Showing posts with label Freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freedom. Show all posts

Saturday 13 May 2023

A WARNING TO THE INTREPID! - The Chilling Effect of Corporate Social Media Censorship and the Matriarchal State

Recently I found myself apparently guilty of 'hate speech' in one of my own administered Facebook Groups (as if its members were not all known to me and sophisticated adults). It was, of course, nothing of the kind (see below). I have had similar experiences with the comments allowed (or rather not allowed) on The Guardian and Financial Times. Others have had similar experiences here on Blogger. In my most recent case, this was expressed as a threat to the very existence of the Group. Nothing happened of course, the 'offending' item simply disappeared, murdered by either an algorithm or some young under-paid dim-wit in some back office but the threat got me thinking about the 'chilling effect' on freedom of speech from such implied threats. 

 

Perhaps the 'West' may not be a patriarchal authoritarian 'tyranny' like China or Russia (at least as they are seen in our popular mythology) but is instead becoming a manipulative matriarchal variant. Perhaps it is deviously in the process of becoming more totalitarian by stealth than its 'evil' (apparently) rivals. Instead of having clear rules with clear punishments (which I can deal with) we have the mauvaise foi of desperate attempts to tell us we are all free (which is only a half truth at the best of times) and then exert social control through hints and passive aggression, weak threats and subtle pressures to effect behaviour change. In psychological terms we have the worst of the traditionalist masculine in one bloc replaced by the worst of the traditionalist feminine in the the other. 

 

Our authorities seem to be too weak to control us directly. They do it through pressure exerted through corporate mummies and institutional set-ups. Daddy is a coward so Mummy has to be brought in to exert discipline over the kids (that's us, folks!). Like good little children in a conservative household, we are shamed into compliance or made guilty after the fact or (if we are to have any fun or freedom or learning experience) we have to become devious law and rule breakers hoping to get away with a bit of naughtiness and not get caught. It is not only our behaviour and language that is controlled in this way within a rather weird liberal/progressive pseudo-theocracy but increasingly our thoughts (something the 'tyrannies' actually do not tend to tamper with). 

 

We have to be right thinkers in order to ensure right speech and right behaviour because Daddy (the State) is too weak and cowardly to wield the whip and impose good behaviour let alone good speech on us. In the eyes of our political culture we are not adults but children who have to be frightened, cajoled, rewarded and lied to in order to ensure that we do not go wild and ask all the questions that developing children should be asking about authority and our environment. Our punishments are generally light - exile, isolation, exclusion - rather than the Gulag. Everybody just takes it on the chin not realising that they are frogs slowly being boiled on the hob. The Western State is the ultimate bad parent no less than the Eastern tyranny - in our case, the absent father who relies on the corporate mother to bring up the children.

 

In fact, there was probably no immediate danger to the Facebook Group in question although I am sure there are people (including the usual suspects in the psy-ops fraternity) who would love to close the Group down. What was happening was a 'warning' designed to weaken the force of inconvenient debate and to confirm that our freedom existed on sufferance and not by right. The Group in question consistently challenges the given narratives about events in the bloodlands to the East whose mismanagement threatens us all with nuclear immolation. In fact, much of that debate has, in any case, shifted to Telegram which, of course, Keir Starmer wants to close down as a 'progressive' (God help us!). Perhaps he thinks Number Ten is a walk in if only he can appear more conservative and authoritarian than the failed and confused Conservatives. Depressingly, he may be right. Most voters seem terrified of real freedom.

 

Perhaps I should suggest caution in particular uses of emotional but still non-harmful language and let the algorithms train us like a dog owner trains its hound but I am disinclined to give way.  If my Group members are courageous enough to defy the imposed narratives about (say) the 'War' as other Groups' members in my territory are courageous enough to defy given narratives about politicised science and art, diversity and even equality or gender and identity, because they think for themselves in reasoned and intelligent ways, then I am 'd----d' if I am going to act like Mummy's proxy. I would rather kill off the Groups entirely when that day comes, stick to Telegram until they destroy that too, cultivate my garden and wait for the whole system to implode as all sclerotic cultures eventually do. I am old enough not to care over much if Western civilisation collapses under the weight of its own malice and ineptitude.

 

As I say, there was no hate in the relevant comment. It simply made the point that I opposed conscription by any Government under all but the most extreme circumstances and possibly not then. I made it clear that I would be personally protective of anyone evading conscription if at all possible no matter which country they came from. Facebook may simply have taken exception to a standard and rather mild British expletive (never forget that Facebook comes out of an American psychological and cultural bubble) which was directed at State entities and certainly not at individuals or identity groups. It was a mild expletive found elsewhere on Facebook without effect so perhaps suspicions should be roused about another agenda. To be fair, the algorithms do not seem to be very bright (although in saying that perhaps that I am demonstrating hate speech towards algorithms!). AI is unlikely to improve things since the people who are programming AI are the people trying to control our mental mapping.

 

Be aware that all the big social media sites except perhaps Truth Social and Twitter (and this last is looking uncertain after the latest CEO appointment) are running scared at the moment as the European Union and the British Government are intending or undertaking major legislative campaigns to 'control' what information we can have access to. This is not such a problem in the US with its First Amendment although those freedoms are also under constant lawfare pressure from 'liberals' and the Federal State. There is a tinge of Emergency Powers legislation lurking in the anterooms of some of these campaigns since we seem to be positioned in a 'phoney war' situation that could turn into a shooting war at any instance without any of us having much of a say in the matter any more than we did in 1914 or 1939. 

 

Elites know that there is substantial doubt about where we are heading and a lot of resistance to the narrative that they wish to promote. The mainstream media, of course, are broadly on side with that narrative as they were on, say, Vietnam for the bulk of that war. This time around, social media provides an alternative narrative that almost certainly reflects social reality - society in general is quite simply more indifferent to claims about Ukraine and Russia than people like Ben Wallace and Tom Tugendhat would like. There are larger oppositional minorities at this stage in the context between our empires than at the equivalent stage of (say) the Vietnam imbroglio.

 

The evident fear in the system is that populations could switch from a large majority for the elite narrative to a large majority against it (which is exactly what happened in the Vietnam War in the US) and so destabilise a system that was put in position in stages over some seventy years to benefit large-scale capital and a self-reinforcing political caste and which is now failing abysmally in terms of both cultural governance and economic stability. Controlling social media and encrypted communications like Whats App, Telegram and Signal are becoming of vital importance to established political elites as Starmer's outburst in the Commons has indicated.

 

That switch in sentiment in the Vietnam War, in a country where free speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment, took place in barely nine months and changed history without benefit of social media so we can see why they are rattled in the White House, Brussels and Whitehall. The existing system in the UK and Europe has a great deal at stake in using any weapon at its disposal to ensure that it does not lose control of power or policy, citing in an exaggerated way both disinformation and particular and real but still often marginal forms of abuse as excuses for increased social control of the free social media. 

 

Instead of Daddy moving on on the abuses directly (after all, it is a bit rich for the British State to claim moral guardianship after its sustained failure to deal with care home child abuse or widespread fraud), the legal framework is created to frighten Mummy into doing the job for it. Major platforms have to be complicit in this because they are businesses and not public services. The legislative and regulatory power of existing elites is sufficient to seriously affect their profitability and a recession may well be on the way. They have no option in the game of survival.

 

Certainly, as Mick Lynch pointed out today, the working population and even the lower middle classes are getting much poorer even as the asset rich get richer and while large corporations make ever-increasing profits on high inflation and war booty. Algorithms too are just defensive blunt instruments that can be designed to be 'conservative' (in fact, 'conservatism' is the cultural liberal agenda and the 'progressive' business-friendly politics that got us into the mess we are in in the first place) and defensive of corporate interests.

 

In short, you cannot take your freedom of expression for granted nor your ownership of your invested information on social platforms nor that arbitrary power will not be exercised to exclude you from a platform if you cannot behave along prescribed lines. If I get censored again (I do not intend to be deliberately provocative but I will never hide my honest opinon reasonably expressed), then you know it is political.

Saturday 23 September 2017

The Freedom Agenda - Polyamory as Exemplar

I have made no secret to my true friends of my polyamorous nature. I not only make no apology for it, it helps define who I am. It is by no means all that I am but I would not be true to myself if I did not accept that it was an important part of who I am. I am lucky to live in an immediate environment that finds this no problem but, observing the reactions to polyamory of those outside that immediate environment, it has given me an abiding intellectual interest in the relationship between individual freedom and society and the cultural pressures that effectively enslave people to the control, expectations and aspirations of others.

Freedom is never just about something as one-sided as sexual orientation - freedom is about belief systems, consent, relations to the state system, the family, the locality and the work place, one's positioning by others in a corrupted media, control of your body, adequate resources (which is why the true libertarian must ultimately be, at least in part, a form of socialist), politics, education, friendship and emotions. Freedom is about the totality of being in the world.

