Discombobulating the Discombobulators
A rough guide for the discombobulated who have had enough.
This short essay was written by the official Wizard of New Zealand, QSM after fifty years of honing the craft of discombobulating unimaginative ideologues, bureaucrats, and killjoys. For those who wish to pursue the matter further, he has created his own existential process cosmology guided by the non-relativistic values of truth, beauty, goodness, and aspiration. This is to be found in his book “The Fun Revolution; Jack’s Adventures in Ideologyland”. He can best be appreciated as a fun-loving, heaven-bound shaman-trickster, outsmarting the hell-bound evil tricksters all around him.
“In 1967, as a backpacking wanderer of many years and academic high culture commissar, I was recruited to set up the first School of Sociology in Australia. At this time I came across Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the impact of the sudden introduction of electric communication on our literate civilisation. I was discombobulated! Previously contradictory aspects of my personality came together with an explosion of joy, and I started living not just for escapist love, beauty, and learning, but for sheer existential fun. I followed McLuhan’s advice and stopped looking in the rear view mirror, and started trying to avoid the approaching traffic. When I was driven off the road a year later for blocking the neo-Marxist ‘Long March Through The Institutions’ in Australia, I was prepared, obtained the existential Shaman role-complex needed to complete my personality to include that of a self-exhibiting Living Work of Art; a sanguine, out-of-others’-control Wizard.”
Forewarned is forearmed. Before proceeding with suggestions how to lovingly discombobulate those who are trying to hatefully discombobulate you, would-be practitioners should acquaint themselves with the current state of the Noosphere of consciousness. We are stuck in a world which is suddenly full of the very unfunny form of discombobulation, popularly called “woke”. The serious and unpleasant people who are in control of our mass communication and state educational and welfare institutions are not a new breed; they are the same old stinkers under another name. They are incompetent bullying fools but they have learned one good trick. Suddenly change the names of your gang, and your rivals gang and blame others for your own catastrophic bungling. First they called themselves Socialists, then Communists, then Labour, then Social Democrats, then Democrats, then Liberals, then Progressives, then Woke. Now we have passed “peak woke”, they are going back to calling themselves Progressives. Like Davros and his creation the zero-sum thinking Daleks they have been programmed to obey or exterminate (cancel). They change the meaning of words, even place names, without warning or appeal. They cannot be argued with. Their crippled imaginations are very easy to discombobulate. A word of warning: Only try this if you are a small independent entrepreneur, keep smiling, say that it’s only a joke, and edge towards the door.
Levels of Discombobulation. These vary from macrocosmic to microcosmic. As the world’s undisputed master of discombobulation, having cast a word or image spell, I endeavour to bring back inherited common sense to stabilise the consciousness and calm the nerves of a discombobulated individual. I take Jesus’ advice to heart about loving my enemy, by assuming a low ego posture. I do not want to wave a red cape in front of a bull that has already been stung by a picador. I am not a matador or martyr, just a synthesis of Socrates, Jesus, and Spike Milligan. The latter was a generous, English/Irish/Indian/Australian, ego-less humourist. When surrounded by stubborn stupidity, he was remarkably skilled at exposing absurdity, just for logic, love, and levity.
Global Discombobulation. In my book and on my website I make use of Relativity Theory, which demonstrates logically and through experimental confirmation, that there is no Absolute Frame to the Universe. For all human intents and purposes, the physical universe is not an objective thing in space; rather, it remains a subjective model open to falsification. As human beings and not gods we must always remember that we are living in a fictional world of our own making. The best thing we can do is to work like craftsmen on our creation. To discombobulate naive materialistic scientists, after reminding my listeners or readers that there is no proof that the Earth is North Up, with which they must agree, I then cast a cosmological spell which turns it Inside-Out! This is easily done by conformally inverting the astrophysical mathematical co-ordinates of the Earth as an oblate spheroid. We need to distinguish between what we are habituated to assume is objectively material, from our latent imaginary capacities, hinting that there is much more to be revealed. The imagination is not an escape from painful reality. It is a door through which we enter the subjective world of speculation and through which we leave it, inevitably changed by the experience.
Love Logic and Levity as Praxis. For over fifty years, guided by my instinctive response to the cultural values of Truth Beauty and Goodness, I have been living as closely as I can in a synthesis of what activists call Praxis (which, as Kierkegaard realised, includes Promethean “Aspiration”.) A good example is the pragmatic Scientific Method based on getting as close to the truth as possible by purifying any useful hypothesis by stripping from it what can be progressively proved to be false. Socrates is a culture hero in Western Civilisation for teaching us the importance of dialectical disputation which is a playful process or skill. He distinguished the great gulf between those people who want to believe and those who want to know. As social animals, we develop and learn the skills we need to flourish. Many of these are already inherited in the brain as innate release mechanisms.
