I, Essayist
By Anthony North
Copyright Anthony North 2012
Cover image copyright, Yvonne North 2012
Other books by Anthony North
I, TRILOGY INTRODUCTORY VOLUME
I, STORYTELLER SERIES
I, Adventurer: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/305210
I, POET SERIES
Inmate Earth: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/237329
Bard Stuff: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/252874
Mind Burps: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/272508
Verse Fest: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/302837
I, THINKER SERIES
I, Paranormal: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/237339
I, Society: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/272861
I, Unexplained: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/303478
I, Observer: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/304480
CONTENTS
Introduction
Commonsense By Dictat
The Female Serf
Eco-Consciousness
Freedom & Unfreedom
I Gotta Right
Order & Morality
Whigging It
Money & Belief
Towards A General Theory of Crime
West Mind
Wealth Through Birth or Merit
The West Out of Control
The Enduring Student
The Pursuit of Freedom
Stat Life
Total Isn't Total
Dark Times
Total Thoughts
Libertarians Be Damned
Atlantis Or Utopia
Picasso Rising
CULTS
Who Joins a Cult?
Inferiority
Hysterically Speaking
The Guru
The Messiah Factor
Gotcha!
Persuasion
They're Not All Bad
The Abnormal Is Normal
CONSPIRACY THEORY
Don't Trust Fate
The Philosophy of Conspiracy
Suspicious Minds
When an Event is More Than an Event
History - Don't You Believe It
Postmodern & Conspiracy
About the Author
Connect With Anthony
INTRODUCTION
I’m uneducated in any academic sense, having left school at fifteen. However, when I came down with ME/cfs thirty years ago, I decided to educate myself. Doing so, I realized that so much is wrong with our knowledge and society. This is the first volume of my reasoned rants. You’ll also find here my views on cults and conspiracy theories, and why they happen.
NOTE: Where I write about politics and society, unless I say the ‘west’, I’m referring to the UK.
COMMONSENSE BY DICTAT
You’ve all heard about the research. It can come in many forms. Beefburgers can make you fat. That’s a classic. As if we didn’t know already. But to science, we don’t. If it isn’t proved, it may not be right.
We all know it’s right, because we’ve employed commonsense. But we’re not supposed to use that any more. Don’t you realize that? We cannot be trusted to be correct in our commonsense judgments.
This is a problem that is becoming dangerous.
What happens in science usually passes down to society. So hey presto! Welcome to political correctness. The vast majority know it is wrong to discriminate, but we can’t know this through commonsense. We’ve got to be told.
In the UK, health and safety is gathering ground, too. This is the real social stinker. Anything that can be dangerous if commonsense is not used must be banned - because we’re not allowed to use commonsense.
Commonsense, you see, has been politicized.
It has been taken away from us mere incompetent people, and placed in the hands of authority. And only their pronouncements can be classed as commonsense.
But of course, it isn’t commonsense they impose on us, but diktat. Governments have realised a new way to control – to politicize our value judgments themselves. And here, good reader, is the real irony. In the age of the individual, government is now guaranteeing that individuality is no more.
THE FEMALE SERF
Feminism was a marvelous thing. It was so right to give women equality in law. Okay, they may not have made it in many other respects, but it was one of the most fundamental requirements of democracy and freedom, and I applaud it. But …
There’s always a ‘but’ with me. Not concerning the correctness of feminism, but the motive for its acceptance in the wider social sphere.
Nothing happens today without a reason.
And often that reason is subtle. For instance, if women hadn’t demanded their rights by going out to work, could house prices be so high today?
High house prices demanded two wage families, and the beauty is, high house prices also provide fat mortgages which are needed to keep Big Biz afloat. A strange relationship, isn’t it?
Freedom only comes in the wake of ideology.
And today’s ideology is of a mass consumer society powered by empire-building multi-nationals. And the only way they could succeed is by allowing ‘freedoms’ that guaranteed their nest could be fuelled.
So work hard you women. It is the ideological thing to do. And your ‘freedom’ has been turned on its head by the system. Of course, it should never have been like this, and hopefully one day it will change. But for now, I’m afraid, the major success of feminism was to turn women into serfs.
ECO-CONSCIOUSNESS
In the beginning there was animism. The first known religion, it believed in a world animated by spirits. The physical and spiritual worlds were interlinked and inter-dependent to a degree that was obvious to early man. Eventually in the Middle East, and then the west, the God-force behind religion became omnipotent and He rose out of the natural world to become its creator. But could this really be the story of man’s determination to be, himself, greater than nature?
As civilisation arose out of the instinctual drives of early man, the city birthed a new form of religion with a leader being one and the same as a god. Yet in the myths of the period, we find nature gods still existent, but feared, with a whole host of disasters caused by these nature gods to knock man off his civilised perch. In a real sense, man seemed to be fearful of nature itself.
