, demoralise and isolate us. Big Tech clearly works in tandem with governments, but often appeals to mental health to explain why they had to intervene to protect the public at large from incriminating evidence they could smear as medical misinformation. Noncompliant behaviours and unapproved thoughts now warrant neuropsychological profiling.

Social planners now champion many decadent lifestyles we once considered dysfunctional as they would prevent people from leading productive family-oriented lives. It is very easy to monitor welfare-dependent online gamers or drug addicts. They do not threaten the hegemony of large corporations in the era of smart automation. Self-absorbed citizens immersed in virtual realities are easy to please and will conform to new behavioural guidelines outside their tightly controlled spheres of illusory freedom, as long as they can enjoy their daily routines. From a people management perspective, unemployable layabouts are almost model citizens. Their minor misdemeanours justify endless surveillance, whose real purpose is to keep tabs on dissidents. Police forces around the UK have little but counselling services to offer the victims of burglary. Yet they now arrest people for misgendering transsexuals online, praying silently outside abortion centres or organising peaceful protests against lockdowns. Whatever your views on the abortion debate or transsexual rights may be, hate crime legislation targets unapproved thoughts based on state-sanctioned truths. When English pro-life campaigner Isabel Vaughan-Spruce started to pray silently near a Birmingham abortion clinic, six police officers were dispatched to arrest her. Her presence may allegedly upset abortion service users and may be hateful to staff at the clinic. This logic redefines hatred as expressing disagreement with protected categories or sacred cows, but more important recontextualises dissent in terms of mental health. The mainstream media seldom misses an opportunity in their in prime-time dramas and news shows to portray traditional Christians, antivaxxers and nativists as lunatics who may become domestic terrorists at the drop of a hat.

I first heard of Asperger’s Syndrome, now usually merged into the wider high-functioning autistic spectrum, in a BBC documentary sometime in the mid 1990s. They portrayed it as mad professor syndrome. The label seemed innocent enough. I had only just become aware of children diagnosed with a previously rare developmental disorder on the same spectrum. Little did I know this quaint condition would soon become both a household name and a catch-all explanation for non-compliant behaviour. Its broad diagnostic criteria can apply to almost anyone with socialisation challenges. Nearly 30 years later, celebrities and TV presenters broadcast their autistic identity. Some claim Elon Musk is on the spectrum. Now, mirroring gender self-identification legislation in Scotland and Canada, Professor Sue Fletcher-Watson from the University of Edinburgh has called for legal recognition of autism self-diagnosis. Whether personality profiles involve depression, obsession, compulsion, hyperactivity, lethargy or aversion, they all attract celebrity endorsements and high-profile marketing campaigns. Psychological labels promote introspection and shape our perception of reality. We begin to see ourselves and others around us not as autonomous actors with nuanced characters, but as stereotypes conforming to an alphabet soup of psychobabble acronyms and gender pronouns.

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All in the Mind

Behaviours and Immutable Traits

Genes

A Scottish politician, Karen Adam MSP, triggered a massive online backlash by tweeting paedophiles and predators are people, adding only that they are people who abuse. The statement is factually correct, but this came just days after the Scottish Parliament facilitated sexual abuse by making it much easier for biological males to gain access to female-only spaces in their Gender Recognition Reform Bill. A disturbingly large number of male sexual predators have already gained entry to female-only prisons and changing rooms by identifying as female while retaining male genitalia. Ms Adam’s critics inevitably accused her of normalising paedophilia as a sexual orientation. Then a Scottish superintendent used the neologism MAPs (or minor-attracted persons) in a year-end report on the police’s strategy to tackle child sexual exploitation. This term destigmatises paedophilia. Ironically, both sides of the online debate agreed that sexual attraction is an innate trait rather than a learned behaviour. This may lend weight to arguments against conversion therapy when it comes to same-sex attraction, but is problematic at best when applied to the ideation of child abuse.

