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| WIGO - What is going on
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WIGO - What is going on
WIGO - What is going on
Friends of Inquisition 21st century might like to know that a new web site has been launched to further expand the ideas that follow below. It is ‘WIGO - What is going on’, which is a reflection on apparent reality, not just a question.
The new web site will allow us to leave the activism work here on Inquisition21 and other supporting sites, and expand on the ideas, which tend to get swamped by the serious activity here.
Please have a look at the emerging new WIGO - What is going on. It explores the two worlds we apparently inhabit, the consequences, the wild card of the Internet itself, the drama of a new worldwide erotic tendency, and comes up with some startling conclusions.
Much of what follows now may eventually be transferred to the new site.
What has brought about our state?
Brian Rothery
Ireland
Humankind is suffering from a great separation between its deliberate or rational nature and its instinctive and spontaneous nature. The British philosopher, Lancelot Law Whyte, called it ‘dissociation’, in the sense of a break or a lesion. Richard Wagner also acknowledged it in his final work, Parsifal. It is at the root of many of today’s obsessions and is bringing much grief to individuals and society.
Another affect of this dissociation is that by concentrating on our ‘rational’ side or making moral judgements using inadequate information or awareness (as in mob hysteria) and trying to suppress or ignore our instinctive side, we think or attempt to be aware, in what we might call frozen snapshots, biased labels or doctrinaire beliefs, as distinct from a more unified awareness that reflects the flow that embraces us and our world.
The dissociation is expressed dramatically through human sexuality which today also exhibits an exaggerated form of the more general dissociation or dualism by being criminalized at the same time as we are all being increasingly eroticized. In the forty years since Lancelot Law Whyte died, the obsessions and social distortions he feared from the dualism have worsened. On this web site and in a related book (see Books in menu), human sexuality has been selected as the major human issue where the dualism can be both examined and dealt with. Whyte recommended this approach but did not follow it through.
In our unhappy and distorted state, many of us, not all of course, need to disavow our hated and often seemingly obscene desires and project them onto others and there is no better object for this than the bogeyman. We’ve always had bogeymen, such as heretics, witches and homosexuals, but for as long as there was an identifiable different and more important enemy to hate, such as the Soviets during the Cold War, the bogeymen did not appear to get out of control. A new bogeyman to emerge recently, however, was the ordinary adult male transmogrified into the rapacious (and raping) ‘woman and child abuser’ by victim feminists. In addition to bogeymen we had bouts of public hysteria and moral panics, Salem, the recent satanic abuse scares and UFO abductions, the last of which also appeared to have the objective of sex abuse.
When the Berlin Wall came down and signalled the end of the Cold War, we lost the big bogeyman of the Soviet enemy. Almost in the same year, 1989, the world saw the first big sex abuse moral panic that was through American channelled globalization to sweep the world. It was the public trial phase of the US Mc Martin pre-school sex abuse scandal, the first of many to come and possibly the beginning of the child sex abuse moral panic. Mc Martin was also the first to prove to have been an invention. But with it, the victim feminism that began the moral panic or set out its conditions was joined by a much more powerful ally – the need for a new bogeyman. All the erotophobic sadism that was once foisted upon homosexuals and other ‘monsters’ now began to migrate onto ‘paedophiles’. And with ordinary men now regarded as potential abusers, if not rapists, by a feminist ideology that was invading virtually all educational establishments and becoming a normal part of everyday life and work, no man was safe from accusation.
The latent and often patent self-hatred smouldering within many of us, stoked by the dissociation and the contradictions it imposed upon us, was channelled into a malignant misanthropy masquerading as ‘child protection’, child protection being the vehicle for the ‘othered’ misanthropy. The concept of the ‘child’ itself became a signifier, the object signified being the ‘abused child’, or one likely to be abused if not at all times protected from prowling paedophiles – that is, any man that might be one. In fact by now we all see children through the eyes of the ‘paedophile’, who probably never really existed except in a tiny minority, but it is too late for that consideration now.