There is an obvious answer for this. Nature was more powerful than man. But as man’s ego manifested itself, we can see man entering a fundamental, if unconscious, battle against nature. And his main weapon could well have been the devising of systems.
The city itself is a system – a way of bringing resources together into a force that much greater than an individual man. Into this process of systems, we can add knowledge – an idea that a king-god is as one in terms of power with the other gods. With the rise of Monotheism, the power urge advances, with God becoming creator of nature, and therefore more powerful. Even today we retain such intellectual systems, with nature reduced to chaos and accident, with man’s scientific intellect the only way of putting order into the universe. It all sound like a social and historic inferiority complex at work, finding systems to produce an image of power from our fears.
If we place environmentalism into this equation, we could argue that the real eco-problem is one of our ever-existing unconscious fear of nature and its ability to upset our systems, as any flood or hurricane proves. Most environmentalists would disagree. After all, if our ravages of the planet are due to a historic neurosis, what chance do we have? Rather, they say, our environmental problems stem from our industrial practices. But could such practices simply be our latest system in the battle to subdue nature? An attempt to kill it off?
If we
are to accept this as a possibility, then we need to identify a specific mind-set that could fuel this neurosis induced battle between man and nature. And the first step to realising such a mind is to understand the role of technology in man’s advancement.
We came out of the animal kingdom, and as such we must have been once governed by our instincts alone. With the discovery of technology, beginning with the shaping of the first bone, stone or branch, we would have had to evolve a process of concentration and forward planning. These talents are counter to instinct, so suggest a new mind, pulled away from instinct, and most importantly, taken out of the natural world. As technology increased, we can argue our psychological umbilical cord with nature would be more stretched. Hence, as represented by our Fall from Eden, we could well be an alien species to the rest of nature in a psychological sense. And being out of nature, we would be fearful.
A neurosis is a self-defeating attitude of mind. It involves a loss of confidence in oneself, and can lead to self-hurt. If the above conflict exists between man and nature, this form of self-hurt should be identifiable. If nature was the first religion, then we should be able to find hints of self-hurt in its later religious spin-offs. And sure enough, mystics from around the world often work with self-flagellation, self-denial and even self-mutilation. The ultimate religious ideals of all religions seem to involve a form of masochism, the martyr being the most extreme example.
Could such a masochism exist in everyone, as would be required if my ideas are correct? There is an interesting point about pleasure. In the extreme, all forms of pleasure involving physical interaction lead to pain. It seems that in partaking pleasure, we are courting pain. We are masochists by nature. We have, it seems, a specific Masocology, which, on the social level, could well be fuelling our entire need to damage the environment.
FREEDOM & UNFREEDOM
The defining point of western society is the idea that the person is free. Each an individual, it is our own choices that decide who we are, assisted by a society that is democratic, with minimum interference in what we do.
This is more a delusion than a reality, because a society can only exist if it balances your duties to others and your rights towards yourself. Go too far one way, and we have totalitarianism. Go the other and we have chaos.
Libertarians would disagree with this argument.
Rather, it is the duty of the individual to be who he wants to be regardless of others. The outcome is not chaos, but fulfilled individuals. But the problem with this is that if everyone does exactly what they want, they impede so much on the wants of others that no one gets what they want at all.
Most people accept this and moderate their behaviour accordingly. Indeed, it seems to be that libertarianism is not about choice, but excess. It is simply about deluded people flying in the face of a norm.
But to most, the idea of freedom is actually a failure.
You see this in so many of our modern youth. They demand their freedom – to do ‘their own thing’ – but when they do, they usually end up standing on street corners wondering what on earth to do.
Those young people who excel still think they are free. But tell me this: what is a great footballer without his team? What is a young concert pianist without his dedication to the culture of music and to the orchestra?
A touch of unfreedom is, it seems, a prerequisite to excelling in life. And an individual can only truly thrive within a culture that allows it. If only we understood this, we may at last produce a society where the balance between freedom and unfreedom is right.
I GOTTA RIGHT
We’ve all got rights. And very good, too. We have the right to life, to liberty, to freedom of speech, of association, of religion. We also have the right to own property …
Property? Hold on. Some say property is theft. And it’s relevant today because in a rights-based, super-liberal, goody-goody society, everyone should be equal. So if someone owns more property than another, isn’t that theft against the other?
Of course, I don’t believe that for one minute. But if we’re going to have a rights-based, super-liberal, goody-goody society, let’s be consistent, rather than hypocritical. And how far should those rights go? How about everyone having the right to be Prime Minister? Now that would be fun, wouldn’t it?