My own position is that each person has the right to express themselves in any way they wish so long as they do no harm to another person. I cannot count harm as challenging other people's emotions, sentiments and thoughts but I can count harm as hurting their material selves, their private property and their reputation or status.

The society that controls my language to save the feelings of another is an oppressive society but the real harm it does is in not creating the space to enable a culture of good manners to emerge that will minimise harms without suppressing risk and challenge. It would be bad manners for someone to disrespect me as polyamorous but it would also be bad manners for me to 'out' someone polyamorous without their very specific consent. The failure to create this space is why we live in a culture of weak emoting and terror-stricken snowflakes instead of increasingly strong, resilient and fundamentally compassionate people.

The fine balance between an individual (which, in the sexual sphere, includes all orientations including the often forgotten asexual and, of course, the monogamous) and society is sometimes difficult to hold. In my case, the discussion of these issues is conducted amongst friends in a set of Facebook Groups that have now been running for nearly six years in some cases and cover a wide range of freedom and society issues (ideology, culture, the internet, sexuality, philosophy, music and art). A six year old erotica one is now moribund because of mounting Facebook intrusion into a secret group of consensual adults of around 30 people (actually disproportionately women!). The group was a deliberate canary in the mine to track Facebook's emergence as social control mechanism and it has proved fruitful in defining this even if the canary is now effectively as dead as Monty Python's parrot. Facebook's social control role was tracked and exposed over time.

What is clear is that the total social system is now tending towards a top-down corporatist control of freedom not out of malice but out of fear of the system's own lack of control of the general situation in response to the failures of a globalisation that it had promoted and the sometimes spurious and sometimes real threats arising from terrorism and organised crime. The system created the conditions for terror, economic collapse and organised crime and now wants us and not itself to pay the price. Big business, fearful of regulation that will cut into its profits, is conniving in the process, most notably with its setting of online standards that intrude into private life.

My own view is that the genie of freedom is out of the bottle and that there is no way that the total corporatist system can crush dissent except by cultural means which is why it has turned its attention to its alliance with the media again. Controlling culture is the standard mode of the hegemonic system - with cash if necessary as we saw in the promotion of abstract expressionism by the CIA in the 1940s. Today, we are increasingly able to see through this manipulation and create islands of cultural resistance that can connect with others despite the attempts at informal algorithmic censorship and control. The new technologies increase control and increase abilities to resist in a call-and-response process that means that the controlling system can never quite win over all aspects of human existence. Sexuality is increasingly that canary in the mine - now repressed, now channeled into an absurd identity politics, now culturally appropriated and now a mode of resistance.

In fact, the means and modes of resistance through the internet and through a new awareness of personal freedom (and, above all, a new preparedness at the margin to stand for personal autonomy and take risks) have resulted in a powerful half underground and half overt energy directed at ensuring that every strike against freedom results in a tenfold determination to strike back, often in a fluid and 'queer' way so that eventually the state system is going to have adapt to us rather than we to it if we are both to work together to remove those who are actually dangerous to safety and society (as opposed to those periodically witch hunted in order to enforce policy). The really dangerous person is not at the top but at the white collar middle management (the 'kapo') level and the soi-disant 'creative' or 'intellectual' embedded in the cultural or policy system - these people are generally second rate minds living in a state of anxiety.  It is these people who seek to master the algorithms. These are the people who failed to protect the child abuse cases in Rotherham. This is why the Labour Party is now dangerous. It is becoming the party of that class.

Crude attempts at censorship and cultural control are yesterday's tools ... the system can track everything we do or say but what it cannot do is stop us doing anything legal (and sometimes illegal) or saying what we like or kicking back to organise to make what we want to be legal to be legal, sometimes simply by making the law unworkable if it is foolish. Censorship of hate speech has simply made heroes out of the hateful. Attacking pornography has simply normalised it. Disrespecting sex workers has provoked them into more effective organisation. The destruction of the authoritarian pseudo-liberal Left has now become as important as the containing of the authoritarian Right - more so, since the Right has adopted the freedom agenda for private life in stages since the 1990s.

The new Einsteinian politics of individual mobilisation and volatility which is replacing the systems-based Newtonian politics of the West is only in its early stages. The Catalonian experiment under way today is an amusing and even playful as well as deadly serious game of cat and mouse between a pompous State machine and local aspirations. Brexit is going to go in the same direction as the attempt to ensure a corporatist solution to a populist decision results in the slow emergence of a country revolt against the pretensions of the liberal middle classes. As Frank Furedi has pointed out, the Hungarian resistance to cultural bullying is another, wholly misreported in our increasingly unreliable official media - the BBC is little more than the Pravda of a failed system.

There will be flows back to the Newtonian and then new discoveries until a major paradigm shift takes place and we are in a new world of Globalisation 2.0, intelligent and stabilised populism and strong but responsive States that have been forced to abandon their presumption that they are more important than the people they serve. The Churchillian Imperial approach is dying on its fight but so, we will find, is the absurd 'all must have prizes' New Left Socialism of the narcissistic Baby Boomers. Identity politics is rapidly travelling up its own orifice.

In that context, since the personal is the political, I produced a discussion paper on just one small aspect of the Freedom Agenda for the Facebook Group on Sexuality (which anyone can join who is not a troll- we are not snowflakes, we execute trolls). I reproduce it below for the record. Variants could be produced for all parts of the Freedom Agenda - other forms of sexual conduct, mental health, internet freedom, personal liberation from party, corporate or tribal loyalties, child-rearing, property-holding, corporate demands on our time, virtue and moral obligation, freedom to believe nonsense if it does no harm, command of our own bodies, fair redistribution, the management of technologies and community and family obligations. Try inserting asexual into the text and with a few sensible adjustments you have a liberatory strategy for asexuals.

The challenge here is to balance an oppressive inherited communitarianism in society, which still has some value as solidarity in bad times and which need not be oppressive at all, with a new and responsible libertarian impulse that still permits the freedom to create sustainable communities. So, here are seven propositions about polyamory for discussion and you can insert any orientation and any private belief system you like and adapt it to your own needs:
  1. Many people who are polyamorous generally cannot be happy without recognition of their polyamorous nature although others can be happy enough but not entirely fulfilled. The polyamorous need to connect emotionally with others. They are not driven primarily by sexual need although the sexual element cannot be ignored. The essential drive remains emotional. Why this is so is irrelevant. It is not a disease or a weakness. It is simply so. 
  2. The bulk of society cannot comprehend the polyamorous sensibility, largely because it does not think about it. This is its problem which has become that of polyamorous people. Polyamorous people should not allow it to be their problem. 
  3. The social barriers for polyamorous people meeting other polyamorous people and developing sustainable relationships are formidable. 
  4. Many people who have a polyamorous orientation cannot communicate that orientation to their family and friends and so they are not able to develop an open and transparent relationship with others. They are locked into social conformity by their condition. This breeds not so much loneliness (because they have existing sustainable emotional relationships) but lack of personal fulfilment and dissatisfaction.
  5. The ‘self-closeting’ of the polyamorous (out of concern not to cause pain or upset to others for whatever reason) is a serious barrier to the sustainability of polyamorous relationships as well as to meeting other compatible polyamorous people. The pool of possible contacts is thus made smaller by social conformity.
  6. There is no intrinsic reason why anyone should limit their natures to the private and the secret to satisfy the social prejudices of others. It is a form of subservience to society which society has not earned the right to demand.
  7. Lifestyle polyamorous communities (centred on the narcissism and anxieties of defensive polyamorists) are simply reproducing the anxious defensiveness of the communities that they are trying to isolate themselves from. The polyamorous person must be able to assert their normality in all those respects that matter while remaining polyamorous.
If these propositions are true, what conclusions can we draw from them? It is from the answers to that question that liberation can start to take place.

Sunday 21 February 2016

Robotics, AI, Sexuality & Power - A Brave New World

In a somewhat breathless report in the Financial Times on February 14th, Moshe Vardi, computer science professor at Rice University in Texas, is quoted as saying that “We are approaching the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. Society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?"

There may be a dash of panic emerging about the emergence of robotics and AI - after all, scientists and engineers have form when it comes to doing the 'chicken licken' thing as they move into the public sphere. It is as if these professions have a deep psychological problem in understanding social and system complexity, adaptability and unpredictability. We have certainly seen this with climate change much as we once saw it with scientific panic about racial degradation!

Nevertheless, AI and robotics are set to make an impact similar to that of the introduction of machinery in the early agricultural phase of the industrial revolution. This pushed masses of peasants out of traditional jobs into the cities as cheap labour. This lead to the next round of applications of machinery to industrial processes as urban labour started to become more expensive. Administrative, clerical and skilled labour are now expensive enough to drive the next set of applications of machine intelligence.

Robotics probably will eliminate many skilled manufacturing jobs. AI will certainly eliminate many clerical and even professional jobs. Robotics plus AI will eliminate many unskilled jobs. On past form, new jobs of a different nature to meet new needs eventually get created. Human existence and experience, after a painful disruption, then improves significantly yet the disruption could be politically and socially dangerous.

