Transgression

This is a posting in a series mostly related to sexuality but it should not be interpreted as relating solely to sexuality - transgression may be economic, social, familial, political, artistic, spiritual or cultural. The question is - why even bother to transgress 'norms' if conformity seems to be the easiest path to take?

An effective transgressional act is not an uncompassionate or cruel act. It simply asks whether a rule or a convention or a habit imposed by society or by others serves your own inner purpose. Of course, knowing one's own purpose helps but sometimes we only know that we don't know what we want.

In that situation of not knowing what we want or who we are and it is clear there are no answers to those questions in conforming to social expectations and rules, then the logjam may have to be broken - an instinctual transgression may be the only means to do this.

To break an irrational taboo (irrational in terms of one's own rational needs) is a liberatory act although this begs the question of the rational and the irrational since the social definition of rational or reasonable may be in direct contradiction to what is rational or reasonable for self expression ... for self-becoming.

Much of social life is, in any case, not strictly rational. It can be an imposition from the past, habit, from power, convenience to others and so forth. The central point to remember is this difference between what is reasonable for society and what is reasonable for oneself.

Ideally, rationalities converge in a free society but social conditions are rarely and only contingently free. Either the 'self' must reconsider its position or it must liberate itself from social rationality. This may not be just a liberatory stance but a revolutionary one.

All permanent change in oneself must be (ultimately) sub-consciously willed - to become the creature of an external substance, however, (addiction) is to lose will. The dionysiac qualities of external substances must serve the person and the person should not become slave to or creature of the substance.

A formal exercise in exploring transgression (or an opportunity to transgress norms) might be to list as many things as possible that might be regarded as transgressive within the culture of the day, and then note alongside each:

• whether the transgression or opportunity would be a 'desire' for you, all things being equal - is it what you actually want in itself or as a means to something else unknown?
• what the costs and gains to the self would be in acting out the transgression (even a marginal gain would still be gain);
• what the costs to the self in society might be and then lay out the material and social risks to be set against the personal gains.

A perfectly rational procedure - except that the best transgressions usually 'come out of the blue'. But let us continue with the conceit of rational transgression. The central question should be - if the transgression against norms is gainful, without material risk and is desired, then why is it not done?

If the answer lies in fear or anxiety or shame and not in financial cost or lack of fundamental interest, then you cannot be liberated as a person unless the actually desired transgression (say, being gay in a faith-based community) has been faced head on. But a transgression is still not a stupidity.

A transgression that damages one's own mental or physical health or safety or one's own property or risks the full weight of the law may, indeed, be a transgression but it is also a stupidity. If the law is stupid, change the law, learn secrecy or take the consequences but never be stupid in order to posture as 'free'.

The gay example is perfect in this respect. A gay person in most of the modern West has no need to transgress because homosexuality is an accepted new norm within the norm of tolerance and diversity but it was not always thus. Campaigning, secrecy and punishment were the 'norms' for the abnormal.

For tens of thousands of males (more!), a brutal choice was given - to conform because of the sheer weight of social pressure or to take phenomenal risks in order to express your sexual nature. Nor were homosexual people (of both sexes) the only oppressed people in society - the list is endless.

Today, polyamorous personalities may not be punished and may wonder precisely what they are campaigning for - and campaigning itself is an aberration from 'being' - but they still live under conditions where secrecy (aka 'discretion') is required and the social structure is biased against them.

But transgression is not merely a revisiting and revision of social reality. It is also a revisiting and revision of personal reality - the habits and conventions of the self and the construction of oneself by others for the sake of others (without needing to unravel the beneficent construction of oneself through the love of others).

The irony of this in the gay example is that a homosexual may find themselves obligated to become 'gay' with a new set of oppressive behavioural norms when all they really want to be is a 'normal' person who just likes sexual attachments to their own sex. Identity politics can oppressively construct people because it is 'social'.

A transgression can even be against harmful habits, routine or those personal rituals that act as barriers to desire or to becoming what one wishes to be. Perhaps there is an act of apparent private 'sin' that you want to undertake but do not know that you want because it is buried deep within you out of fear.

