Intellectual Integrity and Dealing with Russia

The hysteria surrounding events in Salisbury - the attempted murder of two Russians and the collateral near manslaughter of a policeman, using a deadly nerve agent - reached epidemic proportions last weekend. What we knew for certain was that three people were close to death at one time (two still critical at the time of writing), that one of them was connected to the murky world of post-Cold War intelligence and that a tool not available to the ordinary murderer - not the mere deadly cyanide of an Agatha Christie novel - had been used.

There is no reason to cast aspersions on character of the main victim. As we will see, we simply do not know very much at all. In fact, as of today, he is not dead (and we hope he recovers) but critically ill alongside his daughter and this alone makes the Prime Minister's immediate shooting from the hip to point the finger at the Kremlin a little odd. Critically ill not only does not mean dead but it means the possibility of sufficient recovery to be able to give evidence against perpetrators - so why not wait a little longer?

It was, of course, reasonable to believe that it was highly likely (though not certain) that Russians were involved as perpetrators as much as victims but it was perhaps an enormous step too far to say with such certainty - as the Prime Minister and her Government did - that it was 'highly likely' that the Russian Government, the Kremlin no less, ordered the 'hit'. It was even more challenging for our Foreign Secretary to claim that President Putin was 'overwhelmingly likely' to have done so personally. What was the evidence for this? In the end, the Government was asking us to trust it and that too is very challenging as Jeremy Corbyn implied.

Early polling followed the usual trajectory in these cases (much like Iraq). Things started with a surge of support for the Government on limited information and instinctive trust for authority. Then the doubts started to set in. Lack of data raised awareness of the implications, the partisan agenda and the lack of a solid intellectual basis for the extravagance of the claims. People started to remember other cases where they were led down the garden path. This questioning started at the margins and then developed quickly amongst the more intelligent members of the establishment, those who place intellectual integrity ahead of tribal solidarity and who care about the evidential basis for allegations. 

The circle of questioning may expand but the mass tends to accept authority until it becomes clear that a policy is costly, ill-thought out and counter-productive. Eventually people in general may lose interest but the circle of criticism expands until some f**k-up or new data flips the population over to the other side of the game. Why go through this cycle of belief and distrust when a little delay might bring more certainty. This is what I am interested in here.

In this case, around a third of the population soon became thoroughly cynical about the Government's claims or were prepared to back Corbyn and his doubts - or simply had sufficient knowledge or intellectual integrity to ask their own questions. All that is sufficient to block any seriously radical act being contemplated by the Government - which helps to explain the rather weak response to such a 'highly likely' event: a few diplomats get thrown out which is matched by an exact number of ours thrown out by the Russians ... and then nothing! Perhaps as the evidence comes in we will see more considered actions but the whole thing looks like a hissy-fit instead of mature policy-making.

Does 'Highly Likely' Really Mean "We Don't Know?"

The 'highly likely' claim of Prime Minister seems to have been based on little more than that the nerve agent allegedly originated in Russia and not yet on direct evidence that the Russian Government was behind the crime. Again, why not wait a little for the recovery of the victims. The assumption is that a) the nerve agent could not be reproduced elsewhere and b) that the Russian Government is in total control of any stockpile. Sloppy thinking here. It was, of course, reported reasonably enough that "British officials had identified the substance as being part of the Novichok group of nerve agents which were developed by the Soviet military during the 1970s and 1980s"

But think about this for a moment. This is very old stockpile and 'part of'' suggests 'reproducibility' rather than a decisive identification with one single known agent that can be traced to a single known source. The criminals (for that is what they are, whether State-directed or not) have not used state of the art material. The assassination was clearly incompetent and not entirely professional. There are other agents for assassination tools to hand than left-over Soviet era nerve agent. 

If it is old Soviet stock pile, we know that a lot of such material fell into some dubious hands in the early 1990s before some rough sort of order was restored, that stock piles might have been in territory now inhabited by other States and that the early 1990s saw a Russia where everything had a price and where such material might be regarded as somebody's pension. Russian sources themselves say reasonably enough that if they want to kill someone, they have means more effective than this. Not a nice thought but plausible enough.

May would have done much better to say to the Russians that the evidence suggests that the Russian Government needs to explain how an old stockpiled Soviet nerve agent has been let loose on the world and then request British police access to Russian resources to uncover and bring to justice the perpetrators. As we say, it might have done better as well to give some time for the two main victims to recover or have a full murder investigation on their hands. But, no, it had to be confrontational and unsubtle in a relationship with a sensitive nuclear power where a final quarrel might result in the immolation of millions on both sides. .

It is certainly possible that a villainous Putin knew of and countenanced such an act even though it looks distinctly amateurish in conception. Yet this investigation had scarcely got under way before the accusations were made. Although the evidence was not available to make any claim stick in public (except on the basis of 'trust me'), by asserting Russian complicity with ultimatums and finger-pointing all possible attempts at dialogue to hear what the Russians had to say and gather further evidence was lost. Surely a more mature approach would have been to request Russian co-operation in the investigation and make your accusations when all avenues had been exhausted.

Needless to say, "Russia’s foreign ministry hit back immediately, saying May’s comments were a“circus show” and part of a political information campaign against Russia." Well, they were, regrettably probably right. The US had to posture in turn so that we then had three sets of idiots posturing at the expense of global peace. NATO had to jump in, of course, in any case nobody noticed it. The Europeans reluctantly complied with the demands of Western solidarity in a rather good statement that ambiguously took 'extremely seriously' the UK Government's intelligence assessment. I think we take it 'extremely seriously' too. 

Perhaps we are truly ruled by cynics, as are the Americans, Europeans and Russians. The Russians could just as easily have said that they were horrified by the incident, were disturbed at the presence of the nerve agent and would offer joint facilities to establish who was responsible and bring them to justice. They are no more to be trusted than the West but this does not mean they are guilty - yet!

What Is Going On?

This is really about nation states saying to their own peoples - 'trust me, I am your ruler" - and, of course, in all these countries there will be people, naive people, who take things on trust and assertion just as there will be conspiracy loons who decide that it was all down to the Jews. 

On Monday, May said the latest poisoning [actually the poisoning of Litvinenko is not proven as a state-sanctioned act either although the Russian Government appears to have done little to permit proper investigation and is also somewhere on the 'possible through highly likely' continuum] took place“against a backdrop of a well-established pattern of Russian state aggression”.

The attempted murder of a rogue agent in an English country town is suddenly to be linked not even to some mindless bit of institutional revenge against a man of limited or no importance but to some grand strategy of Russian expansion (never mind that it is NATO and the EU that have expanded continuously against the Russia since the fall of the Soviet Empire). 

These nasty little attempted murders by persons unknown soon became expanded into a grand narrative involving Syria and chemical weapons, Crimea and alleged human rights violations in Russia itself and very quickly too! This seemed to be about strengthening NATO and screwing over the idea of a European Army as much as it was about saving the good burghers of Salisbury from mass death by poisoning.

What was worth listening to carefully was the carefully constructed narrative of the expert being wheeled on to the BBC who has a double-barrelled name and a military style in leisure wear. It was flawed intellectually from beginning to end, based on not asking questions but telling a story and it ended with ... chemical weapons in Syria and Russia as a potential existential threat. 

Chemical Weapons

The fair point of the Government was that this was the first use of a nerve agent on the soil of Western democracy since the 1970s and that in itself is deadly serious, especially in the context of the threat of terrorism and the probable return of Islamist warriors from a country, Syria, where chemical weapons are part of the stockpiles of many villains.  

