Position Reserved Explained

The subject matter of Position Reserved has always been various - philosophical, political, libertarian on occasions, commentaries on magickal thinking (by no means censorious) and sexuality. The political has ranged from international relations through British politics (including Brexit) to the politics of the Middle East, the Trump era in the US and beyond. I took a particular interest in such outre subjects as the ideology of the Far Right and national populism, sexual freedom and polyamory and the psychotherapeutic role of paganism and the occult. 

I tracked the COVID outbreak for some time as I tracked, with others, the idiocies surrounding the Russo-Western conflict as it developed up until Position Reserved suspended itself in 2018. I doubt if there will be much immediate comment from now on on world or national affairs because these are adequately covered by me on Twitter. Facebook and LinkedIn (see below). The general theme was a personal alienation from our species en masse, apparently a true ship of fools. This is my quasi-autistic side of which I have become increasingly proud. Like Cassandra, I had the unfortunate ability to see the darkness coming (it may already have come without us noticing because we shut the curtains early) yet be unable to persuade anyone else of its imminence.

The paradox struck me that while our species appeared to be a ship of fools, most of my fellow ship mates were in fact intelligent, thoughtful, humane, often quite simply kind, and as puzzled as I was by the way we were hurtling like the unfairly proverbialised lemmings towards any cliff present. The bulk of ordinary humanity seemed to have their heads screwed on properly - the idiots were the ones in power. With emotional insecurities blown into waves of hysteria by the media for which I have developed the deepest distaste (they are the dangerous winds blowing our ship of course), it appeared that we passengers on our many ships were at the mercy of demented captains, officers who obeyed every whim of the madmen and crews who had no choice lest they be keel-hauled for their temerity in suggesting that, perhaps, we might all be better off if we headed for port or at least took a route that did not have us riding those waves on to the rocks. 

Similes take us only so far. The correct and reasoned analysis is that liberal democracy is a fraud and has been for some time. Nobody dare say this any more than anyone could say that there was no God in 1660. Yes, we can elect our exploiters and the fools and, yes, we have the rule of law (often made by those same exploiters and fools) but we are, in truth, impotent, screaming into the wind.  Our noise only adds to the storm.  Of course, we have been persuaded that our world represents a less dangerous fraud than some more severe ideological frauds (which we insistently misrepresent as we go into denial about our own failures) but we should wonder whether that is good enough. It would be nice to think that a bit of activism might change all this fraudulent nonsense but, sadly, replacing one set of fools with another is only a fake progress. Facing our own impotence in the face of the uncaring universe and of the mis-organisation of our species into 'society' is probably the only way of maintaining one's own integrity even if it risks one's sanity.

But that does not mean one cannot have an opinion, only that one's opinion is likely to be futile if one is outside the tiny group of people who hold power in society - as much today as amongst the serfs of the Middle Ages or the industrial workers of Engels' Manchester. Would Spartacus have been anything more than another Emperor if his revolt had succeeded?  Our opinions remain valid nevertheless as acts of tiny defiance - chances, during our small insignificant (to Power) lives, to show that, at least intellectually, it really is better to die on your feet than live on your corporate, media-influenced and socialised knees.And, sometimes, in history, the taste of revolt, though doomed to change little of substance in the relations between men and masters, can be delicious. For brief moments, Milton's Satan becomes Lucifer the Light-Bringer and overturns the prevailing order simply because he can. And, then, dear reader, momentarily, we come to life after years in the dust and ashes of order, conformity and obeisance.

And so this Blog will have rare (when I can shake off my indolence) bursts of 'opinion' - analyses of our species, of the darkness and the light, proposals perhaps of the Swiftian kind and simple observations on how life might be lived better under the cosh of late liberal capitalism, only the latest of many interations of human ineptitude in organising itself for its own survival and happiness, a system of desperate scrabblings by desperate people that cannot house its young, trains rather than educates, provides health by box-ticking, cannot control its security apparats or its borders, leaves swathes of humanity in desperate loneliness and poverty and thinks posturing rhetoric is a replacement for decisive action. D__n them, I say, d__n the incompetent masters who rule by lies, manipulation and secrecy. 

There are also likely to be significant gaps between postings yet some may appear very soon after each other. The randomness is appropriate for someone who, quite honestly, writes only for himself, for a small circle of friends and that extremely rare person who might just 'get' what I am saying out there in the desert we call culture. And I may also write about strange and personal things ... dogs, how to live longer, life in a provincial backwater, whatever!  Intelligent comments are certainly welcome. Silence is assumed to be the default position of most readers.

For updated old book reviews and rare podcast reviews, see https://timpendryfictionreviews.blogspot.com and https://timpendrybookreviews.blogspot.com  For all book reviews (still being added to), see https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1016626 - there are some 1,000+ at the time of writing with only revisions and more effective reorganisation of early ones appearing in the two new blogs. 

Film reviews were only of the best films seen in recent years and appeared on my Facebook Profile alongside quite rare Exhibition and Podcast Reviews. Cinema is, in fact, my first love but I only have time to write on books. I have Tarantino's attitude to the Art ... it is an Art and not Reality. No more reviews will appear from now on because I have decided that the mad sacrality of cinema requires silence and films will now only be discussed in person.

For examples of me wading into the seas of public trivia like a twenty-first century Flying Dutchman, see https://twitter.com/TimPendry  I tend to block people who stick silly little flags on their Profiles.