The problem here is, of course, with the idiot inherited notion of 'sin' but let that pass. But if this 'sin' is there, bring it out into the open, study it closely, imagine it, decide whether it is a desire that requires action. The desire may evaporate in the light of honest consideration but the 'sin' may also evaporate into an action.

If the 'sin' does no material harm to you or others (so let us be explicit in condemning non-consensual sex, paedophilia and bestiality where harms may be reasonably presumed as default), then why not make this transgression happen, savour it, make it part of yourself - or just return it to its box without guilt or shame as having been studied, felt and rejected after all - for oneself and not for the social or some imagined being watching your every step.

Or it may be transgression in favour of a secret desire that only you could ever know was desired and which only you think of as 'wrong'. Why on earth, under such conditions, would you not transgress against oneself for the sake of oneself?

Transgression can also be something with a ritual quality between two or more - though be careful that the breaking apart of an old convention does not create a new and equally enslaving one. We are back to the identity politics of turning homosexual feeling into gay culture.

To become lost in a cult or culture is no liberation, especially if it is the replacement of one ideological rigidity with another. To be merely rebellious for the sake of rebellion (I am 'against' not 'for' in such cases) is also not to be truly liberatory nor revolutionary.

Transgression is not a matter of thought in itself but of the necessity of unblocking life energy. Transgression for the sake of transgression becomes just an absurd waste of energy, a bad habit. Every revolutionary act must be focused precisely on the unblocking of energy and only on that purpose.

Finally, transgression for one person is different from transgression for another. A woman is different from a man in this respect. The risks are different. All must respect the material risks taken by the other.

Each must try and enter into the mind of the other in order to understand that transgressions must be proportionate and intelligent. This is not the imagined empathy of new age loons for trees and rocks but a really existing empathy between persons. And transgress against trangression if you must ...

Parsons & Freedom

Some astute observers of my last posting noted the influence of Jack Parsons, who died in a laboratory accident in 1952. Parsons managed to capture a particularly American libertarian revolt against the authoritarian mind-set, one that looks prescient today not for its expected fulfilment but as a necessity in resisting the sirens of a revived obscurantism.

Given an American propensity to see everything in sub-religious terms, Parsons embedded himself in the world of the charlatan-genius Aleister Crowley and his simple insights have got somewhat lost in his character of Belarion and in the equally unhelpful obfuscations of Thelema.

The point is that, just as Marxism is a Christian heresy, so Thelema is dependent on its history of revolt against tradition. Just as Marxism is an intellectual half-way house to ease the transition of slaves to liberty within left-wing politics, so is Thelema within the counter-culture.

But both Marxism and Thelema, if not transcended, reproduce so much of their traditional background (including Crowley's now-ridiculous sub-Swinburnian rhetoric) that, in their mature form, far from liberating, they are in danger of become intensifications of the very authority from which they seek to rebel. Marxism came to prove the point in bureaucratic and brutal spades.

I have decided to be more heretical still and to regard a text as no longer a revelation unless it is transformed for each person and generation into something that could not possibly be understood by its original writers because 'things change'. A great deal of our contemporary problems arise from texts that survive long after their original purpose has been superceded - the Bible, the American Constitution, the Communist Manifesto.

Such texts must be gutted, reinvented, used as tools, even deliberately buried as no longer useful but never worshipped. Intellectuals who parse and refer to texts become the enemies of a humanity that grows in its moment of action and learns only from its own actions, and not from analysing past words from the dead as if they were anything but tools.

What I have done here is interpret Parson's 1950 Preface to his 1946 Libertarian Manifesto, Freedom is Two-Edged Sword. The document is naturally about conditions that applied at the time of writing but surprisingly little has changed since then - indeed, the situation may have much worsened. He writes of McCarthyism as we observe the shenanigans surrounding control of the internet and ourselves by a different form of the same bureaucratic mechanism.

He writes of the American State acting in an arbitrary way, using the 'excuse of emergency'': we have seen, over the first decade of this century, the 9/11 assault being used to justify executive powers of tyrannical potential, with gross injustices perpetrated against persons.