Yet this was not stated so clearly at first - all eyes were directed at Russia which is actually aiding the anti-Islamist forces and one cannot but believe that the storm was as much directed at warning the Russian-backed Syrian Government not to use all possible means to end its vicious civil war as it was to draw attention to the weaponry itself. 

Perhaps Russia is being warned that a terrorist act using chemical weapons in the UK will somehow be linked with them in the public mind so they had better police things at their end - who knows what goes on in the mind of Government strategists? 

Perhaps this is reasonable but, if so, it would tell us something about just how out-of-control our Government may be in handling the dire consequences of its own dabblings in the region under Prime Minister Blair. A debate on this would not be welcome. 

Perhaps horror at chemical weapons use becomes the 'casus belli' for getting Parliamentary approval for deeper British operations in Syria to please President Trump's Pentagon where enough Blairites are likely to back the Government against thinking High Tories to deliver yet another damnable intervention that leads nowhere but back to our small towns and cities.

But let us not go down the rabbit hole of political conspiracy theory ...

Behind The Grand Narrative

 

Behind any 'grand narrative', more short term prosaic concerns can be discerned. The amount of political and police resource thrown at the 'solving' of these attempted murders looked ridiculous when compared to the inaction of media, political class and police in dealing with the equally and most possibly more heinous crimes of Asian grooming gangs in towns like Telford. 

Yes, this needed to be investigated and with full resources because of the chemical weapons aspect but troops on the streets and irate speeches by leading politicians were not to be found in the case of the Asian grooming gangs and urban organised crime which are probably far more of a threat to most ordinary Britons even than 'terrorism'. But it is terrorist acts that result in the fall of Governments, not the sustained rape of vulnerable young women.

This was the attempted murder of one of their own under state protection - although this level of concern clearly did not apply to the poor girls allegedly under state protection in the care homes of the North! The State chooses what to care about and its priorities remains the same as it did in the days of Edward III -  the expansion of the Realm and the retention of power rather than the people within that Realm and their day-to-day welfare. It was why we chose to invest in nuclear weapons rather than national resilience in the 1950s and nothing has changed.

Regardless of 'who actually did it' (I say again that it remains possible that this was an act ordered by the Kremlin so don't accuse me of not recognising that possibility) , the exploitation of the incident to build a cohesive NATO narrative, among a population quietly questioning why we bother with such things as Trident in an age of austerity, is the most striking aspect of this 'spin'. 

This was a play, We were the audience, The actors were in place. All that was needed was the willing suspension of disbelief.  But something was very wrong with this story. As someone in the 'narrative game' I could see the joins and the leaps and tropes because that is my trade even if most people could not.  The sheer desperation of it all suggested a very frightened and insecure elite - frightened of things other than a nerve agent in Salisbury.

Of course, we all knew what was going on - it was political. It was a chance for the Prime Minister to play a card, well used as a technique since the Zinoviev Letter, to bind her own Party together against common enemies, distract the population from a Brexit which was reaching its rather embarrassing point of final sell-out negotiations and dish the Leader of the Opposition by associating him with a dimly recalled 'Red Menace' simply because he asked some pertinent questions about the basis for the Prime Minister's claims. 

The Deeper Level

Yet, at a deeper level, another agenda was in play. There is a brutal struggle going on for control of the security of Europe - that is, which system will stand against invaders from the East or the South? Will it be the Anglo-Saxon broad-based NATO or a Franco-German European Army that might threaten the UK one day more than it may threaten Moscow? Security is the Prime Minister's personal obsession. Defence of the Realm is certainly far more important than the Welfare of the People to a Tory tied to the interest of the Crown.

The targeting of Russia as villain was a golden opportunity to bind the tabloids and Parliament, which both purport to represent the people, around a forward defence of NATO's existential justification for itself - the demonic Russian East.

So, what we had here was a whole concatenation of interests and fears - the Russian bear, loss of power, terrorism in a Syrian context, the US alliance, Brexit and so much more - creating a general need to let rip and fix all attention on this one event in one place at one time and direct attention away from the Government and (bluntly) its lack of intelligence on the threat and towards an enemy and a threat, Russia, that could be easily understood by the editors and country Tories.

But what was the truth of the matter? What is actually likely, as opposed to what is politically convenient to be regarded as 'highly likely' regardless of the evidence actually presented to the people, was not under discussion. 

For, be in no doubt, this was a crime on British soil and a crime, moreover, that appears to have offered some threat to other ordinary citizens and which seems more than coincidental with a number of other killings of prominent Russians whose connections were somewhat rum to say the least (or at least compared to the average British subject to the Crown). The matter certainly deserved serious investigation alongside such crimes as those in Telford and Rotherham regardless even of the nerve agent aspects of the case. The police seem to be making little progress in cases to date and need a breakthrough.

But an analysis that pointed to the chaotic state of post-Soviet Russian politics was far less convenient than one that directed the public to the contribution of the West to that chaotic state or which might point to other actors than the Kremlin itself being responsible for crimes because of that state of chaos. A simple story was required. May referred dismissively to Russia being a mafia state rather than as a state in formation out of anarchic conditions created by the West with some deliberation a quarter of a century ago (I was there and I saw it).

The Chaotics of Russia

The bottom line here is that, while jumping to conclusions derived from ignorance, most of the media simply do not understand the chaotics of Russian governance. There is a history to this and journalists are not good at history. 

History is a serious problem for journalists. It requires them to drop simple narratives (their beloved half-truths they call 'stories') and deal with the real world of complex relationships between real facts while analysing the gaps in the record from experience. Journalism is not truth, it is literature. The news is written by people who have never done a deal, run a campaign or made a difficult executive decision. The political class' skill lies in manipulating data to provide the narratives (or 'stories) to these inexperienced people that can serve their purposes.

Yes, it is possible that Putin personally ordered an assassination but very unlikely. The fate of a minor traitor really is not top of mind for him in the middle of an election campaign. running a country of vast extent with a population nearly three times that of the UK which is still coping with the economic fall-out of the collapse of its empire and dealing with far more important issues such as the dispute with Ukraine, the war in Syria, Islamic terrorism, relations with President Trump, national defence and an economy which is far from out of the query basket. 

Our friend Valery Morozov was almost certainly correct on Channel 4 News (and this was accepted by the spokesperson for the chemical weapons establishment in that same segment) that Putin really has no interest in a minor intelligence figure from the past.

Yes, it is certainly possible that an arm of the Russian security apparat is engaged in a political war of its own involving violence. In such a case Putin can be blamed for not being in control of his own system and May may be right to condemn this - when she knows that this is so and on those terms rather than Boris' assertion of personal culpability.

This is more likely and would be justifiable cause for complaint but then the complaint should be cast in just those terms. We should be able to show Russian state complicity and Kremlin failure to control its own security operations and demand with evidence that Putin explain himself (although, I suppose, we might have to explain extraordinary rendition and drone murders on our side but let that pass). This might be more effective in embarrassing Russia's Great Leader than blind assertions for the camera.

What Is More Likely?

But it is still more likely that this is a factional struggle between oligarchical elements linked to the security apparat historically and over which the Government has no formal control in which our main victim got caught up. If so, we should perhaps be co-operating with the higher levels of the Russian State to bring these elements to book and end their links and access to the security state instead of throwing out accusations and trying to destabilise the country by backing people like Navalny. 

As Putin himself drew attention, in the cut sections of a recent NBC American TV interview (the fact of the cuts is more interesting here than what Putin said because he has said this before), while the West whines about alleged Russian villainy in trying to manipulate public opinion this was a game long ago started in the West - against not only in Russia but against half the world. 