In the earlier cycles, there was no democracy so we had riots, then revolutions and then the formation of new political parties constructing the democracy and other radical forms of governance that allowed society to engage in the internal Darwinian struggle that led to the triumph of a rather weak form of welfarist liberal democracy.  This may have frustrated Nietzsche who saw the 'weak' collectivising to become strong and it is true that this collectivisation could de-humanise as much as the machines did but the outcomes were, on balance, more beneficial than not in terms of creating the conditions for at least the possibility of personal empowerment and individuation.

The next cycle looks as if it will be expressed through populist upsurges. We are now into new territory, so we may as well enjoy the ride ... but the one thing we can be sure of is that this new system like the old will be managed by self-reinforcing elites periodically replaced by more suitable self-reinforcing elites.

This is the nature of power - it cannot be held by everyone at the same time although the powerful are just as controlled by those over whom they exercise formal power, in subtle and devious ways, as they control those who have no formal power. Foucault was good on the complexity of all this, If so, the first 'new' elite will only be the cleverer elements of the old elite seeking to manage the new populism. It is when that fails that the fun and games begin ...

But before we get over-excited here is an example of hype that needs treating with care, The FT again: "Prof Vardi said it would be hard to think of any jobs that would not be vulnerable to robotics and AI — even sex workers. “Are you going to bet against sex robots?” he asked. “I’m not.”" As usual in our rather sexually anxious culture, the Professor uses sexuality to heighten the air of tension. We really do need to grow up about sex but that is not why I raise it.

If you think about Vardi's comment, it begs the question of what sort of sex worker - we are speaking of the oldest profession, one that deserves being taken seriously and respected in our otherwise sex-negative society. There is the aspect of 'relief' and of 'fetish' whose demands might be relieved by autonomous robots with no personality (the problem of robots with personality and consciousness is one for science fiction and very far into the future but still one eventually to be taken seriously).

But there is the very separate aspect of human need for contact with other humans, as opposed to the autistic but perfectly reasonable human need to have no contact with other human beings, where the elimination of the exhaustion of work and our daily scrabbling for 'time-resource' (an overhang from the industrial era) might actually create a positive need for a huge range of erotic services for all sorts for very different people in safe and psychologically healthy ways.

Perhaps the female interest in the performance art of burlesque or the turning of pole-dancing into a form of athletic prowess are just the beginning of this vast range of human-to-human interactions which will involve 'trade' and extend to all other forms of experience - ambience, performance, fashion, play, aesthetics, humour, dance and movement, fragrance, seduction, ritualised safe violence (which is what much sport is at heart), magical belief and the invention of cults, psychotherapies and philosophies, new ways of constructing family and community, new politics (against the reactionary politics of Iron Age religiosity and industrial age bureaucracy), safe altered states and new forms of economic organisation.

All that will then be needed is a limited framework for protecting the person (and the animal and eventually the conscious robot) from unwarranted unequal exploitation and physical and (within reason because all conscious creatures create themselves out of risk and struggle) mental harm. The State should, ideally, as Marx expected, 'wither away' except that there will long be a need for something to construct and set the limits for the massive infrastructural investments that will help create that limited framework's potentialities.

Professor Vardi chooses sex workers as a trope because our culture is still hung up on sexuality. A socially conservative puritanism is re-emerging in this context as the last reactionaries hope to use the coming crisis to reintroduce their worn out values - hence the explosion of Islamism, Papal energy, Super-Federalism, Neo-Cold War idiocies, counter-terrorism strategies, surveillance, prohibitionisms and engineered anxieties and panics.

The choice of sexuality as the primary point of excitement itself suggests the problem - a deep cultural issue with the normality of sexual response and the ancient fear of it in a context of limited resources, the need by elites to control humans as property (which still carries on in those states that conscript their young) and the danger to order of emotions in closed spaces.

The new technology opens up spaces, no longer permits humans to be treated as property (which is very scary to people who find security in being slaves) and increases resources - suddenly, there is no excuse at the educated and intelligent end of society for savage authoritarian mores other than the existence of the disturbed personality type of the authoritarian.

We have often noted that the struggle between freedom and authority or power, often generational, is far more central to the human condition even than class or gender or ethnic conflict. The problem then becomes one of the fear of ancient ways dissolving and releasing the mob into chaos (which is the current terror that permits social conservatism to be tolerated).

The AI/robotics revolution may be scary for the disruption in employment and community (but what positive change in society is not) but it is also scary for another reason - it will terrify Authority faced with the loss of their elite control over the distribution of resources, over cultural space and over the disposition of labour value.

The most frightened will be the 'educated' (education not being the same as usefulness or intelligence) who have believed that they rule by divine right because they have ruled, at least culturally, for over half a millennium in some form or another, whether liberal-bureaucratic, pseudo-socialist, progressive, corporatist or fascist.

So, for the rest of us who embrace the future while thinking it reasonable for new elites to arise who will mitigate bad effects on humans and who will prepare for the day when the descendants of the AI/robots will be our conscious equals (and one hopes our friends), it is a case of watchfulness against the claw-back of power by the losing classes, the exploitation of fear and anxiety to impose restrictions on our freedom and the crass over-claims of excitable scientists and engineers. Avanti!

Saturday 22 August 2015

So Who Is The Author of Position Reserved?

[It occurred to the Author that regular readers had no frame of reference for the personality behind the postings. This is a slightly edited version of the Facebook Profile I use and may act as a sort of reference point.]

Existentialist, Anti-Trancendentalist Mysterian Supermaterialist and Politically Non-Euclidean with Chaotic, Possibilian, (cautiously) Trans-Humanist, Gothick, Nietzschean, Antinomian, Discordian/Erisian, Zen & Tantric Tendencies. Believer in Wu Wei and Wyrd and not much else. Looks on the species as work-in-progress likely to take another 30,000 years to become basically secure and so decent.

Politically into personal liberty (all things being equal, especially in cognitive and sexual matters), anti-bureaucratism (above all, that of the European Union which is the 'monstre sacre de nos jours'), good order mixed with compassion and common sense (the 'way of the decent copper'), sustainability for future generations and maintenance of the natural environment (which is not to be confused with any support for the Greens who are as mad as hatters or professional environmentalism which is little more than a job-creating racket), the primacy of the young over the old who usually are responsible for screwing things up in the first place, national self-determination (though never ethnicist which means that Israel worries me), against German-led Europeanism (as opposed to liking Europeans) and American-led Atlanticism (as opposed to liking Americans even though I go into hiding when they 'get God'), secularism (big time! anyone who believes in fairies and is in politics is a threat to me and mine), evidence-based policymaking, respect for difference (it is the outliers who ensure the progress and survival of the species), kindness to people who believe in fairies except in politics, anti-feminist, anti-identity politics (you are a person not an hysterical attribute) and anti-Frankfort School ideology which precisely means that I support the rights of women to make their own choices and that I support socio-economic and political equality, above all against the matriarchal top-down busybodies of the Academy.

All in all, a classic pre-1970s rational, pragmatic liberal socialist who still believes in the democratic nation state (not that the UK is really one any more) - very much an endangered species amidst the hysterics, posturers, hypocritical moralists, opportunists and downright liars of modern media-driven democracy. Not currently party-affiliated: the Labour Party is so appallingly decadent that the Tories now look relatively competent. How did that happen? Oh, and past contributor to Tribune, The Chartist and Lobster and founder of www.exaronews.com over which I have no editorial control or influence whatsoever.
 

Instinctively polyamorous like most men if they were honest but married to a remarkably interesting woman with two very bright and likable kids ... I really like women a lot and my sympathies are wholly with Emma Goldman on 'feminism'. I do not like sport or engines. I rather like fashion and art.

However, my aversion to ideology, identity politics (which has destroyed and fragmented the intelligent distributionist Left) and post-Frankfort School idiocy suggests that if you are a dim-witted femi-nazi who denies men their fulfilment as anything other than pale imitations of themselves, an ethnicist or traditionalist or a happy-clappy rights liberal or activist, you might be a helluva lot happier not entering into my circle..

Philosophy

My philosophy in life is existentialist (as if regular readers had not guessed). Life is a path that leads to death and no other end. There is no point in believing that you will be pulled from the pit by some great God. You climb out yourself.

The only meanings are those you make for yourself. But, actually, life is good, very good, if you feel the fear and make it work for you. I am passionately anti-anti-natalist and all philosophies of death and the death instinct. I prefer Catholicism for all its evils and mistakes to a Buddhism which negates.

Sometimes, things will go very wrong but these can be good times in retrospect, though you may regret that you had to learn the hard way.

But no regrets is part of the rule-book. Just live with it and move on ...