A dreadful development, made possible by a combination of moral panic and legislative creep and aided by disingenuous individuals and groups seeking influence and power, has been the emergence and rise of a new fascism based on social behaviour, heavily orientated towards sexual activities. The fascists are the new moral leaders who legislate for and monitor and police us, principally in matters of sexual behaviour but also in how we talk or write about race or religion or minority groups. The empowering of ordinary police to investigate many of our sexual inclinations or activities has given them authority away beyond their ability to understand what they are investigating. The new fascist administration is made up of legislators, an already corrupted legal profession, the judiciary, the police and a host of social workers, probation officers and ‘experts’. There is an enormous disproportion in power between these fascists and those they claim to police. One example is that if accused of a sex crime, one finds it close to impossible to find either a defence solicitor or a defence expert witness. The latter tend to work only for the prosecution and the former tend not to want that kind of client.
As in all triumphalist fascist regimes, through a compliant media the bullies in power easily obtain a public veneration bought by preaching about their cause - that of witch catching, jew-baiting, paedo-smashing. Both bully and ardent public admirer appear to be enjoying a form of obscene sadism.
This next suggestion may seem outrageous to some and please write if you believe it to be. Genocide occurs when there is an enormous disproportion in power between aggressor and victim. In the American gulag that plans for and overseas the programme for the labelling, naming, shunning, hounding and displacement of ‘sex offenders’ (paedophiles) are the officials with enormous power. Ironically, the ‘offenders’ are the victims. The gulag also is made up of politicians, police and media. The genocide, however, is directed at (by now millions of) mainly male individuals spread throughout all walks of life and all communities, very like Salem where no one was safe either.
Now some of this is examined further.
Disavowal and projection - D and P
D and P, or ‘dnp’ for convenience, is the denial or disavowing of shameful and even hated desires and their transference or projection onto others, in this process creating a hated enemy. Let us call this disavowing and projection ‘dnp-ing’. It is how the monsters of the ‘paedophile’ and ‘sex offender’ have been created. These monsters are thus creations bred within oneself, suppressed, denied, rejected or disavowed, and transferred or projected onto others with all the hate and venom their inherent contradictions have inspired.
Disavowal and projection of unwanted sexual desires is a common expression of the dissociation just discussed. It is not unusual to see high profile male practitioners caught out performing the very acts they claim to abhor when done by others.
Disavowal and projection in matters of human sexuality are so universal and so powerful that they have permeated the legislative, social and police systems, creating a ‘ruling class’ or cartel of ‘the policers’ and an underclass of offenders, the latter for example shamed and shunned by sex offender registry rules, and, as in America, hounded from home and state.
The zeal and hatred, with which the policers hound the offenders, are fanned by the dissociation of their natural or true selves from their desired or assumed selves. They are, however, fighting a projection and when one fights a projection the war is never over, but it is also ultimately doomed, although many people will be destroyed in the process. Witness how the Nazis became even more genocidal when their extermination programme had failed to expunge all the Jews. Those who remained seemed terrifyingly more dangerous to them.
Some psychologists also call it 'othering' – the planting on other people or groups of one’s own secret or tortured desires. Virtue purchased by means of othering unwanted desires can become a violent and potentially genocidal lie.
As for the concept that 'paedos exist in vast shadowy conspiratorial 'rings', it is extraordinarily difficult to relinquish such a horror story precisely because one has been surreptitiously enjoying it and evidence is usually relatively ineffective in persuading someone to relinquish a pleasure, especially when it is socially sanctioned.
The child
The child could be a symbol of our sought after unity, an object of our love and adoration, a manifestation of beauty, but the Establishment has transformed the child into what some linguistics practitioners call a signifier (the signifier being the word, the signified the thing or idea it represents). Child thus becomes 'sexually endangered/abused child'. For the more thoughtful, this of course creates the paradox where we have become accustomed to see children through the eyes of the ‘paedophile’, thus all in a sense becoming ‘paedophiles’. This new signifier of the ‘child’ is more virulent than just about any other term in bringing out the very worst in human misanthropy and paranoia. Why it has happened in our times requires much reflection and perhaps future historians will provide some answers.