For some, though, not much is fun. Take the rights of the disabled, and the difficulty they have getting around. The rights-based, super-liberal, goody-goody society do, of course, say every disabled person should be able to travel as easily as the able-bodied. But how practical is such a proposal?
Take, for instance, a small, rural bus, subsidised by the local council, and barely making a profit. If such a bus had to be disabled-friendly, the bus service would most likely go under, and yes, that would mean the disabled had the same rights as the rest. Basically, none of them would be travelling at all. But maybe, in understanding this, we can understand what the rights-based, super-liberal, goody-goody society really is.
As in so many situations like the above, the imposition of rights for a minority destroys the convenience of the majority. Now, whilst I am all for minority rights, such rights must always be weighed against what damage they would do to a majority. But in a rights-based, super-liberal, goody-goody society, a majority is not even identified as existing. Hence, we are all minorities and stuff the rest.
Rather than being rights-based, super-liberal or goodygoody, such a society is actually a form of anarchy. And this is so because the rights-infatuated, super-liberal, do-gooder doesn’t actually have the faintest clue how society works.
Life is a bitch, with the law and how people live being two completely different things. The day middleclass liberals realise this, and accept they live in an unreality, they will stop messing society about and let real people try to sort out our problems properly.
ORDER & MORALITY
Many years ago I was waiting for a train with my young family. It was a busy city station and it was approaching rush hour, but I’d never had problems with this train. There always seemed plenty of room.
This was a good job because amongst my entourage was a baby in a pram. However, this particular afternoon the train pulled up with just two carriages instead of the usual four. Which seemed to present a problem for the people waiting to get on board.
Manners, it seems, went out of fashion.
Rather than waiting, courteously, for me to load the pram, a near stampede ensued, creating a bottleneck by the door, seemingly blocked by a delicate baby in a pram. But of course, people are decent, and the baby was in no danger?
Well, as it rocked on its wheels and threatened to spill baby onto the platform, I decided my best course of action would be to extricate myself and family from this mayhem – especially as the one gent who tried to intervene was about to be punched.
This event has stayed with me for decades.
This is because it taught me a simple fact about people, life and society. We like to think, today, that we are moral people, existing in an ordered society. But the above event suggests this is wrong.
Rather, could it be that we have not advanced morally at all. It is simply that society and infrastructure are such, today, that order takes away the need to consider the subject.Which should, I would have thought, make us worry.
WHIGGING IT
British politics has a natural order of traditionalist and modernist. This system had become well formed by the Middle Ages, with the monarch and aristocracy forming the traditionalists, and a growing modernist movement in local elders and the great Guilds. The traditionalists ruled by keeping down the peasant population in Feudalism. Eventually the modernists began to gain ground over the traditionalist rulers in the growth of city cooperatives, giving wealth to a fledgling middleclass.
The eventual outcome of this natural political order in the UK was the Whigs and Tories, representing modernist and traditionalist values in Parliament. The Whigs won the day, causing the middleclass revolution that was the Indu
strial Revolution. This was paved by convincing the poor that their lot would improve due to industrialization. The upshot was, of course, more poverty and squalor as the class they claimed to help was enchained in a system that gave the middleclass control. However, traditional values again triumphed in the modern Conservative Party, with the Whigs going into decline with the creation of Labour.
This modern period of politics was thought to break the mould of the traditionalist/modernist struggle. But the reality can better be seen in extending politics back into the Middle Ages as above. If we do so, then Labour becomes just another weapon in the modernist fight against tradition. Which brings us, of course, to modern new Labour and new Conservatives.
They are all very similar to the old modernist movement, maybe because that is what it has always been. And in realising this we see a natural continuance of the modernist ideal, and we can begin to see where the modern political party comes from. Seeming determined to trash every element of traditional power in the UK, they claim to do so in the name of minority rights, allowing them to reclaim respect from centuries of persecution.
Unfortunately, politics has never been so sweet, as can be seen by the requirement to keep down Medieval peasantry and working class factory workers, even though the authorities said it was for their benefit. The purpose of the new party onslaught upon traditionalism is the same as it was in the Industrial Revolution – an attempt to grab power from the natural, traditional powerbase of a country.
Agreed, often the traditional wing of British politics has been dictatorial and just as keen to grab power as the modernist. But let us not let their failings hide what is really going on in the modernist mindset; for if oppressed minorities think for a moment that the modernists really care about them, then they are living a dream, just as naïve as the working class in times past.
Persecuted minorities are presently being used as stooges in the eternal political balance between tradition and the modern. And believe me, when their usefulness is over – when they have diluted traditional values to the point that they cannot fight back – the minorities will be cast aside as worthless. And there will be the danger that their persecution will begin all over again.