Let me go out on a limb here. All men are potential rapists. For sake of argument, I’ll use the definition of non-consensual forced penetration, a basic infringement of bodily autonomy. The question is when should we intervene to stop such immoral acts? The conventional wisdom is still that we should only punish perpetrators after a court of law has proven that someone has committed the crime. The same logic applies to murder and theft. Many of us may contemplate acts of revenge or entertain sexual fantasies that may inflict untold harm on others, but we do not usually act on our nefarious urges, unless we are either psychologically unstable or culturally conditioned to dehumanise victims. Arguably a society that normalises depravity is itself degenerate. As adults we are ultimately responsible for our actions unless we claim insanity and submit to psychiatric surveillance.

Philip K. Dick popularised the concept of pre-crime in his 1956 science fiction novel The Minority Report, which Stephen Spielberg later adapted for film. In the book the police’s precrime division uses precognition technology to predict when suspects are about to commit crimes and thus arrest them ahead of time. This assumes free will is a mere illusion and our behaviours, while sensitive to many inherited traits and environmental stimuli, are pre-determined.

Psychiatric screening is a classic case of a road paved with good intentions that leads to tyranny. While it may seem a good idea to evaluate young children for potential neurodevelopmental disorders, the devil is in the detail. What kind of personality profiles warrant preventive treatment? Whose business is it anyway to intrude on children’s natural development other than their parents and extended family? Until recently, parents only sought professional help if their children were seriously ill or had obvious intellectual handicaps. Now health visitors and social workers monitor the progress of all children and look out for any signs of developmental abnormalities. In Scotland most children, especially those without a stay-at-home parent, attend nursery before starting primary school at the tender age of five, letting external agencies take over pastoral care early on and refer any non-conforming children for psychiatric screening. The authorities now treat parents as little more than temporary carers and have begun to ask pupils to report politically incorrect speech at home. In 2019 a 17-year-old Aberdeenshire student was suspended for simply stating in class that there are only two genders. It’s becoming increasingly clear the authorities are more concerned about non-compliance with new societal precepts than the kind of harmful behaviours we traditionally call crimes.

The concept of precrime has now been extended to the realm of thought crime. Search engines can already analyse patterns in your online queries to predict your likely behaviours. This makes the redefinition of paedophilia as a sexual orientation particularly scary, especially if its diagnosis blurs the boundaries with other non-heteronormative tendencies that were also once considered mental disorders, but now must be celebrated. If a prepubescent child can identify as another gender, the stage is set to encourage such children to consider their erotic desires with each other and adults. At stake is the erosion of childhood innocence, when we can explore the natural world around us inquisitively uncorrupted by the deep and competitive feelings evoked by adult erotic exchanges. Merkinch Primary School in Inverness, catering for 5- to 11-year-olds, issued a questionnaire asking pupils if they identify as gay, lesbian or transgender. What evidence is there that adult sexual preferences can be determined at such a young age?

An alternative way to view the formation of our erotic feelings focuses on the interplay between our natural hormonal development and our social environment. This approach prevailed before the 1980s. The early gay rights movement did not view homosexuality as strictly genetically determined, but as a tendency among consenting adults who could not find happiness in heterosexual relationships. They argued modern liberal societies could more openly accommodate a wider range of lifestyles without changing the fundamental role of natural families. In reality, teenagers and young adults in same-sex environments such as boys’ boarding schools have long experimented with forms of homo-erotic mutual masturbation, but later grew out of this phase when circumstances changed. For decades homosexual practices at British private schools were swept under the carpet as temporary perversions comparable with illicit drugs. Nobody sought to elevate non-heteronormative eroticism to the status of protected characteristic. The idea that gays and lesbians are born that way can both validate the behaviour, if society considers it harmless, and criminalise people for life, if society condemns it.