Socrates; Truth as Praxis. Socrates, an old soldier, had made fun of the classical Greek bourgeois materialistic belief that human beings should be guided by logic or reason. Invisible subjective beings such as gods and spirits were regarded as too subjective, humanly biased, and too emotional, to be trusted like cold reason. His concern was with his soul rather than his reputation. Socrates distinguished between two fundamentally different types of human beings; those that want to believe, and those that want to know. In the dialogues he made famous, Socrates used his wit to playfully discombobulate his rational opponents. He did however admit that he may have increased his wisdom by mistake during these exchanges of bias. He was no narcissist but like all personalities in the plutocratic classical his empathy was limited, even towards his wife.
Living and arguing was its own reward: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Like Jesus he refused to put his philosophy of action or praxis into writing. He was wise enough to realise that words and their meanings can be deconstructed by a series of less talented scribes, taken out of context, and then reconstructed to mean something very different. Plato, one of his followers did precisely that. Plato’s final betrayal was to lay down a blueprint for a totalitarian Republic run by intellectuals with no sense of self awareness. He was driving those that were beginning to escape from the cave of Socrates’ famous metaphor/parable, even deeper inside to watch his own proposed ideal forms projected onto the cave wall.
Jesus: Love as Praxis. The life of Jesus, as narrated in the various canonical and non-canonical gospels with various degrees of accuracy (which we must intuit), gives us many examples demonstrating that he, like Socrates, was always in praxis. Instead of ‘materialising’ verbal symbolic statements in writing, no doubt for the same reasons as Socrates, he was demonstrating love in action in its various forms. Unlike Socrates he combined wisdom with amazing empathy. Positive feedback discombobulates the controlling transmitters’ lies and hatred, as Jesus demonstrated when he recommended “Love your enemies as you love yourself“, and “The Truth will set you free”. Jesus discombobulated his enemies, the Scribes, Pharisees and Sanhedrin, and despite their great knowledge of written texts and bureaucratic control of holiness, turned God’s Will and the Scriptures upside down. For Jesus, love replaced hate as the way to encourage obedience, and Yahweh, the angry, jealous, woman-hating warlord, was transformed by being transformed into a loving and forgiving father who left his children, the Jewish people, free to sin if they were prepared to pay the price. Instead of resisting evil, Jesus cleverly removed the sheep’s clothing worn as a disguise by the ravening wolves. He was discombobulating the bullying priestly discombobulators of simple, direct, uneducated but loving people, by turning their own techniques of superior knowledge and status against them, but for love, rather than for revenge or power for himself. Unlike most charismatic holy men, Jesus was regularly surrounded by independent young women in love with him. There were not his exploited mistresses. They financed his mission and became his disciples, along with the men he attracted who wanted to learn from him,
The theologically ‘re-imagined’ Christian Church that appeared soon after the Ascension was largely the literary creation of the wild-eyed, scary, but highly charismatic, Saul of Tarsus. He was a Pharisee, but was considered by others at the time to be neither a good traditional Jew nor a good follower of Jesus, whom he had himself had never met, but a Romano-Hellenistic-influenced enemy of both. Originally an enforcer for the temple in Antioch expelling heretical messianic Jews, he became an official persecutor of members of the fast-spreading Jesus movement. Then he suddenly had an earth shattering vision in which he claimed that Jesus forgave him and promised him eternal life if he believed and gave over his life to become a proselytising zealot He was also to bureaucratically organised churches. Like Jihadists Paul was a metaphysical necrophiliac, a miserable depressive with no elan vital, who could now look forward to a happy life at last in Heaven, especially should he be martyred. It is quite possible that Paul was ‘possessed’ by a visionary being in a very similar way as people are possessed by evil spirits. Satan is the father of lies and could have presented himself as Jesus. Saul, now Paul, was instructed to establish churches where they presumably had to share in Paul’s puritanical self-loathing and fear of the feelings aroused in him by women.