To have intellectual integrity in making claims against someone, one should not be engaged in the similar acts oneself. There is no evidence, of course, that the West is bumping off people in Russia but it had been kidnapping or bumping off people it disapproves of elsewhere without due process for quite some time. It is in alliance with countries that have a very weak sense of due process and which execute people for dissident thoughts so that export order books may be filled.

Her Majesty's Government has not yet provided the smoking gun that shows the Russian Government to have been guilty of these murders directly or through negligence. It is acquiring 'opinions' from allies. For that reason, we should remain cautious until that evidence is produced and is more than, say, the surmise of a Coroners' Court based on evidence provided by state-directed intelligence agencies behind closed doors or an analysis of intelligence agents who may know the square root of f**k-all about the actual workings of the higher levels of the Russian state security system. 

The Childishness of the Response

Forget Iraq, think back to the complete ignorance of Soviet reality right up to the Fall of the Soviet Union now evidenced by post-Soviet academic researchers and the startling ignorance of Arab Islamism and its funding that caused so much embarrassment to American intelligence agencies in the wake of 9/11. There is no reason to think that anything has really changed since then. In general, we know very little about the minds of our enemies.'Highly likely' really should have been downgraded to 'possible' and taken seriously as 'possible'.

We are, in the UK, behaving a little like Austria-Hungary in July 1914 treating Russia like Serbia - making ultimatums that no sovereign Government can reasonably accept (though this may not be so clear to a Government that finds it so ridiculously difficult to recovery its own sovereignty from its nearer Empire, the European Union).

Despite the tabloids, the Tories won't be able to carry the whole country with it for long if the squabble ever turned into something more than a tit-for-tat diplomat expulsion. War is not on the agenda if economic sanctions are relatively trivial. A surge of support for Prime Minister has already begun to drift away as people start to question the basis for the claims and share qualms about throwing around mud on a surmise. 

The Russian State are frankly thumbing their noses at the UK with good reason. They are a proud sovereign people faced with no more than allegations and political warfare, not with investigative querying and requests for collaboration to find out the truth. Prime Minister May has shot herself in the foot for mere short term propaganda advantage.

Childishly, the Russian Foreign Minister has now been banned from the UK - as if he f**king cared. And that is an insult without anything more than a 'highly likely' behind it. The UK refuses to pass over the evidence for study against international treaty. Why? What is it afraid of? Should it not have asked the Russian Foreign Minister to come to London to discuss and resolve the situation.

Other Possibilities

This all looks like dodgy politics rather than a sincere investigation. The British police, left to their own devices, are generally rather good at this sort of thing (Telford, Hillsborough and Orgreave notwithstanding ... oops, have I sown a doubt? I apologise). But let us move on from the Russian Government and look at other possibilities without descending into conspiracy theory. 

It is possible that the Russian security apparat's only role is that a rogue element has sold a nerve agent under the counter to organised crime or to oligarchs (some of whom are often no better than organised crime evenwhen they are favoured sons of Western security) in which case, again, we should be co-operating with Russia to find the villains and not cutting off investigatory collaboration. 

It is, of course, possible that the nerve agent has been constructed in a Western or ex-Soviet Republican lab and then used for black ops purposes for whatever motive but possibly one related to destroying any possible Anglo-Russian or US-Russian rapprochement. 

This cannot just be ruled out of court as conspiracy theory, given the sociopathic nature of the darker side of the security company - after all, security operations attract types like Angleton and Beria as jam attracts wasps. 

This dark side agenda would fit with other narratives related to Syria and Iraq. We have discussed this already, Chemical weapons in Syria somewhat unaccountably popped up early in public intelligence briefings that appeared on camera within hours of the incident. It is always instructive to note carefully what is said in the first 24 hours by 'justification agents' in any political warfare operation because this is the raw preferred narrative before the political experts get to adjust the message away from the intelligence bods. 

  

The Least Likely Possibilities

It is certainly unlikely but the rogue element could come from our own security apparat or, more precisely, that we have a rogue ideologue or criminal coming out of Porton Down which just happens to be around the corner from Salisbury. Elements in our own security apparat have shown rogue status in the past but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

Rogue agents on any side with dark revenge, personal or ideological or political motivations are another possibility. This should be considered by any policeman worth his salt but how inconvenient might this be if proved to be true and how likely might it be that it would be covered up? I leave you to your own level of trust of our politicians, our own security apparat and our own police forces. The track record is not great.

As we go through the likelihoods, we can say with reasonable confidence that it is highly unlikely that the British Government did this itself (even our most sociopathic politicians are not quite that stupid and would not get it past their own civil service). 

The least likely is suicide, of course. But the point here is that one should not jump to conclusions and that include either that Putin personally ordered the acts or that a rogue Western cell decided to trigger anti-Russian sentiment out of frustration at any one of a number of policies - Ukraine, Syria, defence spending, threats to NATO, risks to Trident . 

Unfortunately the 'evidence' has now become so politicised that nothing can be trusted any more than it could be in the Syrian or Iraqi chemical weapons cases. The Prime Minister's rapid highly politicised jump to judgement has ensured that!

 Criticising 'Highly Likely'

The truth is that all security services are mostly making it up as they go along on weak intelligence. Did any of you actually read that embarrassingly trite and poorly evidenced Trump dossier which was so embarrassing and yet came from someone who had been be a leading past MI6 analyst!? Mentioning Iraqi WMD at this point would simply be a low blow so I won't. 

'Highly likely' is just not good enough when there are so many alternative analytical possibilities and before the investigation has got very far at all. Add to this the convenience for the battered Government in frightening the population into traditional Tory patriotism and distracting it from Brexit and you see a process riddled with its own lack of intellectual integrity.

The Government is taking an uneducated population for a ride and adopting the easy way out rather than a measured and sensible review of the evidence and investigation before coming to a conclusion.

The worst of it is that, thanks to the political play by a cynical Government, if Putin is guilty and it appears to be proven, one third of the population will be minded not to believe it on the precedent of the Iraqi WMD and the untrustworthiness of our own side. The country will then be more divided than ever and the relationship between a left-wing Labour Government and the security services will be one of de facto political warfare - a very dangerous situation since no one can win that struggle. 

And if evidence emerges (and some interesting evidence is emerging) that things may be a little more complicated than we are led to believe, a third of the country will stick with their ignorant cod Cold War attitudes regardless while the bulk of the population will be confirmed in their distrust of their rulers when what we badly need is a restoration of that trust. 

So Cui Bono?

Never has trust in Government been more needed and yet this weak administration once again risks throwing what trust exists away for short term advantage. The fish rots from his head and that is now what is happening to the West. But let us close by summarising, in no particular order, the 'cui bono' candidates (since it is hard to see what Putin himself gains from such an act):-

1. Operations involved in organised crime where revenge or dark dealings around massive funds at stake in oligarchal political warfare drive actions; 
2. Rogue members of the Russian security apparat seeking revenge without concern or understanding for Russia's higher level national interest;
3. Cold War Western security apparat operatives in the US and Europe seeking to damage Western-Russian relations (Ukraine is a sub-set of this category but another sub-set would be Western strategists seeking to bind Europe into NATO rather than the European Army or seek rapprochement with Russia and a further sub-set is those political warfare operatives seeking to undermine Trump's general move towards rapprochement); 
4. The Conservative government (or more accurately the Conservative-led security state) seeking to mobilise public opinion in a 'patriotic' stance against the Left and to distract attention from Brexit (as well as ensure control over NATO-led European strategic direction); and
5. Private revenge or insanity (whether from a rogue security operative from any apparat or within the Russian community in London).