We have a limitless capacity to believe our own preferred lies, especially if this promises to get us off the hook (me good, others bad); and certainly, most people prefer their own self-deceptions to someone else's truth. A colleague who advises me says, “The authorities' fraught preoccupation with endangered and abused children, from a psychoanalytic perspective at least, tells us a lot about their unconscious desires. Whilst the concern to protect is consciously embraced, it is of course the unconscious desire to violate and obscenely enjoy that is projected. People who get institutionally labelled as paedophiles are being used as screens to portray the refused desires of the virtuous. The authorities are using a crudely reductionist psychology, based on cognitive behavioural therapy. In this there is no ambiguity in language or behaviour, no fundamental opacity, no unconscious: bad people have 'inappropriate' erotic fantasies, fantasies are intentions, perched directly on the surface of behaviour where they can be read off straightforwardly by 'good' people like policemen, judges, and psychotic feminists. There is a wholly spurious omniscience at work here (ignorance and narrow-mindedness inevitably appear as authoritativeness and knowingness).”
This bit really made me think of the thousands in Operation Ore and its related and similar police raids that have had to undergo humiliating interviews and grillings in sordid police stations from officers with far less than half their education and experience. One 61 year old in particular who had just begun early retirement to continue writing after a fine career in government and university was faced with a contemptuous young policeman at the end of a long and brutal interview who said, “And I understand you were a senior officer in the (naming the government department)?” And still smirking, “And that you write books?”
He said to me, sadly, afterwards, “I thereupon watched while my whole former CV was reduced to two lines as an addendum to a sordid police charge list.”
In this as in many other cases, the Knowing and Authoritative police officer whose job it is to 'manage' people like this now crushed man could not himself write a complex sentence. As in similar past purges however, he was an instrument in an exercise in social purification, a vital component in a modern day Crucible of Misery.
Operation Ore - an example of disavowal and projection caused by the distortion.
One of the best examples of the travesties that can be caused by the dissociation and its endency for disavowal and projection was Operation Ore, carried out by the British police in the full glare of the media and now the subject of a class action against the police and prosecution service (group action in the UK). Operation Ore affected thousands of British men and their families and was an FBI-inspired spin-off from the infamous Landslide case. It now appears that of the thousands ruined in dawn raids, some of whom committed suicide, most, if not virtually all, were victims of credit card fraud. The class action will shortly be in the courts and upon its success it should spread to Canada, Australia and Ireland, all of which were also affected by similar Landslide-inspired campaigns, although Great Britain was the worst affected by far. Ironically, America was least affected. Those close to it have received a first hand insight into the ruin and devastation caused by the moral panic of sex abuse and its accompanying inquisition.
The human unconscious may be spreading the news. Here is a very perceptive response-comment to a news story about a new UK system for issuing local sex offender warnings.
The main response-comments to the story contained the usual ‘hang all pedos’ outbursts, but then came this one: “Incidentally, it's well known that those who profess their hatred of 'nonces' most loudly are actually attempting to deflect and deny their own secret desires. Perhaps those are the ones that we should take a close look at, particularly those that have a fondness for violence.”
There exist both an individual and group unconscious and we have good reason to believe that we communicate with each other through that unconscious and that some of us at least even know things in our unconscious that out conscious is not yet aware of. Mass beliefs and hysteria work through the group unconscious. The literary critic, Leo Bersani, once noted that our unelected sexual rulers can sustain their domination on a populist basis simply because the most effective messages to transmit are the ones which are already there - the ones hiding in the unconscious, which can only be 'seen' when they painted onto to an 'outsider' who is then considered 'not us.' For example, grand-standing and creating legislation and extra police powers to control the monsters that lurk in our unconscious.