In my experience, sexuality is not set in stone, but like many other behavioural traits evolves from a mix of environmental factors and genetic predisposition. Comparisons with other less emotive behaviours may enlighten us. Most psychologists believe people are not born muggers or racists, but some immutable biological attributes may shape our moral compass. Some societies, or socio-economic groups, are undoubtedly more prone to violence or distrust of outsiders than others. Likewise, societies may have very different sexual mores with homo-erotic practices much more common in some than others. While few of us can survive without friends, family or at least a circle of acquaintances we can trust, our survival instincts guide our coping strategies in life. We may tend more towards amoral or otherwise socially deviant behaviours if other strategies fail. If we extend the meaning of survival to cover our innate desire to spread our genes and leave our imprint on future generations, we can begin to understand why people may adopt different mating strategies based on a complex set of competing psycho-social and hormonal impulses as well as cultural influences. Undoubtedly, many of our preferences on lifestyle issues as varied as food, drink, exercise, vices and work are deeply entrenched by the time we reach adulthood. Yet when we struggle with our wellbeing, it seems perfectly normal to seek to improve ourselves by learning new skills, adopting a healthier diet, getting more exercise or quitting harmful habits, although we may prefer to laze around at home bingeing on junk food and watching YouTube videos. People suffering from alcoholism or drug addiction regularly undergo rehab and many go on to lead healthy lives. In some deprived areas, teenagers may get involved in gangland violence and end up in jail as young adults. Given the right training opportunities, some learn their lessons and succeed in mainstream society. If we were to conclude that obesity, alcoholism or mugging were immutable traits, we may as well condemn such people to lifelong medical or penal internment before they harm either themselves or others. Thanks to the expansion of the mental health industry, this is more or less what’s happening. Dysfunctional behaviours such as overeating are validated as innate psychological conditions that can only be managed, but never corrected.

If we treat paedophilia as a crime and its perpetrators, often victims of sexual abuse themselves, as psychologically disturbed, we can both protect childhood innocence and make such tendencies socially reprehensible. I see it more as a scourge on society than a lifelong neurological condition. However, reclassifying minor attraction as an immutable orientation runs the risk of either condemning perpetrators for life or normalising the behaviour, leading inevitably to more proactive surveillance and less freedom for those of us who behave responsibly. The same authorities that want to censor the Internet allegedly to protect us against exposure to online child porn and grooming gangs are normalising erotic ideation among prepubescents via RSE (Relationship and Sex Education), literally implanting ideas into children's young minds. Just because some people become very set in their ways does not mean they cannot change bad or evil habits. That’s why society and families matter.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Who’s really behind the Gender-bending Craze?

The Scottish Parliament has just passed the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Its advocates hail this legislation as a key milestone in our ongoing progress towards a fairer society, by literally inventing a new taxonomy of social constructs divorced from biological reality. As human beings, we have some immutable traits, which result from millions of years of evolution. We are a sexually reproducing species. Only women can give birth to new human beings and only men can impregnate them. Even in-vitro fertilisation does not change these fundamental facts of life. It merely enables conception without conventional coitus. Whether you like it or not, every natural child has a father and a mother. In theory, asexual reproduction, as in monozygotic twins, still relies on prior art, i.e. sexual reproduction via mitosis, involving a union of gametes, is still a prerequisite for subsequent meiosis. Stem cell reproduction techniques replicate sexual fertilisation through in-vitro gametogenesis or IVG, but does away with the need for a donor mother and father. The coming human GMO revolution, as Henry T. Greely foresaw in his 2016 book The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, will separate the roles of erotic desire and biological sex from procreation and thus the genetic bonds between different generations of the same family tree.

However, this future is not inevitable. Natural procreation is still very much the life blood of modern civilisation, but for how long? With uncertainties about the long-term sustainability of our current high-tech way of life and the automation of most manual and clerical jobs, there is no shortage of children, only very imbalanced age pyramids with more over 65s than under 18s in most of the world outside Africa, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. Despite rapid declines in fertility, we have never had so many human beings. Yet the world today’s youngsters will inherit will be one of demographic decline with dwindling opportunities for all but the most talented, which will only boost demand for genetic enhancement among the rich and discourage natural procreation among the growing welfare classes. Let us make no mistake, gender recognition legislation has nothing to do with helping vulnerable individuals struggling with their feelings about their assigned anatomy. It is about redefining one of the most fundamental aspects of natural humanity to facilitate a transition to transhumanism that will inevitably place our future in the hands of a clique of bioengineers.