Science is 'scared', he notes, locked into a 'security' agenda. To his credit, he sees the US' deals against communism with corrupt dictatorships to be as malign as the Communist seizure of Eastern Europe.

Perhaps the only area of improvement since his day is that 'burlesque' State intervention in private morals seems to have ended - but we should not be complacent. Even today, in East London, a malign alliance of post-marxist progressives and faith-based groups seek to dictate the private pleasures of some to meet their ideological ends.

Authoritarian loons are still lurking in the undergrowth as they did in the 1950s when communists and parsons combined to censor comics. Since the progressive 'radical centre' has left us with a society that is unmanageable through the loss of 'auctoritas', the instinct of progressives seems to be to rediscover 'morality', especially sexual morality.

This is where Parsons has something to say because he, perhaps acting as a vector for the German revolution in psycho-sexuality that got crushed at home by that most evil of radical progressivisms, national socialism, is aware of the link between sexual and political freedom.

The free person who is open in his or her desires without harming another poses a threat to the structures of convention, conformity and control that are necessary for authoritarian cultures to thrive. Freedom in private life has a tendency to leach out into social, cultural, political and economic freedom ... and we can't have that, can we?

The Vatican's manipulations until very recently to control information concerning child abuse by its own members and the cover up in 2010 of security consultants offering young children to Afghan cops (as exposed by the incomparable Wikileaks) represent the very closest link possible between the banality of corporatist evil, war and sexuality.

Parsons writes of 'inertia and acquiescence'. We are less surprised by this today because scientific experiment around and since his time has shown us some grim truths about our species. We are obedient by default, we are frightened by our condition, we are exhausted by the inputs hurtled into our minds by a complex social reality.

We are also prey to manipulation so that certain social wolves have learned how to make a science of this manipulation to drive us to consume ourselves, to vote like zombies (though that tutelage is ending in cynicism), to feed on others souls like vampires ... we are, more than we think, the undead.

Raising awareness is thus not about more drugs to deaden the pain but about education and criticism of what is presented before us as 'normal', 'right', 'appropriate' ... we learn through bitter struggle. Above all, consciousness is Socratic, a questioning of everything, including our questioning.

The attempt of 'progressives' to take away much of that struggle and then replace it with infantilising control, exercised coldly and 'professionally' without compassion, removes our chances of becoming truly human at source. Thus, again, the sheer banality of evil.

Parsons writes: "The little that is worthwhile in our civilization and culture is made possible by the few who are capable of creative thinking and independent action, grudgingly assisted by the rest."

This strikes the contemporary mind as elitist in the worst sense but he is right because he is merely describing current conditions in which the few who 'think' have to rely on chance effects for the success of their contributions to the human condition.

They have to be lucky in where they are born, what happens to their families, what school they go to, who they know who can help them on their way and who their emotions direct them to as life partners. The winners believe in their own talent, of course, but the matter is likely to be one of chance.

No wonder the vast mass of humanity, most of which is too hungry and frightened to think of anything else than their next meal or, in the West, not losing their position, are brow-beaten into sheep-like states by those who have been born in the right place, to the right people, in order to manage and control to their own profit.

It may take 3,000 years for the most prosperous quintile of humanity to become men and women rather than ruminants and 30,000 for the 6-8bn persons who can inhabit our planet to attain the same position as a matter of course, but the work starts now as a revolutionary process of destroying the structures of authority held by the few over the many.

The release of talent held down in small American and English towns today could transform our culture and our economy. It is no accident that public school boys in England have kicked away the ladder from the clever poor and middling sort and forced them into a situation where they can only progress by becoming indebted to their masters. Tuition fees are a crime for which the Liberal Democrats have been justly hammered.

This is the instinctive strategy of wolves - to build a class of dependent scribes to manage and manipulate their own families and towns, to instil rule through an internalised fear of consequences. And what should have been an out-and-out class war to stop our best and brightest children becoming kapos never materialises because our minds have long since been enslaved. There is no energy or understanding left in our minds for the liberation of our bodies.