The Facebook Profile is at https://www.facebook.com/tim.pendry but I make it quite hard for people to get through and become one of the Elect. There is, however, plenty of material that is public domain. The huge number of Groups I used to run have now dwindled but I am happy to direct people to the remaining lively ones.

The LinkedIn Profile is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/timpendry but this will only be interesting to anyone who wants very short near-daily updates on the global economic and political situation. LinkedIn is otherwise an intellectual desert filled with desperate corporate platitudes. 

Sexual Politics

What are the power relations at work in the building of a late liberal capitalism dependent on a) getting women into the labour force as quickly as possible and b) ensuring that they became the centre of an economy of consumption and then of sentiment? What has happened in the last half century has generally been good for both men and women - increased prosperity, increased respect for half the population's aspirations and the benefits of a 'diverse' female perspective on society and culture. But the simplistic socio-cultural model of feminism with its mythic history of patriarchy is not in accord with the reality of the industrial society that has now been replaced.  Matters are much more complex than that.

The society which preceded us was built not only on the standard models of exploitation (ours still is) but on a set of power relations in which men were manipulated into states that were not happy or satisfactory to themselves in order to create a society that, in many ways, was much more comfortable for a certain type of woman who has lost something in the process of change. The constraints on society identified a century before by Nietzsche which had arisen from Judaeo-Christianity resulted in a society of mutual repression in which resource-scarcity repressed both male and female desire and engineered males into compliance with social norms that gave inordinate power to women in the household and in terms of sexuality and child care even if women had no such power in the work-place.

The revolution that has given women increased power in society via their ability to access the work place may have dragged a lot of men into an improved state of being themselves (there is no doubt that improved social conditions are liberatory for both genders) but women have often been able to retain those bits of industrial and even Iron Age thinking that suit their purpose. For some women, this liberation has been half-hearted with some way to go yet in dealing with male power relations in the elite (the 'Harvey Weinstein problem') but most women are still using conservative social forms to demand male compliance in relation to households, child rearing, sexual relations and linguistic and cultural freedom.

Peterson and the Dark Web of intellectuals are probably right to draw attention to some fundamental male-female differences (without any need to allow this to have any implications for quality of opportunity or intrinsic human value) but they seem to have a problem understanding the power dynamics of gender relations. A balanced but oppressive system was replaced by an imbalanced less oppressive one where the victim status of women (part of the myth required for political campaigning under late capitalism) is enhanced without any recognition of the historic victim status of men in relation to resource-scarcity and 'social obligation'. Peterson and others want to go backwards, current liberals want to edge forward into solidifying what has been won. No one is thinking about going further forwards still towards a new progressive model that over-reaches current conditions for a more full liberation of all 'humans' equally.

Peterson and the Dark Web community are concentrating on psychology and ideas when the real issues are to be found in history and social and economic relations. Liberal elites like a debate about psychology and ideas because they certainly do not want a debate about social and economic relations. Culture wars are very convenient for the middle classes - a useful distraction. Our current problem is thus that we have an imbalanced cultural model driven by consumer capitalism, one that appears to despise the male and mythologise the female, being faced off by a reactionary attempt to return to an oppressive balance, albeit moderated somewhat. There appears to be no approach which takes account of history, resource-scarcity and the realities of gender difference to create a more progressive model in which balance and compromise are permitted between free men and women (albeit mindful of the psychological security and welfare of children) who can make their own choices without either material oppression or cultural manipulation.

Since the liberal capitalist model is based entirely on a top-down manipulative struggle for resources and status (a situation which is unavoidable to some extent) then it becomes inevitable that the embedded aspects of often unconscious female gender manipulation in our culture are not recognised and dealt with. If they were, then a recognition of the sheer scale of more general manipulation of populations and of power relations affecting class more generally would begin to undercut almost every element of middle class 'liberal' domination of the mass of the population - its politics, marketing, human resources, educational systems, media narratives, state psychological operations and even psychotherapies. And we can't have that, can we?

Position Reserved Restored

After around five years of neglect and suspension, Position Reserved is coming back online with a little more focus.

Book reviews will continue to be published elsewhere, either book-by-book on GoodReads or on one of two book review blogs covering fiction and non fiction. These latter generally take old reviews from some years back, collate them under subject matter and re-edit the original reviews to create a more considered overview.

You can catch up on immediate reaction to world events as the mood takes me at LinkedIn and Twitter. You can also see public domain material (including reviews of exhibitions, events and podcasts) on Facebook. Facebook also gives access to a range of specialised groups which I administer but only to people I know and who clearly have an interest in that specialised area. I have a presence on Academia.edu

Commercial and international affairs commentary will be centred on LinkedIn. Position Reserved will be reserved for general political commentary, philosophy, culture and occult and fortean matters. Film reviews used to be occasional on Facebook but I stopped these to protest unwarranted Facebook censorship. They may start to appear here instead. I spend a lot of time on cinematic matters but very little of this will emerge as text here or elsewhere.

Over the next few weeks I will be concentrating on transferring a few redrafted opinion pieces that were placed on an experimental blog that now looks surplus to requirements and on providing an overview of a research project undertaken on Facebook that looked at alternatives to the Tweedledum-Tweedledee choices we are given at British General Elections.  Once those commitments have been made, I will post when and as I feel like it.

Comments are welcome but you might do better to connect on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and GoodReads if you want to connect more directly.