Not Born Yesterday

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.

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Nby's role.....a reiteration (13th June 2008)

Not Born Yesterday can never be a 'newspaper'. It has a few reliable sources and lucks into the odd scoop, but readers should see this as an occasional added bonus. Rather, nby is trying to be a multimedia magazine dedicated to waking people up to the following plan:

‘Leave la-la-land and come back to a reality in which you’ll have to take more responsibility and suffer some pain – but you'll have more freedom, more contentment and no bullshit’.

There are,of course, millions of people (and they come in both genders, all classes, all ages and all the time) who will never, ever get to this first base of understanding. These are the folks who think ethics are for wimps, scorn the concept of a socio-political ideology,think those with a mental illness are malingerers, want everyone to work hard for The Company 24/7, and remain certain that they deserve to earn more for doing less. Being the proud owners of double standards, they always want double-helpings.

Because they are bright and yet somehow oafishly stupid, they accept daft ideas such as trickle-down economics, 'there is no such thing as an obscene profit', everything must wash its face, all banks should be deregulated, the media are there to satisfy low-brow needs and make money, leverage as much credit as you can afford, don't get mad get even, and Tony Blair was a safe pair of hands. They set targets that can't be met, demand profit returns that destroy businesses, asset-strip honest companies to make a fast buck, and - up until now - have voted New Labour.

More than anything else in life, they want it all and they want it now. They always have a reason why they should jump the queue. And they always want to be the exception.

There is a second group who work at or near the top in politics and the Civil Service. They thrive within a group I call The Westminster Village Idiots. They're not called The Establishment any more, because it's gone beyond that and become a Closed Shop more tight than any operated by the Trade Union gangsters of the 1970s. They tend to be lawyers, 'career politicians', Oxbridge, commercially naive, pc, patronising, public school and left-brain uncreative.

There are yet others (much poorer, but nearly 40% of the UK population) who lack the erudition of this group; they also lack the education or motivation to appreciate how they're being shafted by everything from the National Lottery to rising council taxes and hard-sell credit offers.

And then there's you and me. The easier-going, common-sense, mature, decent but irreverent tendency who have been round the block a few times and distrust anyone who believes either nothing and nobody, or everything and everyone. I've no idea how many there are of us. But I do know that nby's wilderness years are coming to an end, that the site is recruiting new readers faster than ever before, and that those who come here share many values.

None of the other three groups are going to read Not Born Yesterday. But in a nutshell, nby wants to see far less influence for the first two groups, a better deal for the third one - and, most of all, more stable family units in more contented communities.

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