In other words, if 'cui bono' alone is taken into account and assuming (except for e)) rational actors, there are at least four sets of actor who can reasonably be considered as more likely to be culpable than the Kremlin itself represented personally by Putin and Lavrov. And this applies equally to the murder of Litvinenko insofar as a) b) and c) and not d) and only at a stretch e) might also apply in that case and in the Berezhovsky cases. 

For balance, I would add that if it is true that the Russian security apparat is itself fully criminalised and intent on revenge or implicated in organised crime (and this has some plausibility) then, while it is less plausible perhaps that Putin was directly and personally involved in the crime, then he is responsible simply as Head of State and the wheel turns back somewhat in the direction of Prime Minister May's assessment. We simply need more evidence rather than prejudiced surmise.

The truth is we do not know and we should admit we do not know, instead of throwing around accusations and relying on prejudice and rumour, at least until the investigation has ended. The British security apparat is itself not to be wholly trusted any more than the Russian and we should never forget that. 

Last Thoughts

To be clear, just because it is 'ours' does not mean that our government's intelligence and analyses are sound or that it is not driven by ideology or not manipulable by political considerations. If there is one thing that we have learned in recent history, it is the truth of that assessment. Anything else would mean little more than a tribal belief that Arsenal must always be in the right in any penalty against Spurs. Anything else would be naive.

It is hard to see how or why such an obscure event as the murder of a treacherous agent might be more useful than some dramatic act in Syria or Ukraine if it was needed to get Putin through the last few days before the vote. Perhaps Boris has the smoking gun - in which case, we must accept it if it is the gun and it is smoking but accusations should have come after the smoking gun had appeared and not before. 

Although the 'mass' appears at first sight to have accepted this nonsense at face value, you can tell that doubts are creeping in already. The Twitter feeds were far more doubtful than the tabloids and that doubt began to grow after a surge of early Cold War tweets that all looked suspiciously as if they were cued to persuade us. 

Both the Spectator and Peter Hitchens then showed that a substantial 'High Tory' element thought Jeremy Corbyn got it right in asking some awkward questions - it takes a lot for Tories to do that. He was right. That does not mean he is right on other things. But he was right to ask those questions. He was not saying and we are not saying that Putin is innocent but only that assertions are not proof.

The real reasons for the killing are probably obscure oligarchal struggles or revenge for past slights which may lead back to the Russian security apparat. However, the reason for its exploitation is largely about party political advantage in the UK and an attempt to dish the advocates of the European Army in favour of NATO. All this is set in an ideologically-driven High Tory and State neurosis about Russia that seems to go back to the days of Lord Palmerston.

It is all rather ridiculous - if only because it shows how defensive and anxious a weak British Government has become. So, let us now maintain an open mind, trust no one and wait on such facts as can be presented that are more than intelligence analysts' surmise and the arrival of something in our country from a stockpile over thirty years old. 

In the meantime, let us wish a swift recovery to all three victims of this heinous political act and be prepared for the possibility that it is proven or evidenced as highly likely, instead of asserted as highly likely, that the Kremlin ordered a crime on British soil and that this should result therefore in more serious sanctions than actually offered by the Prime Minister, regardless of the interests of big business and the City of London.

A Sense of Proportion - Nuclear War and Feeling Secure

As we struggle to find the money for the National Health Service and we squabble over what should or not be paid out to Brussels (nothing in my view), there is another world of money out there that has nothing to do with Wall Street or the City of London. To get a feel for this economy, we must switch to the United States for a while.

On 23 February 2008, a US B-2 bomber crashed on the runway shortly after take-off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The findings of the investigation stated that the B-2 crashed after "heavy, lashing rains" caused moisture to enter skin-flush air-data sensors. There were no munitions on board. With an estimated loss of US$1.4 billion, it was the most expensive crash in USAF history.

Yes, that's right - US$1.4bn sunk into one aircraft whose only function was to drop megatonnage on someone other than us. There are 20 B-2s in service with the United States Air Force (excluding the one written off) which plans to operate the aircraft until 2058, Each can deploy sixteen 2,400 lb (1,100 kg) B83 nuclear bombs.You can add up the sums deployed in any way you like but that is a lot of money, a lot of national infrastructure and a lot of healthcare and education costs.

With a maximum yield of 1.2 megatonnes of TNT (75 times the 16 kt yield of the atomic bomb "Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945), the B83 is the most powerful nuclear free-fall weapon in the United States arsenal. About 650 B83s were built, and the weapon remains in service as part of the United States "Enduring Stockpile".

The cost of each B83 bomb is hard to calculate because one would have to take into account research and development, a cost which is spread amongst several items of mass destruction. According to the [US] Union of Concerned Scientists (note we are only talking about the B83 delivery system (the B-2's B83's could be replaced with yet another bomb, the B1): "It cost some $80 billion to develop and build 21 of these planes, or $4 billion per B-2 bomber, and the current life extension program will cost $10 billion. Each can carry up to 16 bombs, so the total cost of each deployed bomb would be roughly $270 million, taking into account its share of the bomber."

Whether these calculations are accurate or not, 21 B-2s each with 16 B83s (that is 336 B83s) are all utterly useless except to devastate another part of humanity or to maintain a 'theory' of deterrence that may or may not have worked for the last seventy years. Of course, other potentially opposing nations have a similar capacity though nothing near as big but still the total sum is formidable, far more massive in the US than elsewhere in the world.

The US hasn't actually built a new bomb since 1992 (as of 2013) and is spending money only on refurbishments of weaponry so perhaps the investment has been made and we should accept the bad investments as something that comes from another age. But now the ramping up of anti-Chinese and anti-Russian feeling by opposing camps in the US and of the latter in the UK raises once again serious questions about what we spend our money and why.

I am not even going to try and estimate total costs when the B2 and the B83 are only a part of the whole and just one unloaded bomber can wipe out $1.4bn of national wealth because of a few faulty sensors. But, before British readers get too smug at this colossal waste while America's built infrastructure crumbles and its inner cities remain sink-pits and it cannot provide even a basic free national health service (let alone the free education that we British have now lost thanks to that vile abortion of claimed Leftism New Labour), the UCS noted in 2013 that "the DOD also is modifying Trident submarine-based missiles—which initially cost about $100 million each—to extend their lifetimes at a cost of about $140 million apiece."

Now, this is my point. Every one of these expenditures was undertaken because elected representatives approved them, often in a bipartisan way and with minimal opposition. There have, of course, been concerns about cost and not only amongst elected representatives. Intelligent military men have themselves often wondered whether this has been the best use of resources, 

And yet, in every case, these measures passed without serious opposition as to principle through Congress (or Parliament) whether the majority were liberal or conservative (or Labour or Tory). The arguments for national resilience and peace are thrust aside in favour of what amounts to a massive gamble on not having to become genocidal maniacs in what would be as likely as not to be a futile revenge attack at best and a war crime beyond the achievement of Adolf Hitler himself at worst.

Ultimately, this is not some sinister plot by a cabal of miltaristic illuminati but is a democratic decision that results directly from your and my vote. When we vote in our standard party preference, we vote in people who will sign on the nod, or with minimal questioning as to purpose, vast sums of money that cannot be spent on economic infrastructures or on social issues or just be given back to the people. We ensure that we are complicit in the use of this weaponry since deterrence only works if there is general agreement that we can use this stuff. We really cannot blame the so-called elite - collectively we the people maintain this system. It would not exist if we did not approve it by our personal votes.

