Editorial
sample of one
The Human Condition
Many people wonder why our culture seems to have so much cruelty and indifference alongside ridiculous over-protection of everyone from children to minority groups. They're right to wonder: it does seem at first sight to be the most extraordinary dichotomy.
It's taken me years to work it out - most of the last decade to be exact - but at last (I hope) I've pared the reason down to one simple statement: those in charge of the world want us to be inhuman.
I don't mean by that they want us to kill other folks without remorse, because doing so is in fact a big part of being human - and always has been. Rather, those running the railroad want us to deny our human instincts - be they good or bad. Despite what the Hobbesian cynics try to tell us, we do in fact have myriad good instincts. And regardless of the starry-eyed Wishful Unthinking Tendency (the WUTs), all of us at some time or another act upon bad instincts.
The inability (or unwillingness) of these two ruling elites to grasp this is, I submit, the beginning and end of our contemporary problem as a culture.
Two enemies with one aim
It would be hard to imagine two opinion-forming groups more antithetical that the Health & Safety/Political Correctness obsessives on the one hand, and business free-marketeers on the other. However, one absolutely crucial desire they share is an insatiable need for control. The first group achieve this by putting up notices, passing laws and generally telling other people what to do; the second by money, blackmailing politicians, office bullying and the aggressive assertion of economic drivel. In this way they achieve a level of power quite monstrous in its selfishness and irrelevance.
Between them, they are steadily destroying what keeps our species individuals fit for purpose - and cohesively content in our social pack. Because the second thing they have in common is an almost autistic ability to deny the reality presented by experience, facts, and data of every kind. In its form as feminism, for example, the pc tendency remains prepared to believe that 700,000 years of human wiring in relation to maternal hormones can be eradicated (or indeed, should be) within thirty years. And in its insistence on judging cultural success via material achievement, neo-liberalist economics fly in the face of everything being proved by neuroscience in relation to what really turns Homo sapiens on.
A dozen different disciplines of science teach us that individuals thrive on responsibility, and have their self-esteem dramatically improved by it; and that when ordered about relentlessly, people become institutionalised, depressed, and incapable of deciding things for themselves. These same eclectic sources of experience in turn confirm that free societies with the least disparity of wealth and the best work/home/community balance are more productive, more creative and more stable than oligarchic societies where (the tiny, elite minority insists) only obsessive hard work - and a maintenance of the status quo of power - can bring happiness.
Taken in the sense of that last paragraph, UK society today has the worst of both worlds. It is almost as though, by some odd time-quirk, the laissez-faire indifference of Victorian society has been injudiciously mixed with the anally controlling indifference of the 1950s Soviet Union. With the addition of surveillance technology, it could so easily produce a nightmare worse than anything imagined by Franz Kafka, George Orwell or Anthony Burgess.
No future is inevitable
I have a good friend and supporter who keeps on telling me how depressing the site is at the moment, and on the whole I agree with her. But others less close to me think I'm a doomsayer about humanity, and nothing could be further from the truth. The human race has endured and then defeated bigger problems and more egoically damaged leaders than those we answer to at present. We will give them a decisive answer in due course: but that they will disappear, and we will survive, cannot be doubted.
The arithmetic of psychology ensures this. As every last quantitative psychographic study shows only too clearly, sociopaths, megalomaniacs and obsessive compulsives are relatively rare. Distorted egos have always risen to be pack leaders, but in nature they were far more searchingly interrogated as to their definition of success. Packs survive and flourish because leadership is offered but also because the right kind of 'safety in numbers' comes with the deal. In turn, Homo sapiens has done well genetically because of competition within packs, but also intellectually and physically because of cooperation between packs.
In our contemporary world, the pc levellers are diluting the competition, while Globalist economics deny the need for cooperation. 'Compete and then shake hands with fellow athletes' has been replaced by 'avoid all risk and demonise the bogeymen'.
Cool analysis not hot air
That this irrational state of affairs will not endure (because it generates zero respect from the average, normally silent majority of pack members) is apparent in recent events. The sight of first Northern Rock and then RBS's swollen-headed Freddie Goodwin going cap in hand to the Treasury has had a sriking effect on people of every political persuasion. It has fulfilled nby's most popular truism, 'those who have double standards always want double helpings'. Equally, the complete reversal of almost all 'nobody must fail' mantras in education says clearly to all parents that not only do educationalists lack the courage of their convictions - even worse, they move effortlessly from one absolute truth to another.
What we are seeing at last is the gradual restoration of common sense (about which there is nothing at all vulgar) and balance. Not for nothing do ancient legal rules about the mental state of suicides refer to death self-inflicted 'while the balance of the mind was disturbed'.
Today, we no longer need the clever, and their assurances that up is down and right is left. What we will require tomorrow is leaders who are wise and grounded.
Content highlights
I know many of you are keen doggy article fans, so it would do no harm to give a plug to the Terrier Trio's canine perspective on the Scottish Cyclops at Dog Collars.
If you haven't already been there, last week's essay on Poverty Alleviation leaves little in doubt about the Prime Minister's 'commitment' to the eradication of poverty.
And those who need a complete escape from reality could do worse than enter the odd land of Off Day