Philosophers who are admired include Heraclitus, Socrates, Kierkegaard (without the God bit), Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein and Foucault. I respect Wilhelm Reich and Jack Parsons not for their thought but for their good will. I find the philosophers of the Far Right challenging, fascinating and instructive - their critiques of contemporary liberalism resonate even though I oppose them. There are dangers in these thinkers and they require contesting with respect.

Philosophers who are despised include Plato, anyone deluded enough to think that meaning subsists outside ourselves, Hegel and all Hegelians (though with a sneaking respect for Marx's use of Hegel to create a dynamic political movement which, though it went wrong, still gave hope to the hopeless and still has things to say today) and guilt-ridden post-Nazi 'liberals' like followers of Kojeve and Habermas. Zizek drives me up the wall - did he and others not see that Tsipras was engaged in a doomed enterprise. I have no time for German Idealism more generally, analytics who dance on the head of a pin or who invent elaborate ethics in order to avoid personal despair or ensure tenure. My current bug bear is the fashion for extreme scientific speculation which is taken too seriously - it is an enjoyable stopping off place between real philosophy and science fiction.

Matters of the Spirit

I was never interested in the idea of some ghostly spirit, internal or external, animating us and then merging with some abstract Great Beyond. The mind is materially embedded in the body and the mind-body in society and all is fundamentally matter. We are emergent from matter but we cannot say we understand precisely what we mean by matter in this context. Functionalist materialism is simply an interpretation of materialism and there may be more here yet to be uncovered - or never recoverable.

There remain great mysteries in the functioning of society, about the nature of ourselves and about the workings of minds which may as well be regarded magically as undiscovered, and possibly undiscoverable, science.  If there have to be gods, then I choose Dionysos and Aphrodite, Odin and Freyja ...

But you cannot escape the drag of matter, of others or of your own carcase. A Luciferian rebellion, in the end, makes it all worthwhile because it asserts the working of your own deeper matter against the matter worked on you by the laws of physics and by the burden of social organisation. The imagination, a creative irrationality, is what makes us able to move beyond being mere walking stones, shuttled around by blind necessity and previous chance.

If I could rebel against matter I would but I cannot, so, instead, I reserve the right to rebel against social convention and the dead weight of history to free the mind-body for new experiences and pleasures, for individual psychological transcendence (not to be confused with claims about the universal) and for the benefit of those I love.

God certainly need not be involved. Past texts, especially those 'revealed' in the Iron Age, are useless. As are all socially constructed abstracts ... I very much prefer the realist Foucault to the delusional Habermas.

Politics

I used to be involved in politics a great deal. I wasted much of my life and time on the 'official' Left. It achieved little and all I learnt was that the few will always command the agenda of the many, not because they are strong but because we, the many, are weak. Recent events surrounding Jeremy Corbyn's candidature for leadership has exposed to the gaze of all what I learned in the struggles of the 1990s - the main Party of the British Left is deeply dysfunctional, staffed by second and third rate minds with no strategy beyond the 'next election'. The British Labour Party is little more than the defensive manouevre of conservative special interest groups terrified by the onward march of history. I may join it again if Corbyn wins even though his politics are not mine (though I know and respect the person)

On the other hand, anarchism tends to the naive, riddled with the naturalistic fallacy, deviant forms of religion and hidden communitarian terrors. One sinks back into a soft sort of left-libertarianism, a social liberalism or libertarian socialism created out of justifiable pessimism tempered by good will. I would prefer even Baathist order to the killing fields created by enthusiastic and naive armchair liberal outrage, at least when push comes to shove on taking the AK47 out of the broom cupboard.

I have certainly come to dislike the self-regarding political class and the lies of the 'international community' (aka professional fixers) but equally those who afford them loyalty out of an ignorant tribalism, corporatist cowardice or a refusal to think about the nature of power and how the power of the few depends on the willing servitude of the many at home and their disregard abroad ... evil lies so often in obeying orders provided by those same second rate people who naturally rise to the top of political institutions.

The foot soldiers of domestic left-wing politics have been continually digging while in a hole. Solidarity, once it has served its initial purpose, tends to become slavery. The networks of people determined to collaborate to get the cattle trucks from place to place without asking about the destination, combined with the awful truths of social psychological experimentation by our elites, suggested to me that evil was well embedded in the human species by its very socialisation strategies long before we were born.

And so I am a peculiar form of pessimist of the anarcho-Left, owing more to Rabelais, De Sade (the philosopher), Nietzsche (again), Paine, Shelley, William Morris and the incomparable Oscar Wilde than the current degenerate crew of rascals serving special interests, overseas and domestic, who have passed by the moniker of 'New Labour' and who owe more to Lloyd George than Keir Hardie.

These became mere statist war-mongers who have run the economy into the ground for the sake of power, and whose supporters are a rump of dangerous post-Marxist ideologues. In the end, they rise like scum to the surface to get their well-paid jobs in an international system that they created. In that context, it is billionaire wealth creators who deploy capital well to create jobs and build economies that impress me more than the Atlanticist and European clowns who do the opposite. The real talent is at the front end of capitalism nowadays and the leaders of the people should be ashamed of themselves for letting this happen.

The problem may be with Parliamentary Democracy itself, with the prerogatives of the Crown, with the dominance of Party and with institutional special interests that stand in the way of the people's own ability to develop their capabilities in collaboration with others. The way that the priestly class of public intellectuals and third-rate journalists dictates the terms of politics in the Atlantic system and the way modern graduates lap up the nonsense is a lot of the problem ... closed cosmopolitan (a classic contradiction) elites believing their own lies about the nature of the world and existence.

I stand against the bureaucratic State, the Crown as State (though I quite like the Windsors out of sentiment), foreign wars, federalism of all types, the corporate mentality (while appreciating the innovations supplied by genuinely free Jeffersonian markets and even intelligent State infrastructural investment), managerialism as cult, neuroscientific manipulation and tenured technocracy.

Science, technology and innovation are mostly very very good indeed but have to be kept out of the hands of the fruits and the nuts. The market and the State do inspire great works of progress as well as great evils.


Malatesta,Tucker, Rocker, Kollontai, the Kronstadt Mutineers, Zapata, Makhno and, of course, Goldman all had a point and the naive Jack Parsons makes that point likeable: freedom and personal autonomy within a society of free individuals is our highest aspiration ... but I would still trust a weak democratic State over any number of self-righteous activist enthusiasts who weedle their way into the bureaucratic corporatism of social democracy under self-righteous liberal cover.

Saturday 20 June 2015

21 Libertarian Propositions about the World and Individuation

1. There is an underlying reality whose true nature we cannot know.

2. We construct our world through more or less effective manipulation of signs or symbols for things.

3. The most effective form of sign and symbol manipulation is science expressed as technology (the actual manipulation of matter for proven effect) but other manipulations include arts that manipulate the signs and symbols themselves and which manipulate the minds of others.

4. Technological change and individual creativity and needs have an iterative effect on the signs and symbols inherited from generation to generation of persons through tradition. All culture is thus contingent.

5. Each person is faced with a world of signs and symbols that have not been chosen by them but have been given to them. In this sense, ‘they have not chosen their parents’. This world of given signs and symbols continues to impose values on them at every moment of their existence.

6. Each person has an underlying reality of bio-physical processes for which signs and symbols are necessary in order to function in the world.

7. Each person struggles between self-generated signs and symbols on the one hand, making use of what is given, and signs and symbols given to them in the interest of others. Each calibrates himself or herself between the two in order to function in the world.

8. Individuation is right calibration but the signs and symbols of the world are dysfunctional in this context to the degree that they are not ordered either in relation to scientific principles or not calibrated with the biological reality of the person as a mind embedded in a body and a history.

9. Signs and symbols may be very functional for society in the aggregate yet be dysfunctional in relation to nature or the individual – it is a political act to demand that signs and symbol manipulation accord with discovered nature and with individual aspiration or need.

10. A poorly calibrated society is one in which signs and symbols are not calibrated with technological and natural phenomena (i.e. are revealed or traditional religion) or with the signs and symbols of choice of free persons (i.e. are totalitarian or ideological).

11. The signs and symbols of the person are dysfunctional to the degree that they are not in alignment with the needs of the biological person in its form of consciousness at any one time.

12. In order for individuation to take place, the biological person needs to create signs and symbols that express its own reality but which are still in accord with the technological and natural reality of the world in which it inhabits.

13. A poorly calibrated person is one who either accepts the signs and symbols of a society without calibrating these with his own ‘true nature’ (‘repression’) or one whose personal signs and symbols are disconnected from natural or technological reality (’madness’).

14. A person who does not accept the signs and symbols of society but is in accord with natural or technological reality is not mad – society is mad under such conditions.

15. A society is repressive if it accords with natural or technological reality yet refuses to accept the right of persons to calibrate their own signs and symbols within that reality.

16. There is nothing universal in the process of calibration. Society is contingent and persons are contingent in space and time. Finding the universal as sign or symbol for individuation is a contradiction in terms, an abnegation and a determination by the individual to choose signs and symbols that are disconnected from underlying material realities.