Try looking up what one single B83 bomb could do to a city of civilian men, women and children and be saddened at the implications of that complicity (we do not consider, of course, the Russians or Chinese to be any less complicit except that the Chinese people do not get to vote in the people who would do this although they probably would if they could). We have a global system here but all countries claim a mandate from their people, directly through a vote or indirectly through a Party mechanism.

So, every voter (where there is a vote) must genuinely believe in their heart of hearts that their country is at threat to a sufficient degree that vast sums must be diverted from socio-economic development and/or private resources and that it is reasonable for that threat to be dealt with by being prepared to immolate tens of millions of other human beings in a forlorn gamble that the machinery of death will never be needed.

I am not sure if this is right or wrong. I only know that it is ridiculous. Perhaps it is true that, without WMD, America and Britain would be like Carthage before Rome. Perhaps, on that basis, the massive and otherwise wasteful expenditure is worth while as is the gamble that it will never be deployed - that being wasteful is part of the game since its use lies in its not being used like some weird metaphysical game fit for continental philosophers.

I don't care. What I am interested in is the institutionalisation of paranoia, the preparedness to spend such vast sums on extreme possible events (like the vast sums spent on anti-terrorism activity that still can't stop a nutter shooting up a school), the unthinking acceptance of this state of affairs by the entire political class and the apparent inability of the voting population to see the levels of cost and, yes, again, the paranoia (which can be manufactured if necessary as we are seeing in London as I write) involved in giving up many social benefits, economic advantages and even personal wealth for what amounts to the mass embracing of a psychological neurosis - existential anxiety about the 'other' - without ever bothering to get to know or understand or compromise with that 'other' in an alternative strategy of 'peaceful co-existence'.

Imagine a world where those sums had made America and the UK wealthier and more socially secure and both had retained only enough firepower to cause sufficient harm while offering us resilient countries that would fight in the streets for their liberty if necessary. Macmillan in 1957 made a decision for budgetary reasons to drop a strategy of resilience for deterrence and he was not malign or even stupid in doing so. It had its logic but it was the logic of Aquinas - the building of an entirely logical system on a few basic false assumptions shared by everyone without further thought. Reagan too made strategic deterrence a platform and it helped to get him elected - his voters liked this system and simply wanted more protection through the futile 'Star Wars' programme.

Perhaps this is what it is all about. As with air power more generally ensuring that there are no body bags amongst the aggressors but only vaporised remains of civilians below, so these expenditures are really protection money paid by 'our' civilians. The people pay over to the 'racketeers' (the Crown or the Federal Government) the funds and, in return, the racketeers 'protect' them, not so much from the enemy but from the costs and risks of having to face the enemy themselves or becoming resilient in adversity.

Maybe that is the secret. Maybe WMD expenditures are much more 'snowflake' than we thought they were. Maybe they exist so that voters can pass over the difficult business of defending something worth defending because they have a stake in it but where they might risk personal hardship, death or injury (in taking that particular gamble over the response to the intentions and strength of an enemy) and thereby they give responsibility for the throw of that dice to an elite that then develops a bit of an economic interest in keeping the system going.

If I am right, then perhaps the people are using democracy just to offset responsibility and thought. In the wisdom of crowds, they are getting what they want. But what do they want? Maybe they simply do not want to think about these things. Maybe they want to hire people to do their thinking for them and to take on responsibility for the acts that might be necessary to survive. They prefer those acts to be separate from themselves under conditions where they do not have to make any choices rather than make choices that are existential. Democratic humanity, under this thesis, is existentially cowardly but not irrational.

The gamble on letting this protection money (aka wasted money) be spent on a system detached from their daily lives and responsibilities might be likened to the money they spend on entertainment - a distraction, an avoidance, an evasion. From this perspective, the gamble on the economy slowly dying in the future and social care and security collapsing or being inadequate in old age is set against the gamble not of the Russians declaring war but on what might happen to themselves if they declare war. But why would they prefer mass immolation? Do they think the 'other' would immolate them 'just for fun'? Has Hitlerism created an idea of the other's intent to general extermination as if we were Carthage-in-the-making?

The mutual immolation somehow looks less dangerous to voters (because it is chosen internally to be unimaginable as much as there is trust in deterrence as game theory) than a resilience strategy when voter resilience is already being tested to the limit precisely by that lack of economic resource and social security in everyday life that might (if they but thought about it) be resolved with massive savings on WMD delivery systems. But something else may be going on here.

For democratic humanity, a simple immolation of the civilian men, women and children of the other side is infinitely preferable to facing them directly in battle. Perhaps they know that they are now flaccid and weak. Perhaps middle class Americans know that the Viet Cong drubbed them because the Viet Cong were not flaccid and weak. Air power then proved fruitless and probably will again. Sometimes I think the admiration for Israel is such a projection - by supporting a people that is resilient and not flaccid and weak, its supporters perhaps think that this makes them strong. Of course, it does not. This is the mentality of nations used to watching screens and not doing things.

The existence of air power allows the democratic human to feel as if he was in control, as if he could win at no cost to himself ... and it is that feeling of control and misplaced hope that has one central purpose - the alleviation of anxiety. In the end, these vast expenditures are, perhaps, a pharmaceutical, an anxiety-relieving drug, more than they are even a protection racket. People simply do not want to have to think about these things because these things make them anxious. A big abstract anxiety (global immolation) is much easier to cope with than the anxiety of taking responsibility in a resilience-driven society.

Still you vote these people in every time, you cowards. Thank you for that. I feel so much more secure now ... 

Should I Apologise For This Posting? Sex & Power in the Modern World

One of the weirder aspects of our current culture is the ritual abasement of alleged wrong-doers, usually in the form of a forced apology on the advice of 'PR consultants'. My interest relates to something Jordan Peterson has raised. I am not an enormous fan of his total vision which is, in my opinion, flawed in several respects - the stoicism, the concentration on judaeo-christian values, Jungian archetypes and an over-deterministic biologism create the very model of an ideology, a trait that he claims to abhor in others. Or am I unjust and that these traits are those of his followers who have managed to miss his point about ideology? Wherever his new-found popularity leads, he is a reasoned debater with a thoughtful stance on life and he undoubtedly has insights on gender relations which are 'controversial' but none the less on the right side of the game.

His thesis (which is most observable at the point where a new cultural hegemony emerges and displaces another) is that politics is an expression of personality traits. Because sexual difference results in the emphasis of different personality traits (so much, so scientific) in the genders, shifts in the power between genders mean that the personality traits associated with the rising gender began to be valued and then affect discourse and practice under the new order and at the expense of the falling gender.

The narrative of psychopathy (where psychopathy is culturally widened to include a lot of normal male behaviour that does no harm) being 'bad' and empathy (even where an excess of empathy can be as harmful as full-on sociopathy in terms of adequate social functioning) is just one signifier of a cultural change that can be traced to a recent shift of values from the falling masculine to the rising feminine. This has been happening with gathering pace over the last three decades or so, reaching its crescendo in aggressive reaction of now-hegemonic liberals to the insurgency of democratic populism.

All talk of Jungian archetypes here is so much displacement although it is a useful poetic tool for describing what is happening. For actual causes, we have to turn back to a brute materialism. The bottom line lies not only in that women are now voters conscious of being voters as women (though this is exaggerated in its effects) but in the far more important fact that most purchasing decisions for most consumer goods, especially repeat purchases, under late liberal capitalism, are made by women,  Women also take an important role in many male purchasing decisions. Male-dominated corporations have recognised this. They have realised that the huge increase in educated women allows them to tap into this economy more effectively and that single women are also very likely to throw their energies into their work as expression of meaning far more than most men for whom the work is likely to be 'just a job'.