His personality reminds me of Karl Marx, the Jew-hating and God-hating Social Darwinist. His fanatical materialistic followers betrayed Christian Socialists such as Charles Kingsley who had instantly embraced evolution as spiritual aspiration and were giving capitalism a human face and heart. Marx resembles Paul in many ways: they both suffered from a painful skin disease, god-like self-conviction, and absolutely no sense of humour. Both had what the psycho-analyst Freud described as the “Death Wish”. A strange use of the word “wish”. But Freud was a self-confessed hysteric and father-hater, who also deeply hated his own patriarchal Jewish religion, identifying with Classical culture instead. His ideology was that man’s behaviour could be explained by the pleasure principle. Marxist intellectuals have been trying for a century to synthesise Marx and Freud into a single simple anti-theistic ideology
Following his life-changing seizure and revelation, Paul went to Jerusalem to tell Jesus’ family and followers, the Ebionites, the “good news” that he had been appointed by Jesus to found a new non-Jewish universal “Christian” Roman-Hellenistic church, based on his personal ideology and monopoly of written communication, and bureaucratic organisational skills. As a zero-sum thinker, Paul expected them to accept him as their leader. This impacted on them as had the behaviour of Jesus when he confronted the horrified Scribes and Pharisees, saying, like an old time prophet, “It is written but I say unto you”. Paul had to be rescued from the Ebionites by the Roman bodyguard.
The Unique Jewish religion of a “Sacred People”. A religion loyal to a contract with a male transcendental God, acting consciously (without the usual Magna Mater as a subconscious fertility matrix) was diametrically opposed to the alienated bourgeois intellectuals and their slaves in the urbanised Roman Empire. “Christian” Converts to Paul’s mission to the Gentiles as a self-described “Apostle”, although including dangerous opposition to the cult of the divinity of Emperors, at least avoided the relentless persecution suffered by the troublesome sacred Jewish people for whom religious practice was indissolubly linked to belief. Paul’s new theology was based on belief controlled by priests rather than common practice in daily life. The destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, and the later partial conversion of the Emperor, guaranteed the success of Paul’s new church. The Ebionites and other non-Pauline followers of Jesus disappear from history (meaning the extant official written narrative of the period). At the present time there are people, including well-trained female academic historians and archaeologists, looking for evidence of what happened to the suppressed activist Jesus Movement headed by Peter and James.
The essential foundations of the Greco-Roman Christian Church Paul founded with his distorted writings on the classical Greek ideas about love, are contradicted by his anger when opposed. His feelings were not based on love, but guilt. His disgust at being human, his enormous guilt over the killing of the redeemer, and his overwhelming desire for release from this evil world. This is not the life-affirming, unconditional, spontaneous, and existential love that Jesus preached and practised and whose anger was about wicked deeds (including lies and projection) not wicked feelings. Unmerited personal salvation was the foundation of Pauline theology and could only be achieved by unquestioning faith. Deeds became less and less relevant. The priests and intellectual wolves were now wearing the clothing of the crucified son, willingly sacrificed by his own father. The First Covenant had been revoked! The old, intellectually bankrupt and fear-based priestly jobsworths of the Jewish Sadducees and Pharisees had returned with a vengeance as the new Romano-Christian Church. The Pontifex Maximus simply became the Pope. For administrative purposes the Roman establishment preferred it to the cults of Sol Invictus and Mithras. However, the new religion retained the Gospels recording Jesus’ sayings and deeds illustrating the power of love to transform society which had which been transmitted orally for only a hundred years before being recorded. Jesus’ words and example, although half crippled by the bureaucrats administering Pauline subjective salvationist theology, did go on to play a major part in building our present civilisation.
Levity: Playful Fun as Praxis. By adding Levity to Logic and Love, I introduce another powerful way of discombobulating both smug, self-confident, closed-minded intellectuals and self-righteous puritanical bullies. What I insist on calling Levity in praxis has profound civilisation-changing potential like Logic in praxis and Love in praxis. I am obliged therefore to try and put the idea of Levity into historical context and to provide examples. I hope the reader will persevere.
Making fun of one’s masters, both spiritual and secular/political, is a defining characteristic of adventurous peoples living on the edge of civilisation. Of all of these, the Anglo-Saxons, with their uniquely strong love of fair play, dramatic stories of monsters, battles and adventure, together with fascination with existential nonsense and brain teasers, have been steadily building up a way to purge truth and goodness from corruption by status, class and power. With their mythodynamic stories of chivalrous knights, romantic love and clever peasants outsmarting giants etc., for hundreds of years they had been engaged in undermining the limited imaginations of the Pope’s enforcers, namely the arrogant and humourless Norman occupation forces.