17. This is not to say that there is nothing that is not ‘universal’ but whatever is universal and is not scientific is beyond the human and is unknowable - to claim to know is to promote an illusion.

18. It is a presumption to think that any mind can escape a world of contingent signs and symbols. A temporary but possibly transformative discovery of one’s own reality (but not that of the universe) is the most that transcendent strategies can achieve – such strategies may tell you nothing about the universe but a great deal about yourself.

19. All persons are equal in their right to their own construction of signs and symbols even if some are more able to do so than others. All societies are oppressive to the degree that they dictate the acceptance of signs and symbols that are not scientific facts of matter. Religion and culture are not facts of matter. They cannot be rightfully dictated.

20. The greater the number of signs and symbols in a society, the greater the choice for individuals and the more language there is available for individuation. Individuation can only take place in a free society in which religion and culture are tools for (and not the masters of) individuals.

21. The three platforms of individuation are:

• Understanding all things as contingent and not universal
• Understanding the ultimate material base to all consciousness
• Seeing individuation as a process or calibration in relations between the given and the chosen

Saturday 27 December 2014

Victimless Crime and the 'Criminal State'

Let us be controversial. The elephant in the room in any consideration of 'victimless crime' (that is, the intrusion of law or regulation into private choices) is the community-state. It is the claims of the community-state that create victims where there are none - or rather it is the claims of those activist minorities who seize control of the institutions of the State, both legislative and executive, that victimise free persons.

The political tragedy is that there is no absolute reason why some alleged victimless crimes should not be the subject of community action (expressed if necessary through an executive State mechanism). We argue for what is permissible later but we have to be clear that liberty is lost through the process of process (a liberal obsession) getting out of control.

The First Category - Absolute Private Rights

We might start by saying that, of the four general areas of victimless (alleged) criminality, one is an absolute - the right of persons to command their own actions, language and words in consensual acts of any nature under conditions of reasonably full information and without creating non-consensual obligations on others (such as, say, clearing away a body in the case of suicide).

The community has no role to play in private consensual transactions under these conditions. Indeed, the State, rather than other persons, has little role in public consensual transactions either. An offence to one person must as much be regarded as an offence to the other if that offensive act is not then permitted. Good manners are not a matter for the State - the private citizen or subject has, as recourse, the right not to associate with the boor.

The rules regulating alleged offensive behaviour are matters that are, first, based on the equality of all persons in regard to comparative 'offensiveness' and, second, a matter of negotiation between persons. Under this approach, it is reasonable to consider it an offence to intrude noise and images (say) on to the personal self and property of a person yet the control of public space, purely understood, is regulated according to reasonable specific harm to all equally and not simply to the harm felt or perceived by one person and not another.

Aesthetic difference or emotional reaction is not sufficient cause for one person to dictate the behaviour, language or thoughts of another. A distinction thus has to be drawn between an act by a person (who is free) and an act directed at a person (which may be oppressive). The intent of the actor, not the presumption of the 'victim', is what counts. For a man to walk down the street naked with an erect willy may be tasteless but it causes no harm. To assertively wave the willy directly in the face of another is the act of a bully and is offensive - but then so is waving a fist or offering a direct insult. It is not beyond the whit of society to make these distinctions.

A test of inappropriate community power is whether it stops one or more persons being who they are in private or in public (like gay kissing or breast feeding) regardless of the aesthetics of others. Appropriate community power stops any person from forcing their aesthetic not on the community but on another person in a targeted way with deliberation or through ignorance. And, of course, before it is raised, a 'strong' view of consent (involving not only adequate information but the ability to comprehend) is accepted. This does not remove all risk from transactions (since risk is what is to be respected here) but it does protect children, animals, the physically and mentally vulnerable and workers in the work place from abuse because of the power relations involved.

But, again, matters should be appropriate. Sexual harassment of a worker is bullying but sexual conduct between workers is no one's business but that of the workers themselves if it does not breach contractual duties that relate solely to the job in hand. Similarly, the private right to erotic pain is a private right about which the community has nothing to say. Opinions should be free, no matter how 'hurtful' or aesthetically troubling, they are. To be contemptuous of a belief in God or even insanely to believe in conspiracy theory is a private matter. Above all, persons who are adult must be reasonably assumed to have rights to personhood that rise above imposed community norms.

The Nordic laws (Sweden, Norway, Iceland) criminalising adult males for undertaking an economic transaction with a woman for sexual pleasure represent the highest form of cultural oppression: acts of totalitarian war on the choices of both parties where both parties are engaged in a consensual act. These have become oppressive states. Religious insult as a crime must be restricted to going into a Church and asserting contempt or to desecrating Jewish graves and such like acts against individual persons or on communities on their own territory - and they should represent a civil action supported by the state and not a state action alone.

The Second Category - Regulating Harm

The second level of community intervention is where the executive intrudes to stop a person harming themselves. The issue here is the line between acting against a temporary aberration or weak information and oppressively failing to permit persons to make personal developmental choices that might incur risk or danger. This is the 'killing ground' (literally) of the political struggle between 'progressives' and 'libertarians' with the latter being excessively principled in terms of absolutes because the former have engaged in a determined 'mission creep' that extends community control not only over acts but language and thoughts in a wholly unprincipled way.

Drugs and assisted suicide are the obvious knotty issues here but also sex work and gambling. The 'progressive' mentality is piling up spending on industries whose purpose is to save people from themselves in an oppressive and infantilising way. The low point was not just Nordic Fascism but arresting BDSM consensual sado-masochists. Above all, there is no logic to solutions which are oppressive in one nation and free in another. The Nordics have become insanely intrusive into sexual matters while the Americans have an irrational 'thing' about gambling that is incomprehensible to the Chinese. Anglo-Saxons obsess about drugs, the Dutch are more relaxed.

The common sense approach - to reduce expenditure and close down self-sustaining special interest groups as well as restore private freedoms - is to permit in general and regulate in particular, with an emphasis on controlling the conduct of suppliers of services, providing full information and developing escape mechanisms paid for out of taxes raised. So, prostitution, gambling and assisted suicide in extremis might be legalised, regulated to a reasonable degree and (except obviously in the case of assisted suicide) taxed, but the 'consumer' and the 'worker' protected, much as they should be (often inadequately in practice) within the financial services or retail sectors, on these principles:-
  • 'silent harm' (that is, harm arising out of lack of information) should be reduced or eliminated: this would require industry-funded information on real risk in gambling or duties of care on disease transmission in sex work or the offer of counseling and mental health treatment (even drugs like LSD) as alternatives to suicide in terminally ill patients
  • the community state (financed through taxes) should be engaged in general economic equality strategies for women, provide but not enforce skills training to give choice, consider legally enforceable limits (cooling off periods) on decisions to bet high sums or escrow funds for gambling amongst low income earners and so on.
Instead of 'banning' pleasure or risk or 'fundamental choice' trades, the community-state should permit private choice and transaction but force upon producers certain duties of care towards consumers and contracted workers which might include a degree of 'cooling off' on 'major' transactions (betting large sums or death) and should fund alternatives. The cost of 'funding alternatives' is almost certainly going to be less than funding massive security and punishment systems promoted by special interests.

The Third Category - Systems Management

The third category of alleged victimless crime is one that irritates many economic libertarians but it has validity on the basis that it applies where a person is not engaged in private acts but is integrated into a system that has social consequences. The demand for car insurance is an example of this. The free person might object to paying for this, especially if they believe they will never use it but this misses the point, which is that the person is not a free agent in a car but a user of a system that is integrated with other users.

Systems regulation to mitigate harm based on the users' actions en masse is perfectly reasonable but only with two assumptions in mind - that a person can, if they so chose, albeit with inconvenience, opt out of the system (in this case, by not driving on the roads) and that the regulation is proportionate and geared to the facts of the case. The recent EU Court ruling that equalised male and female costs in insurance arrangements is a typical progressive oppression because it shifts the car insurance system from a self-regulating system to an arm of community policy engineered by activists to meet strategic communitarian aims. It is typical of the new European bureaucracy.

However, mandating seat belts and banning the use of mobile phones while driving are permissible restrictions on liberty because the cost to the system as a whole and the potential harm to non-consenting others (including trauma and cost of accidents) makes the point unarguable that action should be taken. As soon as a self-regulating system, usually linked to a technological solution to a human need (such as transport or food or water supply) moves from these two ground rules - the ability to opt out and the necessity to remain proportionate – it shifts from legitimate regulation to our fourth zone of interest, 'government'.

To recapitulate, private lives are not the business of the State, private vices require some degree of regulation as trades in the general public interest and public systems supplying services require a degree of proportionate regulation in order to ensure their proper functioning. But what of government and, indeed, of other non-human entities with claims?