New centres of power have emerged in the corporate sector for women - notably human resources and marketing - just at that point when a particular form of education has introduced an ideology of empowerment for women (feminism). Peterson himself points out in addition that men have withdrawn from the universities and media relative to women so that we can see how the high ground of culture, combined with the entry of women into politics, has created a new female cultural domination where the next stage is a demand for 'gender equality' - which really means a demand that educated middle class women dominate the institutions that hire them in such numbers.

These are just facts on the ground. Economic change has not only shifted political power increasingly towards women (even if this is not yet fully equalised) but it has shifted cultural power in such a way this cultural change is working at a faster pace than the political change that will follow. In general men are giving up on politics but also on culture, the universities and the media where culture is manufactured. The fact of democracy is their last bastion against the possibility of total manipulation by a new administrative elite made up of educated women and the male elements in the 'capitalist' and 'managerial' classes who understand the profit in this revolution or who simply go with the flow of history. The dislike of democracy in liberal circles lately is perhaps a recognition of democracy's 'last fortress status' against ideology.

It is as a result of all this that the personality traits associated with women are becoming culturally dominant. Peterson's concerns are not that these personality traits are not good (rather they are just facts on the ground that come with any increase in power for women) but that we are replacing one imbalanced cultural arrangement with another (male personality trait dominance with female personality trait dominance), that this is creating the potential for the same sort of violent tensions that the first imbalance did - and that this has triggered a populist revolt which also happens to appeal to many 'conservative' women.

For this is an important point, the educated middle class feminism of the new world is deeply presumptuous in its claim to represent all women much as many men are linked by interest and sentiment to the new world of empowered middle class women. This is not a line that separates one gender from another in reality but one that separates two types of personality trait with different expressions in men and women (and which inter-mix with many other traits and histories which ultimately result in all individuals being unique even if they insist on then recombining into tribes and ideologies).

These thoughts were initially triggered by an article in the most recent British Psychological Society's Digest, "Flowers, Apologies, Food or Sex? Men's and Women's Views on The Most Effective Ways To Make Up". This article has one line that tells us that there may be a connection between general female personality traits (though we must make the central point here that these are general traits that differ considerably between women and may be part of the personality type of many men as well) and the emergence of female cultural power in the West - "... women thought their partner apologising or crying would be more a more effective way for their partner to make up than did the men."

Now, observe what happens in a scandal today and then compare it with 50 years - the insistence on apologies and the showing of remorse. The male instinct is that when something is done that is wrong, then apologies and emotion are relatively irrelevant - what is necessary is change in actual behaviour and restitution or recompense with what the wronged person wants (usually sexual relations in the case of men apparently, and there is nothing wrong with that if it is just a desire and there is no question of anything other than consent).

The female instinct is to ignore all that and demand an emotional submission and a change in language (which is symbolic for an expected if unverifiable change in thought). Showing emotion while using submissive language is a near-guarantor that the change of heart is 'sincere'. What the man thinks is important to most women whereas what the woman thinks is less important than what she does to most men. One trait finds security in knowing other minds (which can tend to household totalitarianism) whereas the other trait finds security in 'obedience' and 'compliance'. Again, this is not necessarily reflective what women and men actually do or think but is only what 'gender norms' imply as personality traits become dominant or submissive in society.

If some women might find a sexual act to be a demeaning as a means of recompense, bluntly many men consider a forced apology to be equally demeaning. In both cases, if freely given out of love and respect, there is no issue but if forced out of an imbalance of power or some form of household act of terror (such as 'not speaking'), then there is broadly an equivalence of distaste for what is being forced on the 'loser'. Sexual coercion for women and psychological coercion for men are pretty equivalent in terms of their damage to personal autonomy. The wife-beater and the persistent nag are actually perfectly equivalent when one takes into account of the nature of the victim of the act. Our society tends to recognise the first as problematic (which it is) yet willfully ignore the second as equally problematic.

The female instinct is encapsulated in the Catholic confessional where absolution comes from a verbal formula and then a 'change of heart' yet public policy at the same period of male 'dominance' through the institution of clerical power in society was rarely interested in such things. The paradox of priestly male dominance is that this interlocutor with God is, in effect, a eunuch - cruelly one might say, like many urban liberal middle class males. 'Patriarchal culture' co-existed with 'matriarchal culture' (a fact conveniently forgotten by feminists) but was not formally ideological or totalitarian (although matriarchal culture could be totalitarian within the household as patriarchal culture could be within the court). Male culture just wanted material compensation and simple submission to superior power by dint of language and acts without emotion. The formal act of obeisance is not an apology but something else.

Male dominance strategy was more interested in brute power relations rather than (primarily) control of culture even if Power did control culture through the court. Instead of a celebrity apologising for an abusive act in order to placate female consumers of entertainment products and then be obliged to show emotional regret in order to continue to be able to work, the traditional  'male' response would be to bring that person to justice for a crime but ignore the act if it was not a crime. This latter stance is, of course, now unacceptable - a wrong act is now deemed wrong, whether a crime or not, in a return to a modern version of clerical moralism. Shame (and guilt) are policing methods that are embedded in the community because they have been imposed from outside by the agents of the dominant culture.

The community itself rarely polices these issues today. It has become a matter of public discourse through newspapers, broadcasters and social media. Since the funeral of Princess Diana and Blair's calculated use of emotion to appeal to feminine and media sentiment, emotional responses to events have been manufactured from above as weapons or tools in cultural warfare by ideologically-motivated groups. The vigils surrounding the death of Jo Cox, MP were a perfect example of such manipulation, closer to Goebbels' distasteful (even to Hitler) manipulation of the killing of Horst Wessel than to any reasoned consideration of what to do about rare cases of lone fascist fanatics.

Charlie Brooker's 'Black Mirror' series has several excellent satires on this culture of manipulation but he still looks at it from within his own class, blaming the lumpen mass for its reactions and weakness rather than investigating the ideological manipulation of emotion in a competition between factions within elite groups. All elite groups now engage in this use of emotion as communications tool or weapon and not just the cultural Left. The cultural Left is perhaps simply more adept at it because they have an ideological framework for it.

Ignoring a wrong is, of course, unforgivable (perfectly reasonably) for women where the structures of power have not created the means for 'bringing to justice'. This may be the core of the problem here. After all, many solutions to alleged female abuse would require a legal system that was so intrusive on normal male behaviour (in order to catch truly errant male conduct) that men would live under a regime similar to that of 'The Handmaid's Tale' but under female domination. What is required is a balance of interest between the genders that lets individuals flourish as they are and has rules on lack of consent and bullying but creates a grey air of private life where individuals are allowed to congregate with those that are like them without wider community intrusion. The new warrior liberalism is like the old conservative authoritarianism in that it constantly expands its territory to fill a vacuum, like any empire. It is, in this respect, culturally oppressive even as it raises issues that must be raised - especially regarding the ignorant behaviour of some men to some women.

Western society resolved this in the past through somewhat hypocritical 'codes' outside the law, using shame (or guilt) but these are no longer possible and in any case were oppressive towards those women who were not 'inside the code system' by choice or lack of resources. The Irish Catholic Church's treatment of women 'outside the codes' is a lesson in pure evil. We have not found the way forward yet but it probably lies in 'values paganism' re-instituting 'codes' that permit autonomy and free speech, rewards those who show respect to others in the context of an ideology of self respect and punishes all forms of coercion (ideally, including unlawful state coercion).