The Abolition of Womanhood

The whole concept of women’s rights only makes sense if we can define what a woman is. Many woke politicians now struggle with this task. If we reduce womanhood to a set of personality and behavioural traits on a subjective spectrum with masculinity, anyone can claim gender-based privileges, which evolved over millennia to accommodate the distinctive roles we play in reproduction. The redefinition of womanhood, as appeared recently in the Cambridge Dictionary as a new entry under woman, is a semantic assault not only on biological females, but on the once untouchable institution of motherhood. The new definition of gender as a neurological concept with over a hundred subcategories warranting special labels and pronouns builds on the equally vague concept of neurodiversity. The well-funded transgender rights movement with its myriad charities and NGOs is really an outgrowth of the wider mental health industrial complex. Until recently, psychiatrists considered gender dysphoria a mental disorder often comorbid with other personality syndromes, not least with the ill-defined autistic spectrum. Prof. Simon Baron Cohen popularised the notion of the extreme male brain on one end of a spectrum from masculine systemisers to female empathisers. Yet this is a gross oversimplification of the differences between male and female brains. Human brains are incredibly versatile and responsive to environmental stimuli. Sex-based specialisation evolved to help us survive. Women need greater awareness of social dynamics, something we now call emotional intelligence, both to choose reliable partners and to raise the next generation. By contrast men can often succeed better in life by pursuing practical tasks or technical endeavours at which they can excel and more important contribute better to the survival of their extended family. While we may associate some behaviours more with masculinity or femininity, there are many ways to be a man or a woman. Some men thrive on social interaction and enjoy flaunting their sportsmanship or physical prowess. Others are more reserved and cerebral. If we used the simplistic empathising-systemising spectrum, many successful alpha males would fall more on the empathising side, while many shy conscientious young women, juggling the onerous duties of motherhood and an intellectually demanding career, might tend more towards the systemising end. It is hard to discern any strict correlation between multifaceted personality profiles and culturally sensitive sexual roles, except when it comes to the heterosexual dating game that favours socially confident individuals attractive to the opposite sex. Numerous studies have shown heterosexual women still prefer manly men and their male suitors still appreciate female beauty and tenderness. Unsurprisingly people seek complementary partners who can make up for their weaknesses. These instinctive attitudes are likely to change in a world without natural procreation where sex is demoted to drug-fuelled erotic exchanges enhanced by cosmetic surgery. Genitalia may become expendable accessories rather than gifts of mother nature. Alternatively, haptic feedback devices could simulate erotic feelings in atomised individuals and thereby do away with the need for more expensive sex robots. Biological sex would be a mere detail assigned at birth, but one’s sexuality and gender identity would be infinitely malleable.

The coming battle is not just over intellectual freedom and bodily autonomy, but the future of humanity itself.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Whither Humanity?

The rise and fall of hominids

Free Thinking, the Common Good and the Emergence of a Master Race

Many subjects are now off-limits in polite society. If you challenge the mainstream narrative on a whole host of controversies, you may risk much more than ridicule and ostracization, you may lose your job and even access to your online bank account. It hardly matters if you can cite mountains of hard evidence to support your analysis, you must filter all your conclusions through the lens of the preferred narrative. In other words, you must bend objective reality to suit a policy agenda handed down by a world-wide web of think-tanks, investment banks and biotech multinationals. It’s what I’ve called elsewhere the Global Mafia, hiding behind its army of media-savvy progressive opinion leaders.

Over the last three decades, the concept of political correctness has gradually encroached on public debate to suppress any perspectives that a self-selected coterie of experts has deemed unacceptable. The hate speech meme is a particularly pernicious extension of political incorrectness, implying that some social values are not just outmoded, but deliberately target a mutating set of protected victim groups. If you support immigration controls, someone may accuse you of hating the people who may no longer qualify to relocate to your country by legal means. Oddly, the same logic does not apply when it comes to military interventions abroad. It is apparently okay to drop bombs on brown people if they support official enemies. Besides, who gets to decide who the good and bad guys are? Perversely, accusations of hate speech can now silence victims of sexual abuse and the socially conservative poor, the kind of people who still value families and independence from their colonial overlords.