The Fourth Category - The People as Victims of the Criminal State

Government executes a legislative power that might reasonably regulate both 'emotional trades' and complex industrial and post-industrial systems. Government also has certain macro-regulatory functions - which include economic stability, defence of the nation and, more controversially, social order. Crimes against the State are the most difficult of all 'victimless crimes' because the State is a thing-in-itself that claims to represent us as persons but which, in fact, is a bureaucratic self-perpetuating machine that represents only those persons who have seized the levers of power, usually through somewhat spuriously democratic means.

The State is not a moral actor but is merely the vehicle for appropriate conduct (the preservation of order and economic stability to enable private life and the permitted regulatory functions in a complex post-industrial society) by an organisation whose entire claim to rule is ultimately based on the simple expedient of having a monopoly of force. What do we mean by this? Only that the current constitutional liberal democratic State may do all these 'good' things but it is also empowered to do many 'bad' things under the behest not of private persons working in concert within agreed rules about freedom and responsibility but under the behest of those who have seized control of its powers.
  • The State has a professional political class that has no direct link to private persons acting in concert but is entirely beholden to a party structure based on clientage and the influence of special interests.
  • The State has a bureaucratic class that not only has no accountable and direct or indirect link to private persons acting in concert but represents an institutional interest protective of its own status and privileges.
  • The State is surrounded by a parasitical class of representatives of competing special interests who, at their best, improve appropriate regulation but which, at their worst, divert appropriate regulation from the needs of the system or from the consumer or worker in order to strengthen their own financial and ideological interests.
The institutional interest of the State as represented by political, bureaucratic and lobbyist (not excluding countervailing NGO) vested interests creates a profound alienation between the population and its ruling elite who cannot guarantee freedom, who are tempted to interfere in private life and who are incompetent at appropriate regulation. This combination of interests, essential to the self definition of modern liberalism and progressivism and represented by the behemoths of the European Union, the Federal Government in Washington and all democratic capitals, is thus part public service and part criminal racket, designed to divert public funds into the pockets of special interests.

If this is all it is, perhaps we could live with it, but this unholy trinity of politicians, bureaucrats and vested interests brings with it an ideological package that operates against the public interest by using the State as the means to impose their particular vision of what it is to be human. The politicians will not challenge standard cultural norms as fearful electoral conservatives. The 'emotional trades' cannot be regulated properly. Activist groups enter into the political and bureaucratic process and force minor oppressions and major costs on the population. Business perverts the smooth-running of the market at consumer and worker expense.

The victim here is the public. The meaning of criminality has been reversed so that crimes against the State become 'bad' and crimes against persons or the people go unpunished. Petty wars are declared at huge public cost, non-jobs are created that assist the few at the expense of the many and individuals are persecuted by the police to please their security and populist allies. Until we, as a people, understand that we are the victims of this three-fold class of interests and restructure our political decision-making to make our representatives and bureaucrats more directly accountable and activists and lobbyists much more transparent, we will continue to be victims of organised state crime, mostly (admittedly) petty but quite capable of both expropriation and, in war time, enslavement.

Saturday 1 November 2014

The Importance of Secularism In Defence of Freedom

Freedom to choose one's pattern of relationships, lifestyle and sexuality self-evidently requires freedom from the dictates of others with different views on such things. Since religion is historically a business of dictates (this is unanswerable), there is no freedom for many people without freedom from religion.

We may choose not to be free (to accept dictates) or we may find a religion whose dictates accord precisely with our own preferred patterns of relationship, lifestyle and sexuality (not an impossible aspiration) but if we choose to accept dictates that go against our very nature then we must choose not to be free freely and not impose our choice against freedom on others.

Or perhaps we can turn a religion into freedom by demanding that it no longer dictates anything - in which case it is no longer a religion of commands and orders but a community of spritualised individuals. No world religion has ever been this and only this and no other.

The Sacralisation of the Real

So much, so simple since religion is not the same as political order. Political order can be maintained without recourse to the supernatural. The decisions of secular order may be hard to stomach sometimes but they should not arise from an elaborate extension of the mental states of the few over the many, ones not based on the hard facts of the matter.

Political order is what it says on the tin - a matter of order even if the question is begged for whose benefit the order exists. If a political order adopts a religion for the sake of social order, as Constantine and innumerable other world leaders have done, then the question is part-answered - the order is not for the benefit of those whose freedom is to choose a particular private life.

Personal freedom, including the freedom to believe what one will, is thus ineluctably bound up with secularism. Faith-based communitarian interventions in the condition of the people must always be viewed with suspicion as failures in the ability of secular power to maintain good order and as potential oppressions against the person.

When the secular power can no longer cope with change or the hegemony of its ruling elites are threatened, religion can often present itself as a quick fix, turning the need for psychic order and discipline and the special interests supported by communitarian values into a social police force to be directed against the free person ... and so innumerable Dark Ages begin. We may be in such a time. 

Outside the power play, with religion as the tool of order, the sacralisation of reality is a wholly private matter for adults, those who can choose to associate with others of like mind but who cannot and should not coerce those who are discovering themselves for themselves or are vulnerable to coercion.

This prejudice towards freedom is not a prejudice for bad manners but manners are not to be imposed by the institutions of the community. Good manners are set by example. Texts cannot bind a person, only a person can bind a person to texts. To let a text bind you is like letting a person other than oneself bind you - a form of slavery. Unthinking belonging to texts is slavery.

On The Sanctity of the Vital

Where a religious sensibility has value is when it moves from text and command (as in Judaism, Biblical fundamentalism, Papal pronunciamento and Koranic determination) to one of principle that requires no supernatural or God-like element but perhaps, at most, only an added agnosticism about what we can call the natural.

Oddly, the bete noire of many resentful of religious claims, Catholicism, may have the most effective 'fundamental principle' in its notion of the sanctity, meaning the profound value, of all human life from conception to death. This value might be extended to animal, alien and AI but the core principle remains - the value of the vital expressed as the person.

Catholicism takes a wrong turning in embedding this value in a God and in an Afterlife  - and in the exegesis of cumulative texts - and in failing to discriminate adequately between the consequent relative value and potential of lives once the core value is accepted.

But the insight is definitely there - that personal existence and self-creation in the world overrides any social or economically determined value to others or the convenience or self-determined devaluation of oneself or others. We are sacred - not the planet, not the church, not the race - us as persons.

Difficult Issues

This means that euthanasia, eugenics, the death penalty and abortion are not either/or issues against the Church but are battlegrounds where social order and personal aspiration really do contend over ground contested with a Church which has something to say even if its rigid position does not say all that there is to be said.

The secular moral position must be that euthanasia, eugenics, the death penalty and abortion cannot be treated in themselves in an absolutist way (as the Church would) but that the implementation of such policies need to be considered with high seriousness in the context of the principle of the value of the vital. This high seriousness about life is what we must concede to the Vatican.

This applies to sexual choice, not in the sense that free adults should not be free to do what they will but insofar as sexuality is highly charged in its effects on persons. Value vitalism requires seriousness in considering the balance of interest between persons, steering between the Scylla of solipsism and the Charybdis of another's psychic vampirism.

In this sense, the free should only associate with the free or at least only with those who clearly crave freedom. Those who prefer 'slavery' should be permitted to submit - so long as a door can always be left open in case they change their mind. There must always be an unlocked door to the outside.

Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body

This sense of responsibility is profoundly different from that of, say, Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body because it is existential: it refuses to let an institutional arrangement or a command to dictate moral choice but, on the other hand, it recognises that sexual activity remains a moral choice of sorts.

Pope John Paul II asserted that extra-marital sexuality falsified the language of the human body and he spoke of total love. But this is a totalitarian love that idealises human sexuality beyond its ability to keep to the ideal. Ultimately, it is cruel and the novels of Western literature are often a testament to that cruelty. I recommend Anna Karenina as the standard answer to cruelty.

The Pope denied two general possibilities - that the approved institution of marriage might become the holding bay for controlling and cruel instincts that merely masquerade as love and that a person can give reverence and love to more than one embodied person or 'incarnate spirit' at the same time and even in the same place (the 'polyamorous option' so to speak)..

For a culture of faith, the lack of faith in the possibility of extended love is quite remarkable. As we have seen in the posting on PB Randolph, who tried to extend the language of sacred sex under Victorian conditions, his idealism of control and harmony, of sacrifice and totalitarian commitment, is well within the ideological framework of Pope John Paul II.

Religion as Sexual Regulation

Islam, of course, is different again because sexuality is essentially treated here as a problem of social order and of regulation. In this respect it is brutally honest about its purpose and perhaps that should be respected. The result is yet another Iron Age cultural model imposed on a very different world but at least Christian idealism is displaced here by a practical, almost cynical, commitment to the social.

In practice, this determination on communitarian social order (with property ultimately underpinning the model) can result in oppressions of sexual preference and freedom more awesome in their effects even than those proposed by the other religions of the book though the complexity of this 'order' is often underestimated.

All this is a matter of cumulative traditionalist interpretation by clerical legislators of laws as God's Will rather than the fruit of an idealism that is supposed to replace human nature entirely. We see something similar, despite the myths in the West, in mainstream Hinduism which is stunningly prudish by modern Western standards.