We are moving here towards wanting a culture of 'good manners' for private life within a framework of law that punishes severely evidenced wrong-doing (essentially any form of unlawful coercion of the individual). Needless to say, this must include tools for the gathering of evidence and strong and impartial law enforcement. The DPP's recent behaviour in relation to alleged male rape trials was a moral disgrace but women are right to want a debate on the boundaries that dictate the correct behaviour between men and women - a debate which, if undertaken openly and reasonably, might come up with some uncomfortable conclusions for both genders as to their conduct 'in the field' and the necessity for creating social rather than legal solutions to the problem of consent.

This strategic difference between a society in which either male or female personality traits shift from private life to public policy and dominate the whole is fascinating. The shift to female personality trait dominance explains our new cultural elite's determined drive for apologies and that industry of PR people who trot out the need to apologise (rather than make restitution and be subject to material containment) in order to 'salvage' reputation. The person who apologises then has to go into the wilderness and claw their way back if they can (without any real attempt at justice), perhaps on their knees in penance for crimes that may or may not have been evidenced. The new argument that the 'victim' must be believed throws out of the window not only certain standards of jurisprudence but disallows both malice and false recollection in good faith. And yet we all know that, just as some claims are false, other claims are true and cannot be proven so that a moral injustice has been done when nothing can be done.

Social change is thus not effected by a reasoned consideration of how to change laws and regulations to deal with moral injustice but by 'exemplars' - much as medieval Churchmen dealt in exemplars to guide their flock. Regulation and law try to follow, usually finding that things are a lot more complicated than the ideologists think. Alleged wrong-doers are judged not by judges in accordance with the law but by a sort of Salem-like community of social media and mainstream media witches who are uninterested in investigation of the actual truth of claims or with context. This is dark stuff.

'Justice' is offered as a form of communitarian assault on the errant individual but it is increasingly based not on cool and fair assessment of the equality of the genders in their rights to self discovery and self creation but, in fact, on one simple truth - female voters and consumers can dictate terms to the mostly male elites who run the productive end of capitalism and who probably know their days are numbered. However, let us be clear, when this goes wrong, this is not all women judging some men but some women, the educated liberal middle class elite component of the gender, seeking out some men and judging them as representative of all men. This is no different from a minority of male priests seeking out and judging a few women and making claims about the whole sex - which is what happened 500 years ago, more recently in backwaters like Ireland.

Justice as the rational business of formal complaint to enforcement authorities involving courage on the part of the complainant and then the necessary procedures to judge truth or falsehood on the evidence is abandoned as (in effect) 'patriarchal'. The problem is that 'male' courage is socially created - courageous women obviously exist and most men are cowed by power but it has been historically far harder for women to adopt the risks of a courageous stance. Woman are thus often disadvantaged by the ideology of courage as are all vulnerable people in certain social conditions. Justice is not justice if it is not just and there are justifiable reasons for concern that our legal and regulatory systems lag our understanding of the primacy of networked human autonomy in a culture of equals rather than as a hierarchical structure of competing elites embedded in the past.

Those who feel wronged are probably right that they have to fight to get noticed in a society that ignores them until they get noisy and emotional - child abuse victims are the obvious recent example - but they are playing a flawed game in a flawed system. The real requirement here is to unravel the hierarchical elite-based system and replace it with something that starts with a reasoned understanding of what we are really like and not what ideologists think we should be.

There are reasonable arguments that 'justice' has not caught up with the needs of women but it has also not caught up with the needs of fathers or polyamorists so the problem is more widespread than feminist theorists think - it is a problem of the inappropriate parts of Iron Age ideology and industrial social structures being retained while the appropriate parts have been jettisoned. It is a problem of society not being in tune with the actually existing human condition.

This is a new world that is coming and yet it has now spawned its own resistance because not all women share a belief in the necessary extension of the traits attributed to them (such as the apology and grovel being sufficient) into the public domain (while wishing to retain them in the private domain). These 'conservative' women match in numbers the 'liberal' men who have calculated on moral and pragmatic grounds that 'equality' just means that the old order is dead and that they have to find a place in the new order.

We all chuckle when some liberal metropolitan male supporting the new order gets caught out as an 'abuser' (even if this means little more than some crass language or a blundering touch) just as we have always chuckled when some Southern Baptist Minister gets caught out in 'cheating' but both breeds of men have allowed ideology to conquer the reality of their condition which is as creatures of ideology. Both men are often subject to disproportionate witch hunts as exemplars of wrong-doing within their community. All men become 'rapists' to their critics in one world and all churchmen are hypocrites to their critics in the other world - both propositions are absurd. A better truth is that neither sets of men have the courage to be who they are and yet show the rest of the world respect. They have become stupid because they are cowards, unable to live their lives as the persons that they are because history and ideology have dictated personae that drown their true selves. The same has applied to women stuck in households and then humiliated when they escape release in a love affair.

The point is that the human condition (and society is just the public expression of the human condition) requires respect for all human traits, for difference and for variability (which is incidentally another sound point made by Peterson) This includes many other traits, whether libertarianism or authoritarianism or empathetic or (non socially harmful) psychopathic traits, as much as the traits that tend to show difference between men and women because of their biochemistry and brain structures (a difference which science accepts as partially true without drawing any valuation conclusions in relation to the principle of equality).

Our society is rapidly spinning into another round of disaster to match that when male personality traits dominated over female personality traits. You cannot exterminate the 'other'. The key issue here is a fundamental respect for personal autonomy. Autonomy emerges out of each individual's very particular model of perception, cognition and biochemistry as well as history. The uniqueness of the individual is our starting point. From there, comes respect for others and (which is where brute males fall down but also authoritarian female household matriarchs) consent. Indeed if two people want to do anything, no matter how distasteful to others, in private, or to speak of it (since free speech and struggle between persons through robust persuasion are central to the good society) then it is no one's business but their own.

So back to the apology. There is nothing wrong with the apology as either sincere expression of regret or perhaps as tactical tool to end a fruitless squabble while considering one's position (yet is it ever really healthy to apologise for something that you feel you have no need to apologise for?!). But there is a lot wrong with the public institutionalisation of the apology to meet communitarian needs that have nothing to do with the job in hand and force people into modes of submission which actually change nothing, Indeed, the public apology is often little more than cover for a decision not to resign and not to make recompense. It is not embedded within a culture of honour as in Japan where both apology and resignation are carefully encoded within a shame culture with a long history.

An apology in Western culture is simply a response to an assault, an act of obeisance on feminine lines. All an apology of this sort may do in our culture is to trigger the imposition of yet more oppressive rules and regulations that may benefit a certain type of woman in a certain situation but which may limit the lives and opportunities of other women and degrade relations between the sexes. There is no thinking-through of the problem that was demonstrated by the act that required the apology.

We should have more considered explanations to hand, more justice (evidence-based dealing with claims), more resignations, better laws and better law enforcement and fewer apologies and far fewer restrictions on free speech and normal human interaction. We should have more honour and good manners. We should pre-empt the bitter onslaught of an insane social media-driven witch hunt with better education on consent and respect. Our entire culture is in danger of becoming supine before just one personality trait and just one ideology (feminism) just as, in the 1930s, it became supine before another personality trait and another ideology (fascism).