The English were probably the most mixed race people in the world at the time and in the Eighteenth century they were called “the mongrel nation” by other European peoples. This came about partly because of the tens of thousands of soldiers posted on Hadrian’s Wall over the centuries, who were deliberately chosen from countries far from Britain, and who had intermarried with the locals and stayed on when the Romans suddenly left. Viking invasions and large scale settlements also contributed. For millennia, small boatloads of settlers had been coming to the shores of East Anglia and Kent. Much earlier, when the climate was more benign, a Megalithic maritime empire had formed which was centred on a great Neolithic religious complex based in the Orkneys. This linked all the island and coastal settlements between Scandinavia and Iceland. When the climate became colder the magic Altar Stone was moved to Stonehenge which became the new magical centre. For hundreds of years, tens of thousands of pilgrims came from Northern Europe to this complex awe-inspiring site.
Anglo Saxon England emerged from this as a model Romano-Christian nation whose foundations were planned by the learned Bede and carried out by the charismatic Christian king, Alfred the Great. The miracle of Guthrun’s spectacular conversion was one turning point. The Danes either converted or paid a tax. King Alfred built a navy, personally translated the Gospels into English, established schools, and even travelled to Rome to inform himself of continental developments and to keep the Vatican informed of what was happening in England.
The Roman Christians betray Christendom. Fast recovering from the gradual collapse of the Roman civilisation, the Church leaders based in Rome sneakily betrayed their besieged spiritual masters in Constantinople over and over again. They were still in their hearts Roman citizens. Early in the Eighth century they had forged a document claimed to be from Constantine, appointing the Patriarch of Rome as head of Christendom, thereby deliberately undermining the legitimate temporal authority of the Emperor and the legitimate overall spiritual authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Donation of Constantine was publicly revealed as a poor forgery in the fifteenth century. In the year 800 the Germanic Frankish warlord Charlemagne, who had conquered much of continental Europe and had cleverly absorbed the previous Lombard warrior kingdom, was crowned by the Pope in St Peters as “Holy Roman Emperor”.
Finally, in 1054, when Western Europe was on the road to political and economic recovery, the Pope sent envoys to Constantinople. In the magnificent Cathedral of Hagia Sophia itself they rudely picked a fight with the Imperial party over a detail in the Nicene Creed and split Christendom in two. Roman Catholic armies subsequently conquered and occupied Thessalonica, the second city of the Byzantine Empire, for decades. Western Roman armies, sent to help Byzantium against the threatening Islamic Jihadists, seized Constantinople, looted it and gave the delighted Pope a large share of the stolen treasure. The West has twice tried to conquer Russia but their hearts are turning, not Westward, but to recovering their lost empire of Byzantium. How can anyone accept the Roman Church’s exceptionalist certainty that they are the one true Christian Church? Without the armies of the schismatic Church of England coming to its rescue, Napoleon and Hitler would have reduced it to a shadow of its former self, as the Ottomans did to the Eastern Church. Under the Tsars (Caesars) the Eastern church morphed into the Russian Orthodox Church.
One Schism can beget another. In the sixteenth century Reformation, urban, business-owning, literate, heretical Protestants, bashing their new printed cheap bibles in the usual clerical way, rebelled against the Classical non-Christian humanistic revival of the Machiavellian money-lender-Popes. The English Christians joined in. They cleverly manipulated the Catholic King Henry VIII (obsessed with his dynastic succession) into founding the Church of England as another schismatic branch of Orthodox Christendom. In the process, the power of both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Monarch came to depend on the Parliament that backed the schism, and both monarchy and parliament astonishingly now depended on the mythodynamics of the Arthurian Romances, which had been used for hundreds of years to add charisma to the monarchs. This romantic tradition humanised crude Viking invaders as Ferdowsi’s “Shah Nameh” humanised the unimaginative Arab Jihadists who invaded them. The Persians even kept Farsi, their ancient Aryan language.
The Christian Anglo Saxon Kingdom named by Rome as Evil Pagans. In 1066, the Pope’s enforcers, the ex-Viking Normans, invaded England. They were carrying the Papal Banner authorising total war against pagans. At the same time the crowned English king Harold was occupied with successfully fighting off a northern invasion by another claimant to the throne allied with a member of his own family. William of Normandy quickly seized the land, replaced the Bishops with his own men (thereby breaking apostolic succession) and completely destroyed the complex Christian infrastructure of the fast developing Anglo-Saxon Kingdom.