This difference is important - asserting sexual behaviour by traditionalist authoritarian command is unpleasant but perhaps less creepy ultimately than expecting sexual compliance through a totalitarian ideology. Tradition at least arises out of some sense of a past need for order in conditions of scarcity. Modern totalitarian sexual restrictions have no such excuse.

Spiritual Liberalisms

We can contrast totalitarian and traditional authoritarian models of sexual conduct with the permissive value-driven approach of the Unitarian Universalists which retains the ideology of sexual value but re-interprets it to permit same sex marriage, moderated abstinence programmes based on 'full information' and personal choice as to conduct and orientation.

The Buddhists, meanwhile, practice a sort of avoidance strategy where sexuality is quite simply diminished as 'carnal' and so as a distraction from the spirit. Buddhism is, as we have often pointed out, a religion of the death instinct, of negation, where even Catholicism appears ideologically progressive about life itself. Pope John Paul II himself castigated Buddhism for this quality.

But theory is different from practice and Buddhist avoidance strategy has the excellent effect of removing sexual regulation from religion entirely, returning it perforce to the struggle between individual choice and social norms.

The link between Buddhist ideology and sexual pleasure in the West and in Japan are thus convenient constructions out of this neglect but the Buddha himself advised his followers in strong terms to avoid unchastity 'as if it were a pit of burning cinders'. Enough said!

The Neo-Pagan Revolt

This leads us inevitably to the neo-pagan revolt against Judaeo-Christianity but, even here, things are not simple. Neo-paganism seems sex-positive and often is but it is also a mish-mash of reconstructed traditions and beliefs often with an underlying essentialism about male/female 'polarities' or about the 'mother'.

Someone like Starhawk can sound as po-faced about social norms as any rabbi or Catholic intellectual but the over-sacralisation of sexuality in general seems to be more a determination to compare and contrast with Christianity than an effort at existential liberation from spiritual ideology and social norms per se.

The best that can be said about neo-paganism is that it offers a set of safe havens for 'differently cultured' persons, giving a community and a spirituality that the other Great Religions have denied them.

The Great Rite itself is simply the transposition of the ideology of PB Randolph into a new cultural environment and is either performed figuratively (which hardly seems the point, almost seeming a little cowardly) or it reverts back into the private domain where it can become as much bedroom performance art as spiritual act.

Conclusions

Neo-paganism as a spiritual practice is liberatory for many but it cannot and should not be confused with the liberation of the person as person. Yet it is probably the most advanced way-station to trans-human liberation available within the ideology of spirituality, especially with its permissive 'an it harm none, do as thou wilt' (the Wiccan Rede).

But the essence of all these restrictive views on human conduct is that they should remain voluntarist and private. The successful attempt of the religious to impose its sexual values more widely on society at large often becomes an anxious obsession amongst its adherents. This must be resisted at every level, including attempts to control the means of education and information.

Nothing is more important for freedom of all types than that the political order should be and should remain secular!

Saturday 25 October 2014

The Flaw in Pascal Beverley Randolph

In any history of the association of modern magickal thinking and sexuality, one of the ur-texts is the 'Magia Sexualis' of Pascal Beverley Randolph ['PBR'], a mid-nineteenth century American, but part of a broader body of work that was, in turn, part of the American transcendentalist approach to occultism. Randolph had a second round of influence, through the translation and interpretation of the work by Marie de Naglowska, in France but the historical importance of Randolph is not our primary concern here. What we want to do is critique his work from a modern perspective and see where this leads.

The flaw in P. B. Randolph's work is one very familiar to contemporary thinkers and not just those who set their stall on 'queer theory'. It is the very notion of polarity between male and female. Indeed, the flaw in all simple thought, one of the themes of our postings in general, is polarity - yin/yang, good/bad, male/female, love/hate and so on. It is convenient and it can be creative but it is not 'true'.

As regular readers will know (taking the last as one of many), I recognise the fundamental opportunity for difference between categories taken in the round - so that there is male and there is female - but there is no value judgement to be ascribed to either, certainly not in relation to each other. Human variation means that there is no exemplar of a 'type' and the Bell Curves of normality shade and overlap in complex and fascinating ways.

We have asserted elsewhere that the differences between the genders are real 'in the round' but are so highly specific and functional that attempts to extend the category that includes some specific attributes in order to represent some absolute, any absolute, is absurd. There are specific partial functions of feminity and masculinity with some public policy implications (and cultural codings overlaying these based on a reading of the functions for their use value in struggles for power or social cohesion) but there is no absolute quality of feminity or masculinity.

The terms of categorisation are always approximations, based on an averaging out of common attributes so that, as several friends have pointed out, a highly feminised male can still be a man, a highly masculinised female a woman and many entities between the two can be properly regarded as something else entirely.

In other words, the sexual relationship between persons can be ideologically 'genderised' as some sort of meeting of opposites or (in gay relations) of 'sames' but the actual practice of sexuality is far more interesting and complex than this, a matter of the 'magic' of personal rather than gender relations. To build a system around (say) a positive female pole and negative male pole, as PBR does, as if the earth's polarity and magnetism automatically applied to people, because of a primitive insistence on a debased form of microcosm reflecting macrocosm, is, to say the least, sloppy thinking.

As solipsistic poetic allegory, it may work but poetry is a perception of existence and not existence itself. This is not to argue that gender playfulness cannot incorporate such absurdities but only that, once understood to be absurd, we must, perforce, move on. Randolph, for example, writes that 'as in nature' the female attracts the male but, in fact, this was not a matter of 'nature' but one of culture, or rather his culture (a culture that determinedly persecuted him).

In another culture, the male attracts the female and the male attracts the male and the female the female and so on - his culture was the rigid culture of the dominant patriarchal male (much as I loathe the loaded feminist term 'patriarchy' as propagandistic distortion today, it does apply to gender relations in mid-nineteenth century church-going middle class Anglo-Saxon society) and his equally disturbed and disturbing fixed matriarchal counterpart.

But having excoriated PBR for writing nonsense at a strategic level, we can dig deeper into his poetic allegory and try to uncover what tactically exists of value in the false metaphor and a cod-scientific approach involving the volts and magnetism of a mid-nineteenth century American autodidact and fantasist. For, the essence of PBR's system is vitalism. Vitalism is not much liked scientifically or philosophically today but, taken as allegory rather than as 'truth', it represents the personal perception of the flow of biochemical change in a person and is a way of explaining what is not yet fully understood by science - the instincts of attraction and repulsion.

Some people are undoubtedly more 'vital' than others (which is not a value judgement about worth but merely an observation). Some have experienced unexplained attractions and repulsions whereas others go through life with no consciousness of their own connectedness to unexplained phenomena. PBR is making an honourable attempt to deal with and make use of a reality that will not bend itself easily to scientific investigation and, although his own system may be nonsense in relation to reality, his awareness of the phenomenon is generations ahead of his own culture.

Instead of repressing this vitalism, expressed most profoundly in sexual terms, he at least makes an honourable attempt to bring it into the open on terms that his generation might just understand - scientific materialism. He gets it wrong but then so did Karl Marx. Both, I contend, moved us forwards (as did Freud and Reich) without being 'right' and subsequent problems arise not from the authors of radical new ideas but from the dumb acceptance of them without critical thought after the event.

PBR, in linking sexual vitalism to another fascinating absurdity, magic, manages to bring in yet another aspect of the matter - the fact that for some persons in some situations sexual vitalism, as a practice rather than a theory, can lead to shifts in consciousness similar to those of some drugs. To extend this to magical purpose in the sense that sexual vitalism will lead to changes in the material world may pile on yet another absurdity in the eyes of many - until we start to consider that (as we have argued elsewhere) much of our reality is social.

Consciousness changes can shift our own viewpoint in regard to that social reality. Therefore, while the magician who thinks that will and magic will cause him to fly in the air is an utter fool, the 'magician' who believes he or she can use sexual vitalism to transform their personal nature and social presence is decidedly not.

However, the most effective argument against magical practice is generally that magical practitioners are not great advertisements for their own method. Their practices seem to be constantly associated with failure and social exclusion, with marginalisation and even with neurosis. To be successful appears to require that you embed yourself wholly in the reality presented by society and, although there is room for singular creativity in one line of endeavour (the way of the 'genius'), any attempt to question the broader grounds of false mass perception is to have one consigned to the mad house, the prison, the execution block or a troubled isolation (the modern solution). But this is deceptive on two grounds.

The first is that the marginalised and isolated are, in the first instance, drawn to desperate measures in order to integrate themselves into the social and yet to individuate. They are drawn to the fantastic and to the magical. The more marginalised they are (as was PBR as a mixed race petit-bourgeois in a racist aspirant and fast-growing society) then the more drawn they are towards such radical metaphors to explain their position. The history of voodoo in Haiti might be an exemplar of this relationship.