Philosophy & Magical Thinking

The philosopher R. G Collingwood took magic seriously as something that was inappropriately judged in scientific terms. It was best judged alongside art as a craft with ends in view that involved the arousing of emotion. He was deriving his notion of magic from the anthropology of his day but what he was trying to say in the round was that magical thinking and practice were not 'primitive'. It was just another way of seeing the world and engaging with it that was perfectly functional within its own cultural frame of reference. It is on emotion that he is most interesting:

" ... although magic arouses emotion, it does this in quite another way than amusement [which Collingwood associates with Art]. Emotions aroused by magical acts are not discharged by those acts. It is important for the practical life of the people concerned that this should not happen; and magical practices are magical precisely because they have been so designed that it shall not happen. The contrary is what happens: these emotions are focused and crystallized, consolidated into effective agents in practical life. The process is the exact opposite of a catharsis. There the emotion is discharged so that it shall not interfere with practical life; here it is canalized and directed upon practical life." [R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, Oxford, 1938, p.67]

This is interesting because we see this contrast all the time in observing people in their relations with significant others. We also note what happens when emotion is stunted and people are trapped in an addiction to emotional states (the weekly marital argument, the addiction to the state of love, anger at the same thing every time without moving forward).

High emotions seem best directed as either catharsis (an explosion that rewires the brain or moves a person on from one state to another) or channeled, within a context often ritualised in all but obvious name, in order to let the emotion change the world in which the person lives by permitting the conditions for action or change.

One model changes the person (or forces behavioural change on the target of the emotion which may, of course, be mere bullying) and the other transforms the social and cultural, possibly material (but the jury is out on that one) world in which the person has to survive. Both are evolutionarily honed on organism survival. The explosion of emotion forces change in the world in others or in oneself while the sublimation or channeling of emotions manipulates others or one's sub-conscious into desired outcomes.

From this perspective, magic (the channeling process) is as efficacious in its way as doing art, experiencing art or undertaking psychotherapy or religious practice and more effective than science in some contexts (changing the social and cultural conditions we live in) while less effective than science in others (changing the material conditions in which we live).

Science-based politics always fails because magic-based politics will always beat it in an open struggle for hearts and minds as much as magic-based construction will see buildings fall and planes drop out of the sky. Magic will certainly not allow a man to fly despite the claims of yogis and certainly not with the efficiency of modern technologists but it will allow him to cope with, manage or exploit the social and cultural changes created by a world in which people can fly by other means.

Collingwood is not advocating that magic is real insofar as some claim that it can change material reality - there is still no evidence for this and unlikely to be any evidence at any time soon. Magic is only real insofar as it affects psychological reality which is, in fact, the reality that most accords with the really lived lives of most people in the world. Most people use technology and take it for granted but few understand it. It may as well be magical for all the actual comprehension of the science behind it.

At the outer reaches of physics and cosmology, science goes so far beyond perceived reality that its reality looks a lot more magical (although ultimately based on logic, mathematics and observational experiments) than magic does to the mind who has not simply decided to 'believe' in science (a most reasonable belief but still, for most people, a matter of faith rather than knowledge).

Magical thinking is anti-thinking from the inside outwards, constructing reality from the self, the consciousness that is embedded in material reality and is capable of flying shaman-like at any time it wishes. This is opposed to scientific thinking which is reasoning of the outwards world undertaken inwardly.

Eventually scientific thinking ends up following its own logic into mysteries that bend reality and magical thinking ends up following its own logic into realities that bend if not materiality, then society and its workings on materiality.

Science gives us the tools but magic enables us to use the tools by triggering our emotional commitment to a purpose for which the tools have a use. The magical process is an operation on 'morale' - one's own and that of others as manipulation. It is why propaganda, PR and the totalitarian cultural forms of late capitalism are 'magical'.

It is also why magical operations can construct true selves (despite the post-modern nonsense that there are no selves because rational thinking says there are no selves) that flourish regardless of social norms, far more effectively that psychotherapy's attempt to adapt the individual to society and creating a working norm that is healthy within that framework.

The shaman is often indistinguishable from the modern psychopath but his context makes him different. Our 'normal' magical rituals often have a social context that removes their efficacy because the total system disrespects the mobilising power of emotion except as manipulation from above (which has incidentally 'conceptualised' and commercialised art, its sibling, out of existence).

When the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia can buy Da Vinci's 'Salvator Mundi' for $450m simply to establish his modernising credentials and shock his culture into compliance with a new ideology, then art is effectively dead and magical thinking rules.

Magical operations are all around us, operating every day in our lives. The late Marxist attempt to theorise rationally about these operations in nonsense terms such as 'objectification' and 'commodification' utterly misses the point that rational, political manipulation of emotional content must always result in a logical dark magic to maintain emotional balance. Populism's rise was inherent in the manipulations of late liberal capitalism and predictable.

Earlier Marxists would not have used this language but they would have understood the point better ... the decadence of Marxism as it got captured by the middle classes is one of the tragedies of our time. Early Marxists would have seen each magical operation in society as a thesis calling forth by its very nature its own antithesis. Successful magical operations incorporate their own antithesis into their workings to that synthesis is part of what the operation is intended to effect.

A true magician would have understood Newton's "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" to be as applicable to his world as that of the physicist - a lesson not understood by the dark master magician Adolf Hitler and certainly not understood by contemporary pseudo-scientific materialists who take no account of a huge swathe of matter that is ignored because it cannot yet be weighed - the magical minds of men and women.

The human mind is essentially magical. Rationalist liberals hate this and want our minds to be scientific but, if they were, we would not then be human. Just as the fact of a rough 15% of the population (like me) being completely irreligious does not remove the fact of the species being, on balance, religious in its spiritual or communitarian senses (horrified as I am by what this means) so only a minority of humans are purely rational actors and there is no earthly reason why they should expect to rule over others who think in different and equally efficacious ways.

Indeed, just as the fanatically religious and the atheist, the asexual and the polyamorous, have more adjustment problems with social reality than the general majority of humanity, so the radical rationalism of futurist technologists and the lifestyle magicians are faced with the same near-outsider status. Fortunately, most people are sufficiently rational to have faith in science and sufficiently magical to run their own lives effectively in the world the scientists have made.

Anyone who wants to understand themselves and the world and to know how to manipulate the reality created by the rationalists has to learn to become a magician. This does not mean dressing up in a dark cloak and leaping naked on the Seal of Solomon shouting the names of 10,000 demons. That's just fun but probably a bit of a waste of time magically speaking.

It simply means isolating the will from the world and applying it to what you want rather than what other people have told you that you must want and then finding the techniques that tap into the enabling (usually emotional) sub-conscious, stripping away layers of social patterning in order to find out what is under there, how it can relate most effectively to 'reality' and then bending self and reality through will to create a new functional reality within oneself or as a re-patterning one's relationship with others.

The supernatural does not need to exist to make magic work but its pretend existence itself can become a tool or weapon in the process of self and social construction. But bear in mind that you are always up against 6 billion or so other natural magicians, all creating their own reality out of the material to hand. Some of those will be your enemy (snowflakes, religious fundamentalists and radical feminists are mine) because their reality must place constraints on yours.

In practice, all magical thinking is struggle for social and personal survival in which the dangers are obvious - you lose or, worse, you win, and don't stop there but try to go beyond survival to domination. And that is where every action having its own reaction comes in. The Wiccans have it right with 'Do What Thou Wilt an Harm No One' since 'bad magic' (as one A. Hitler found it) will come back to bite you because of the eventual opposition it creates. To live long and prosper, there is only ever 'white magic' ...