That’s where we are in 2022. The new worldwide aristocracy may pose on the green left but exhibits the same moral superiority that 19th century imperialists used to justify the subjugation of lesser peoples. Today, irrespective of our colour or creed, most of us are subjects of the same banking system that controls our access to essential resources such as food, water and energy. For decades we lived under the illusion that a regulated market economy with a social safety net would let us all be masters of our destiny or at least have some say in the future progress of our species. Alas, the fourth industrial revolution has not only enriched a bunch of super-billionaires, it has relegated countless millions of workers to the status of corporate welfare recipients, either via temporary jobs in the gig economy or universal basic income.

The UK’s freshly installed Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, only took three days to ask the Bank Of England to establish a direct digital equivalent to physical cash. Unlike traditional means of exchange, CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) are programmable, trackable, terminable and, more disturbingly, revokable. In the same week PayPal reinstated its much-maligned policy to impose fines of up to $2500 to customers it accuses of spreading disinformation. Meanwhile, the biggest cheerleaders for lockdowns and jab coercion want us to forget police brutality against peaceful protesters, quarantine camps, corporate censorship, non-stop fearmongering, social isolation and the trillions squandered on keeping workers and students at home unable to build a welfare-independent future. Prof. Emily Oster wants us to declare a pandemic amnesty, claiming mistakes were made on both. You would be forgiven for believing covid sceptics roamed the streets deliberately spreading their germs to maximise the death toll. Yet the large freedom demos that the mainstream media shunned did not lead to any spikes in excess mortality or hospital admissions. A meta-analysis by researchers at the John Hopkins University found that across North America and Europe, all covid mitigation regulations combined (lockdowns, antisocial distancing, face-mask, hand-sanitising etc.) did little to reduce the spread of coronavirus infections and may have prevented as few as 0.2% of all covid-19-attributed deaths, but at a huge socio-economic cost that naturally increased all other causes of death. Indeed, the mainstream media now blames delayed treatment for non-covid conditions for continued excess mortality. The same media-savvy experts led us to believe in a pandemic of the unvaccinated by redefining unvaccinated to mean someone who had received an mRNA injection less than 2 weeks ago or over 6 months ago, thereby attributing many jab-related deaths to covid in unvaccinated individuals. Not surprisingly, the symptoms of jab injuries are often indistinguishable to those attributed later to long covid. The media often attributes the rise in myocarditis cases to long covid. If any mistakes were made, then the same authorities that are now spending billions more on damage limitation and covering up their crimes are responsible. But were they mistakes at all? Why would the corporate media devote so many resources to the suppression of all alternate treatments if remdisivr were so safe? Why would they prevent relatives from visiting loved ones in person? Why would they discourage autopsies? These were not mere mistakes. They were part of a premeditated plan. The sanctimonious managerial classes want to guilt-trip us for their complicity in crimes against natural humanity.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Creepy Words

Word salad

In late 2020 I began to notice a curious extension to the once harmless word access, both as a noun and as a verb, during the concerted vaccine awareness raising campaign. Covid sceptics had warned early on that the authorities would make regular genetic code injections a condition for participation in mainstream society with the introduction of digital health passports. Ultimately, they would be tied to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) to make life practically impossible for citizens without means of independent subsistence. Alas, TV pundits and online influencers seemed more concerned about access to vaccines in the context of the equally Orwellian concept of vaccine equity. I can understand notions such as access to clean water, access to reliable electric power and even Wi-Fi access. Water is essential to life on earth while electricity and modern telecommunications can greatly enrich our lives. Yet we only crave access to things we need or enjoy. Nobody demands access to something they do not want. That demand must be manufactured. This intriguing juxtaposition of words implied that people might suffer because of a lack of a new pharmaceutical intervention that had never before been tested on billions of human beings. Who decided that we needed to have access to these new concoctions? Did we ever have any proof that we could no longer survive without them? The EU signed a €71 billion contract with Pfizer-BioNtech to buy 4.6 billion injections or more than 10 for each EU resident and sent hundreds of millions of jabs to Africa that went largely unused. There was never a shortage or a lack of access to something most people did not need. There was only ever a huge glut and massive overspend on coercion and enforcement. What people wanted was access to workplaces, bars, restaurants, sports venues, hotels and holidays abroad for which they needed proof of covid-19 vaccine compliance.