However the oppressed Saxon subculture was not dead but waiting for an opportunity to re-emerge. The fourteenth century bilingual poet and diplomat, Geoffrey Chaucer, appeared as the culmination of a cultural process that, following the Black Death and the Hundred Years War on the continent, was uniting both English speaking and French speaking intellectuals in England. There are no great heroes or villains in the introduction to his wonderful classic “The Canterbury Tales”, just imperfect real human beings. In the Seventeenth century, after a terrible civil war, the brutal, republican Puritan regicides had completely worn out everyone’s patience. The King’s son was invited back from exile, and love, freedom, and fun returned to England. The English simply put the clock back and pretended that it never happened. You can stop progress!
As time went by brilliant intellectual discombobulating nonsense broke through. In the Eighteenth century “Tristram Shandy”, was written by Laurence Sterne, an Anglican clergyman who became the toast of London’s glitterati. During the apogee of the unique British Maritime Empire a new romantic culture blossomed with wisdom, beauty, and also playful existential fun. This extended from middle class family Pantomime, with its upside-down world based on fairy tales, to the popular and cheeky culture of urban working-class Music Halls. The ruling class even added Gilbert and Sullivan comic operettas to their high culture musical diet. Of these, “Iolanthe” is my favourite. The soldier guarding the Parliament sings “Every little boy and girl that is born alive, Is either a little Liberal or little Conservative”. Even my highly active imagination is stretched to its limit by the happy ending, where members of the House of Lords are carried away by the fairies to live in Fairyland. Since all cultures are human creations and Christians are granted free will, by adopting genuine Postmodernism we could copy and improve on that culture rather than Marxist economic determinism which has no sense of reason no sense of love and no sense of humour.
Postmodernism. Postmodernism became inevitable in 1915, following the wake-up call of the battles of the Somme and Verdun. Belief in any deterministic ideology, except satanic nihilism, was completely confounded. The distrust of lying nationalistic party politicians making unrealistic future promises and blaming their failures on the other parties, grew stronger with each catastrophic failure and subsequent doubling down. The complete collapse of the scientific reductionist materialistic and utilitarian Enlightenment cosmology, through relativity theory and quantum theories, also took place around the same time. True postmodernists, not Woke word-mongering, Murderous, Machiavellian, Marxist, Materialist, Millenarian wolves, wearing postmodernist clothing, are suddenly gifted with free will. We can now choose “myths to live by” which being retrieved from the subconscious since the evil horror of the apparently unstoppable industrial revolution. George Macdonald, Charles Kinsley, Lewis Carrol, William Morris and the host of other Christian mythmakers, culminating in C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, became extremely popular. They combined myth-making and Christian social reform without the stupidity of blindly dismissing major changes in our ideas of the nature of the objective world (especially regarding evolution and then quantum mechanics) and the unintended impact on the human sensorium of their technological developments.
The Miracle of Dunkirk. In 1939, the UK Government, trying to avoid upsetting Hitler’s feelings, and deeply allied with France for the first time, found itself plunged into another great war. They knew that the British Maritime Empire was much weaker than the German National Socialist war machine that had been perfected by the Prussian masters of military strategy, and who had been preparing for war for years. The UK Government had no choice but to use intelligence and resourcefulness, especially during the two years in which America sat on the fence, waiting to see which side would come out on top, whilst making a fortune selling weapons. In those days, before government enforced DEI commanded by their word-mongering spiritual masters in Davos destroyed capitalist meritocracy, British inventiveness was greatly stimulated. The British not only designed and quickly manufactured excellent fighters and bombers, but also developed major electronic advances such as radar. In order to crack the sophisticated Nazi Enigma coding machine, they even created the electronic computer which would go on to transform civilisation and destroy the sense-numbing monopoly of the printed word. Could you ever find, let alone bring together, such a genuine ‘diverse and inclusive’ group as those working at Bletchley? Intelligence was also shown in their military strategy of holding the fort and encouraging and supplying resistance movements on the continent, even sending convoys through dangerous icy seas to the USSR when Hitler suddenly broke his pact with Stalin, the man who most admired him, and invaded Russia.
I was a child at the time and shared in the few weeks of despair, when the French, who admittedly had lost so many troops in WW1, panicked and suddenly threw in the towel. After the miracle of Dunkirk the people experienced a sudden increase in morale and began to relish defying a truly evil, technologically advanced, and very determined enemy. Morale was high, though food and comforts were very scarce. “Dad’s Army” the TV comedy series made fairly soon after the war, is close to the truth as I experienced it as an evacuee in Weymouth on the South Coast, watching the evacuees from the conquered British Channel Islands arrive in the harbour.