The second is that radical thinkers take enormous risks with their reputation to transform themselves and society. The massive dead weight of conventionalism with strike down the pioneer even if, in the long run of history, the flawed insights of that pioneer might prove themselves correct - Nietzsche, PBR, Crowley: all failures of a sort and yet ...

Any 'sensible' person would never think radically but would seek out the conventional, especially if they have a family to feed. Most do. Some simply give into necessity. Others are philosophical zombies, creatures of the social rather than individuals operating within the social. Things are probably better in this respect today compared to almost any previous age but there is still a price, even today, to be paid for not being a zombie and, living amongst zombies, many of us have to have dress in the stench of their kind so as not to be eaten alive.

As for PBR, his approach to sex magic is perhaps still worth reading but only in order to establish just how much he was embedded in the Christian culture of his day. His rules are filled with religiosity, involve complicated and ascetic limitations on behaviour that imply a sexual union that is over a month in preparation and has no serious understanding of sexual differences in orgasm.

Indeed, by the end of them, one's conclusion is that PBR is more concerned to make his congress moral and respectable than to encourage the sort of sexual energy that might transform consciousness. When he gets around to sexual positions, he seems open-minded and no doubt much fun was had but it is a sexuality surrounded by anxiety and magical protection and always conscious that respectability requires that the act be contained within a 'sacred' box.

PBR has nothing to teach us now about sexuality or consciousness except negatively - that is, he tells us that 150 years ago, the power of the conventional fear of sexuality was such that a person with a sense of sexual vitalism had to cloak his nature in the language of the 'enemy': ascetic, 'spiritual', theistic ... and that even a person whose 'passion' for the 'vital' forced him into the role of cultural maverick was forced to bend the knee to social convention if he was to be able to talk in any way about mutual male/female sexual love.

Of course his contemporaries were rutting around like crazy as all generations do but the language of the time meant that men and women had to inhabit separate linguistic environments - that of the prostitute and that of the home. PBR, to his credit, made a serious attempt to include women in a sexual dialogue and he compromised by bringing that dialogue into the Victorian hearth and this is what makes him a progressive force who was not without courage.

Unfortunately, the very act of speaking about the sexual in such a shared discourse proved shocking to Christian sensibilities and so this very mild-mannered and rather dull and exhausting sexual magic became demonised. An attempt to escape from zombie status and communicate sexual love was doomed in that culture at that time. Worse, those who went underground with it brought the compromising language of PBR into their 'spiritual' determinations of what sexuality was and should be and so the mastering ideology infected even the potential for resistance.

However, his existence as an underground figure, rarely actually read, helped to open the door to sexuality as something that could be spoken of between men and women. He was succeeded by equally brave women like Woodhull and Craddock who began a process of transformation that has led to today's freedom and openness. Even today, the American Evangelical Right would drag America and the world back to those neurotic and disturbed days when zombies ruled if they possibly could.

So, although PBR's system was scientific nonsense and his magic onerous and excessively essentialist, he should be lauded today for his eccentric courage and his preparedness to (at least) attempt to bring women into equal status, as sexual partners, with men. In this last he failed to take the final step and he remained 'the priest' but his determination to offer women rights to sexual pleasure (albeit in a weirdly religious framework) should make him a hero to all free persons. The right tribute would be to free his departed soul from the trammels of the religiosity that he felt it necessary to make part of himself to justify what really did not need to be justified at all - human freedom.


Saturday 30 August 2014

Freedom = Science + Rebellion

"The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing defined"

Some things that are obvious might need careful re-stating or else there will be misunderstandings between us that could prove fatal. After all, in a time of economic and political troubles, people do kill each other over misunderstandings.

All sense perception is an approximation of that which it senses. Since each person has a marginally different biological structure to their senses and of the brain that orders the senses, then each person is:

- i) approximating objective reality (on terms by which no person can ever know that reality except as an approximation expressed through mathematics or language which pre-suppose that a community of persons have agreed on rules that 'level out' personal perceptions into a pragmatic 'normality' that need not be identical with objective reality at all),

and,

- ii) constructing reality in a marginally different way from every other person so that the reality that is pragmatically effective socially is not necessarily either objective reality or the reality of the person whose situation is (possibly radically) different from other persons.

Practically (or pragmatically), a 'social reality' (a working tool for the ends of the majority of persons in a community for the majority of the time or for the ends of a minority which has managed to command the conditions of the majority) is possible.

However, such a reality is never 'true' except pragmatically i.e. its contingency is in-built by the very biological basis of sense impression and the braibn's ordering of data. Social reality is the most contingent of the three forms of reality (objective or mathematical, individual and community) because it is vulnerable to:

- a) the varying numbers of individual realities that enter into it at any one time;

- b) the degree to which such minds are willing to suspend belief in those aspects of their own reality that do not fit with the community's reality;

- c) the power structures by which some individual persons can impose their realities in a value hierarchy against other minds' realities;

- d) changes in internal objective realities (the waxing and waning of biological strengths) and their effect on minds;

- e) changes in external objective realities (facts of nature) and in the realities of members of the community as they individually face not only changes in internal and external objective reality but ...

- f) shifts in the ability of other minds to manipulate their reality, communicate those shifts (not necessarily verbally), and become aware of their own learned experience of socialised reality and of its degree of dissonance from their own individual reality.

In other words, we must start our analysis of reality not by distrusting the relationship between our reality and objective reality (which is an individual construction derived from the interaction of our own objective biological reality with physical reality) but by distrusting the relationship between socialised reality and our own reality.

Whereas our biology and our physical world set certain absolute limits on our perception and on our ability to create a framework for our perception, socialised reality sets limits that are contingent and constantly changing in a way that is far more volatile than 'natural' reality.

This instability of the social can be summarised thus:-

- a) limits set by our own lack of awareness of our situation: the limitation of blind acceptance or irrational understanding of the degree of choice and risk involved in asserting our own reality (often based on anxiety, fear and the deliberate withholding of knowledge by others);

- b) limits set by the 'imperial' aspirations of other minds whose own realities involve the attempt to dictate their victim's reality through the use of custom or habit (see c)) or a command of physical reality (the bending of physical reality to ensure the ability to deploy 'force' or 'manipulation' [i.e. in regard to sense impressions]);

- c) as a corollary of a), the acceptance of custom or habit, what might be called the 'drag of tradition', especially strong where tradition has become part of the armoury of 'imperial' minds with a stake in promoting conservatism;

- d) the limits set by language which is a social tool and not an individual tool (except for the purposes of wilful managing or manipulating social reality) and which, therefore, defines the person, especially in the form of 'shared texts', by reinventing reality for the sake of what is 'average' or 'dominant.

Ergo, individual freedom (i.e. a right state of individual reality) requires a right relationship with physical or objective reality (including the biological underpinnings of sense perception and idea-formation) and a right relationship with the social, which is one of permanent questioning criticism of the social's functioning value to the individual.

The right relationship with objective reality is a questioning respect which encompasses a right relationship with natural laws where they are scientifically and mathematically valid and with observable social phenomena where they take on mass characteristics (such as the flocking of humans in terms of the market or the community).

This right relationship also requires a right relationship with the individual's own abilities to perceive the world correctly and to analyse it. To know what one cannot or may not know because of the conformation of one's own biology is part of this right relationship. Some distrust of the senses, within reason, is wise.

The right relationship with socialised reality is one of permanent and questioning distrust. To understand social phenomena, including the social use of language and of texts, and the use by those skilled in language, texts and the manipulation of sense perception and brain operations of their tools, is not to be construed as acceptance.

The operations of humans en masse (likened to the flocking of birds or the herd behaviour of wildebeest or the pack actions of wolves) must be understood but not taken as necessary conduct for the free individual - the aim is merely not to be sent awry or be eaten, indeed, to be cleverer than the flock, the herd or the pack.

Similarly, the superior 'fire-power' (control over objective reality) or skills of the few who command the many are worthy of no intrinsic respect but are simply taken to be a 'fact in the world' which must be worked around, undermined or defeated as suits the individual reality of the person observing a social reality that is out of kilter with itself.

It may be that an individual reality is in perfect accord with the flock or with the interests of those with 'fire power' but this can only be meaningful if a person chooses with knowledge to be a conservative or the servant of a master.

Otherwise, the individual reality (the person) has become little more than an adjunct of a socialised reality. They have ceased to exist as a person. They have become socialised reality - a passive component of it like the Borg. They have reduced themselves to the level of the animal.

Conservatism and serfdom are not irrational options. They may be objectively sensible relations if the command over objective reality by the social (either as herd-like community or as a community of betas ruled by alphas) is a fact but the 'victim' in such cases should know their vulnerability and should show their teeth as soon as objective conditions allow.

To internalise socialised reality without needing to do so is asking to be the conscripted soldier, the cheap labour, the bored congregation member ... and so the struggle to preserve a right relationship to objective reality (a respect for science and power) and to socialised reality (a resistance to its claims) is the basis of all human freedom.