There are thinkers who regard even parental hatred of children as completely normal and understandable (although some of us might find that hard to accept) and that it becomes dangerous only when it is subjected to ‘intrapsychic censorship’ – that is saying, “I don't hate children, but they - the abusers - hate children"). When it is seen in a more unified way as an ordinary emotion, to be experienced alongside love and devotion (and mitigated by its proximity to these very emotions) it is merely an aspect of everyday life. Our kids can drive us nuts at times and even fill us with despair. When this normal reaction is frozen, turned into a thing (as opposed to the flow or a process) and mentally split off, it ends up feeling as though it exists only 'outside' (which is, of course, precisely where it has been thrown). And once outside, it has to be tracked down, hounded, eradicated. Except, of course, it never can be, because in looking for bogeymen one is looking in the wrong direction: only balanced (and truthful) introspection can locate it. Those who spend their lives tracking down monsters are actually most likely to be on the run from their own unconscious impulses.
We live in an epistemic regime of
Doctrines and dogmas
These are deeply affected by the obsessions caused by the dissociation discussed above. Few have the means or courage to oppose them, so they are influenced by, used by, even devised by
Opportunists, demagogues and cabals
Both of the above contribute to
The making of laws
How these laws are interpreted and applied depend on
The system of justice
This can be adversarial, inquisitorial, or in rare cases protective – that is, protecting citizens and their families and property from harm from others.
If the system of justice is inquisitorial or harshly adversarial, heavily influenced by doctrines and dogmas and manipulated by opportunists and demagogues, such as corrupt and greedy members of the legal profession and judiciary we may have
A police state
This results in
The suppression of freedom of expression
Including free speech, art, drama, the use of the imagination, the acquiescence of the media, political correctness, and in general Orwellian conditions. These conditions can be maintained or worsened by moral panics, or fear of an enemy.
This in turn results in
Restriction/suppression of political activity
And in
A decrease in the potential for the repeal of laws
The process is facilitated by
A general 'dumbing down' of the population
Note the power today of television and the printed media and their virtual control by a cabal. Note also how the world's most powerful owner of media is also the biggest publisher of banal pornography over adult television channels and tabloids.
Some reflection on the above
The clear relationship between the elements that make up the police state, including the inevitable ‘legislative creep’ that makes it possible can be seen from the above. A key sub-element in the doctrines and dogmas is the crimen exceptum, the designated crime for which normal law and the processes of justice are suspended – heresy, witchcraft, being a Jew in Nazi Germany, child sex abuse, child porn, and so on. Note how child porn has been used to transform the Internet into a tool of repression and fear and a powerful device for the police and prosecution state. Whenever it is powerful enough fear of the enemy can replace the crimen exceptum, as the instrument for the suspension of justice.
Note also how these devices were used in the early inquisitions, Nazi Germany, countries under the control of the Roman Catholic Church, and McCarthy’s America, and are still being used today in Islamic fundamentalism, moral panics and social control.
A critical element, which tips the state from one of democracy into a full police state, is the suppression of freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is vital for avoiding the slide into totalitarianism, but it must be attacked by the opportunists and demagogues as it exposes and undermines them. The police fear it also. When not moderated by freedom of expression, the process shown above develops almost naturally into the police state, made certain by a fatal combination of public apathy and fear, and moral indoctrination and opportunism by whatever cabal is dominant. The signs that the end of the process is near are when laws are passed that suppress criticism of the law itself and when the media bow to political correctness and to the current social ideology. A test for the last is to ask if there are any questions that are taboo. Would a journalist defend a Jew in Nazi Germany? Would a journalist question the unnatural age of sexual consent laws in Western society?
And for the epistemicists
A fascinating mental exercise is to take the model laid out above which begins with the existence of doctrines and dogmas, and imagine several other ‘domains of meaning’ or ‘levels of awareness’, in an imaginary world where we have moved beyond the domain of doctrines and dogmas, into one where we discard black and white labelling, a priori assumptions, and accept ambiguity.
An interesting video
It's over two hours long and you may not agree with all of it, but there is much that is thought-provoking in The fall of the republic.
Created on 04/09/2009 12:45 PM by Editor
Updated on 02/22/2010 03:11 PM by Editor
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