Language evolves all the time as it adapts to new social and technological realities. This is perfectly natural. Our forebears did not have snappy words for electronic pointing devices (mice) or personal digital assistants (pads or tablets) because they had not been invented yet. Neither did we have generic terms for someone we may employ to help us keep fit, as in personal trainer, or take our dogs for a walk when we’re too busy, as in dog walker. In the 1960s, the latter job title may have been comprehensible, but few would have seen such everyday tasks as career options. It stands to reason that language tends to change faster in times of rapid societal transformation. Cultural continuity helps us stay in touch with past generations and learn from history. Once the past becomes a foreign country with an unintelligible language, the managerial classes can more easily rewrite history and manipulate the masses. While the English language has coined thousands of new words, often with Greco-Latin roots, since the industrial revolution, some core concepts have remained cultural constants. Their pronunciation and dialectical variants may change, but the basic ideas stay the same. All languages have words for man, woman, child, mother and father. They correspond to the fundamental roles we play in procreation and in raising the next generation. Whether you are male or female was, until very recently, a matter of easily verifiable biology. Our ancestors may not have mastered the science of chromosomes, but we understood only women can give birth to children and only men can impregnate them.

Words like customer, mental health, protection, safety and access may seem innocent enough. They are hardly newcomers to our language, but the ideas and feelings they convey have mutated, sometimes out of all recognition. A customer used to be someone who chose to pay for a service or product. If you don’t like a product or service, you can always take your custom elsewhere. Today, it often means a service user, with no choice over whether to use the service or not. Mental health has progressed from a general concern over someone’s emotional wellbeing into a pervasive intrusion into people’s private lives and inner thought processes. Protection no longer refers only to sensible measures you make to ward off physical harm, but a temporary immunity from prosecution. More creepily, safety no longer refers to voluntary protection from danger, but to artificial isolation from our natural environment. An obsession with a narrow aspect of relative safety can expose people to greater danger. Leaving a frail elderly person with mild dementia home alone without physical contact may reduce the spread of infectious diseases, but increases all other causes of ill-health, not least through loneliness.

Let us return to the creepiest case of semantic drift, namely access. Traditionally, the word was much more common in technical or formal usage. In everyday speech, we opted for simpler or clearer expressions. There may be many reasons why you cannot or may not visit a restaurant. If it serves alcohol, there may be minimum age for minors unaccompanied by adults. It may be hard to reach, possibly involving a strenuous walk up a long and winding path. Its owners may have banned you because of previous misbehaviour. You may have to present a racial purity pass or a digital health certificate to enter the premises and, of course, you may not be able to afford the bill. The bland term access now covers all such eventualities. An accessible restaurant would be open to all, affordable, have facilities to accommodate people with physical disabilities and cater for all dietary needs and preferences. Such a restaurant is unlikely to be very special. If you travel to a Tuscan hilltop village to visit a rustic steakhouse with a bespoke selection of locally sourced seasonal vegetables, you should hardly complain that is not accessible to wheelchair-bound cash-strapped vegans allergic to almost everything on the menu. That’s not their market. The restaurant is not in the business of being accessible to all and sundry, but of catering to a niche clientele who go out of their way to sample a unique culinary experience away from the madding crowd. Accessibility is not always good. Mountaineers do not climb Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua or Mount Everest because they’re accessible, but because they are the ultimate challenge. Their beauty lies in their inaccessibility.