Parson writes: "When the majority of men surrender their freedom, barbarism is near but when the creative minority surrender it, the Dark Age has arrived." And this is where things are getting worse. The soi-disant intellectuals, academics, the journalists, the 'writers' - these are the ones who have become so integrated into the 'progressive' model of social engineering from above, so beholden to the idea that liberal values can be imposed on populations here and worldwide, that they have given up the ghost on raw liberty entirely.

Or at least they have negotiated sufficient liberty for themselves at the cost of liberty for others - rather like the priest who sits at the lord's table, below his chamberlain but above his peasants. Why? Because these classes think of us, the people, as a mob, they despise us, we are there to be 'informed' and manipulated, our taxes removed for a 'greater cause' (their own employment usually).

These activists and intellectuals are complicit in our enslavement. They are embedded in our State, our media, our political parties and, most tragically of all, in the 'progressive' wing of the economic structure, where they replace wealth creation through innovation with wealth preservation through regulation.

The only criticism I would have of Parsons in this introduction is that he writes that: "The golden voice of social security, of socialized "this" and socialized "that", with its attendant confiscatory taxation and intrusion on individual liberty, is everywhere raised and everywhere heeded" as if this was necessarily negative.

This is a common American blind spot that cannot see that no man is free while he is hungry or without shelter or fearful of the future. The redistributive nature of taxation (in a world of growing wealth for the few as the majority are quietly pauperised) and a measured approach to restrain the excesses of the psychopath strike me as necessary. There is no liberty without redistribution.

The issue here is 'how' to do so without creating a cure worse than the disease - the bureaucratic progressive state, controlled by corporate, NGO and activist lobbies who intensify their interference in our lives in proportion to their frustration at their own failures. There is no redistribution - the cash goes from us to them in what must be one of the most fraudulent money-laundering operations in history.

Parsons is thus right to be suspicious but he is wrong that absolute liberty can govern society - such absolute libertarianism is a mere charter for wolves to prey on the sheep. It is bureaucratism and corporatism, not redistribution, welfare and care for the vulnerable, that need to be fought. The problem is that the people's state is too weak, not too strong ... too weak to counter fascist, federalist and Bolshevik bureaucratism from within.

He is blunt and he is truthful in his conclusion: " ... I was never so naive as to believe that freedom in any full sense of the word is possible for more than a few. But I have believed and do still hold that these few, by self-sacrifice, wisdom, courage and continuous effort, can achieve and maintain a free world."

What he is suggesting is something akin to an old value of 'service' - that the free should struggle to remain free in order to struggle for the freedom of others directly and without the intermediation of bureaucrats and intellectuals. I, on the other hand, still believe that all men could be free in the full sense of the world even if it might take that 30,000 years of effort.

This is not the spurious business of trying to free middle class intellectuals in developing countries (which is simply a sop to the kapo class in our own midst) but of freeing our own people and showing other countries that freedom works and that peoples can free themselves through a struggle that is appropriate for their own condition, on an effective economic base that leaves no man, woman or child behind.

We highlight elite politicians in one country and democracy dissidents in another simply to destabilise barriers to free market ideology (which is little more than opening up new lands to their new corporatism). A collusive intelligentsia skulks, negatively accepting every possible lie and misrepresentation that allows them to take the taxpayers' ignorant shilling. It is necessary for them to believe that they are the good guys but they are merely the rotting flesh on a decaying corpse.

Parsons' message was not just to America (though that is his focus). It is to the world. He is prescient, almost socialist in the libertarian democratic sense rather than the sickly progressive sense:

" The soul of the slums looks out of the eyes of Wall Street and the fate of a Chinese coolie determines the destiny of America. We cannot suppress our brother's liberty without suppressing our own and we cannot murder our brothers without murdering ourselves. We stand together as men for human freedom and human dignity or we will fall together, as animals, back into the jungle."

He concludes his Preface: "I need not add that freedom is dangerous -- but it is hardly possible that we are all cowards."