Accessibility often appears in official jargon alongside other deceptive buzzwords like equality and diversity. Despite all the anti-discrimination rhetoric and legislation, the wealth gap has never been larger and culture has never been more homogeneous around the world. Likewise, accessibility initiatives seldom empower the poor and vulnerable to gain access to venues erstwhile reserved to the lucky few, but rather adapt services targeted at the disadvantaged. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for helping the physically disabled to lead more independent and rewarding lives, where feasible, but you can rest assured that if the ruling classes do not want us to access certain publicly funded venues, they will find other means to exclude us, usually under the pretexts of safety or security. They only care about access to things they want us to use. It hardly comes as a surprise that following the overturning of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling on the availability of legal abortion in the United States and recent calls for tighter restrictions on abortion in Italy, we now hear talk of access to abortion. As more and more jurisdictions extend the scope of legal euthanasia from a practice reserved for the terminally ill suffering from excruciating pain to people with mental health challenges, talking heads have already started to complain about lack of access to safe and effective euthanasia services. Anything, no matter how immoral, seems so much more palatable when dressed up in health-and-safety verbiage. There is nothing safe about death and nothing good about access to tools of biotechnical subjugation.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

OCD: Organised Crime Denial

Do the ruling classes engineer rapid social transformation, or do they just react to it?

Nobody denies other groups of human beings can and do conspire to exploit, rob, maim or otherwise harm other people to further their own selfish ends. However, when such groups are large corporations or states, the mainstream media will usually only expose their misdemeanours if they are either official enemies or convenient scapegoats.

We are somehow supposed to believe that any mishaps that affect the livelihoods of millions of ordinary citizens are the fault of a few bad apples, external enemies, natural disasters or our own misbehaviour. We can rest assured it’s never the fault of the world’s most powerful organisations, who presumably all have our best interests at heart. The abiding message that neurolinguistic programming practitioners and behavioural scientists have implanted in our brains is that we must not only trust the experts, but also distrust anyone who challenges them. But who are these experts? Who decides which functionaries may determine scientific truth and constrain public policy options? When media talking heads lectured us on foreign policy, many switched off or opted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Endless internecine and religious conflicts in far-flung corners of the world only concern a minority of Westerners. Most opted to believe that such military adventures, while often counterproductive, aimed to spread liberal democracy and that opponents of humanitarian interventions supported despotic regimes. While most people enjoyed comfortable living standards at home, dissent remained a minority sport. All that changed in early 2020. Well-paid propagandists did not just flood the airwaves to promote resource wars or raise awareness about mental health, they sought to shame anyone who failed to follow a new set of bizarre rules that fundamentally changed the way we interact with each other. All of a sudden, each physical encounter with another human being posed a potential bio-hazard, unless we adhered to a new bio-security protocol. TV experts could thus blame excess mortality not on medical malpractice, but on our failure to abide by their rules.

As the narrative began to crumble, some observers asked why so many people complied with absurd regulations that did more harm than good. For every elderly person who may not have caught a seasonal infection because of lack of physical proximity with other unmasked people, many more died of neglect and isolation. If you see an elderly lady struggling to cross a busy road with a walking frame, she runs a tiny risk of catching a nasty disease from you if you help her, but a much bigger risk of being run over or stumbling on a pothole. Common sense often goes out of the window when another perceived threat looms large. The question is who persuaded hundreds of millions of people in different countries to change their behaviour? Did the stealthy elites plan this operation years in advance or did people just succumb to the madness of crowds genuinely frightened by the prospect of painful early death due to a scary virus? Honestly, I’m quite happy to believe the events of the last two and half years could be a result of both.

Dr Peter Breggin first came to my attention in the early 2000s as I researched the relentless growth of the mental health industry and the concomitant rise in psychoactive drug prescriptions. My concern was then, as it still is today, not with modern medicine, which has helped save many lives, but with the steady drift towards technocratic control of every aspect of natural human behaviour. Technology should always serve us as human beings and not the other way around. Dr Breggin has long been an outspoken critic of antipsychotics and antidepressants. I read the first edition of Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why To Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications, which seemed very much in the same mould of other books that came out in the same era such as Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America. Yet I later learned Dr Breggin often appeared on the notorious Savage Nation radio show. Its host, Michael Savage, had gained a reputation as a rightwing shock jock who not only supported gun rights and opposed mass immigration, but also generally backed US military adventurism and, of course, Israeli exceptionalism. While I agreed with Dr Breggin on psychiatry, I grew suspicious of the company he kept. I came from a left-leaning libertarian perspective critical of any form of authoritarianism, embracing Rousseau’s idea of the fundamentally peace-loving nature of humanity once liberated from all forms of oppression. To my dismay, many on the cultural left welcomed the expansion of mental healthcare with pro-active screening of personality disorders rather than addressing the psycho-social causes of people’s emotional challenges. The authoritarian drift of what we once called the liberal left predates the covid era, but I hoped the tide would turn and the left would once again seek to empower natural humanity rather than re-educate the underclasses in a forlorn quest to engineer a perfect society. The pursuit of perfection, while advantageous in many technical tasks, almost always leads to tyranny when applied to the management of human behaviour.

Many emotive causes that once delineated rival camps posing on the left or right now seem mere side shows. Your position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, abortion rights or smacking once served as litmus tests in the fictitious left-right divide. What matters much more is the contrast between greater concentration of power versus greater decentralisation or rather top-down versus bottom-up control structures. The current ethos that beseeches us to trust the experts is the hallmark of the top-down model.

In the Western World, radical critiques of psychiatry appealed most to the antiauthoritarian left. The liberal left opposed militarism and championed the emancipation of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups within society. The notorious Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1974. Early 21st century psychiatrists are much more concerned with symptoms of right-wing radicalisation that may include homophobia and transphobia. By rebranding psychiatry as mental health advocacy and extending its remit to a wide range of emotional problems, the corporate-state system has vastly expanded the behavioural surveillance industry with its armies of social workers, teachers and support workers liaising closely with the health and police services. The covid scare empowered the people management sector to apply the same behavioural insights techniques pioneered with vulnerable children and adults to the wider population. All of a sudden, everyone needed to heed official advice on how to go about their everyday activities. The mainstream media normalised an irrational fear of nanoscopic genetic sequences encouraging behaviours that would have until recently justified a clinical diagnosis of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). At the same time, restrictions on informal socialisation, dehumanising mask mandates in schools and an engineered fear of people outside your bubble promoted autistic behavioural patterns in normal children.

While other American intellectuals I had once admired such as Noam Chomsky failed to challenge the covid narrative, Dr Breggin reappeared on my radar as a brave dissident voice in a new era of worldwide groupthink. In a recent interview with the German Corona Investigative Committee (Corona-Ausschuss), Peter Breggin pointed out something I should have noticed about one of the superstars of the covid truth movement, for a want of a better term, Prof. Mattias Desmet. He did not question the criminality of a tiny clique, but rather sought to blame the madness of the crowds, something he likes to call mass formation. While his thesis has its superficial appeals, his recent book on The Psychology of Totalitarianism fails to identify a criminal cabal responsible for engendering collective compliance, but rather lays the blame on lazy thinking and our innate desire to fit in. It is almost as if the ruling classes did not want to roll out Draconian lockdowns and censor dissent, but only reacted to overwhelming public calls for urgent action to combat the virus. Indeed, unlike Robert F Kennedy Junior, Prof. Desmet fails to mention decades of pandemic planning and the inexorable drift to technocracy. It’s as if we acted in unison without any undue coercion by the same power-hungry elites who also happen to own the media and run most NGOs. While most wild conjecture about secret plots to control the whole of humanity may be wrong, much of verifiable modern history would have to be radically revised if we discounted all theories about corruption and crimes against humanity. High-profile gatekeepers serve an important role in providing ready-packaged explanations for obvious contradictions in the web of deceit emanating from the mainstream media. Yet they deny the criminality at the heart of our ruling classes, passing the buck onto rival ruling classes, incompetent middle managers or workers who followed orders unaware of their consequences. They are organised crime deniers.