The Weakening of the British Empire. The collapse of the complicated web of European alliances and costly subsequent First World War led to the fall of the inter-related royal houses who previously had great influence on diplomacy. This not only gravely weakened the Empire which had been acting as global policeman and peace keeper, but led to the rise of warmongering nationalism and anti-Christian socialism in both Russia and Germany. War broke out again as a result of the nationalist greed at the Versailles Peace Conference with the winners grabbing the spoils of the losers. Meanwhile the feudal Japanese had industrialised extremely quickly but felt they had been snubbed by the USA in their attempts to expand into Korea and China for oil in particular which they desperately needed. Having driven them back to their island homeland the Americans dropped newly developed atom bombs on two large Japanese cities and took control of Japan in 1945. A few months earlier the British, Americans and Russians who had taken over control of the Second World War from the British Empire in the name of a new entity called the “United Nations”, had forced Nazi Germany into unconditional surrender. With the support of the American government and dismay of non-socialists in the British Empire, the war-mongering communist Russian Empire was left standing and forcibly occupying Eastern Europe, including the Balkans and part of Manchuria.
America decided to abandon isolationism to become the “Leader of the Free World”. The US paid for the United Nations HQ to base itself in New York. This corrupt, unelected, bureaucratic, front organisation with no tax base or army of its own, provided respectable cover for both America, a plutocratic republic with an elected party politician as temporary king, and the communist bureaucratic republic of Russia, to become powerful rival empires. Now, bankrupted by standing alone for two years against the alliance between Hitler and Stalin, the complex structures of the well administered British Empire could be ‘deconstructed’ with the help of the postwar collaborationist socialist government in the UK and by UN fiat. America, using bribery (material aid to kleptocrats), and Russia using violent occupation (liberation) of the British and other European colonies could as economic partners in crime share the world between them. The fate of the peoples in the once flourishing and developing British Colonies is a story of shame that no-one dares to openly talk about.
The Bureaucratic “re-imagining” of The British Empire into The Commonwealth. During the Second World War and its aftermath, the British peoples were subjected to a tsunami of American popular culture accompanied by assumptions of American ethical, economic, political and even artistic supremacism. Massive American aid was given to Britain and Western Europe to stop Stalin’s plans to ferment revolution amongst the socialists and take over all of Europe. There were however strings attached. Not only would it have to be fully repaid (though in practise not by Germany or Russia) but US financial advisors came over to supervise the spending. This ensured the promotion of their own culture of consumerism, as well as subordination to their farcical bureaucratic front organisation, the United Nations (the new “World Policeman”). Built in to it all was American Exceptionalism, which included praising copycat teenagers, glamourising women who act like vulgar sex-objects, crudely mocking adult men, and of course villainising the British Monarchy and Empire against whom they had rebelled. As fellow members of the Anglo-sphere and as a nation based on an illegitimate, French-backed rebellion against their own founders and rulers, it was easy for them to undermine the traditional brave, and very British Christian refusal to bend the knee or, if compelled to, patiently waiting for an opportunity to take effective action.
The Godless Puritans re-emerge. At the end of the Second World War a socialist government with links to the Kremlin (strengthened during the war) had been elected. They continued and massively strengthened the welfare state control of the Coalition government that had been essential during the war to keep the people from starving or dying from cold or diseases, and which had even improved the health of the nation! Instead of lifting the restrictions, such as price control and nationalisation of private industries, to allow free enterprise to recover, they doubled down. Existing voluntary local Christian cooperatives, voluntary health services and private health insurance were crushed without compunction by the communist demagogue Nye Bevan the creator of the monstrous increasingly incompetent giant, the National Health Service. Was this the utopia promised in the wartime Beveridge Report?
Britain began to stagnate compared with West Germany in particular, which the USA, in practice, had made their closest ally. Proud, independent British culture, already weakened by American triumphalism that had begun to flourish after the First World War, was taking a nose dive, pushed over the cliff by an army of left wing welfare-state public servants and militant socialist trade unions. President Eisenhower, on election campaign, forced the UK to abandon their Suez Canal blocked by Nasser, a puppet of Soviet Russia, and brought down the British government. In the same year the US took absolutely no action to support the heroes of the popular democratic uprising in Hungary against the brutal Soviet occupiers. Sanity briefly returned in the 1980s when four unusually sane and virtuous individuals were in charge of the USA the UK, the USSR and the Vatican, and the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the Communist empire of the USSR was peacefully dismantled.
Levity becomes more Profound and Sensational. During the years immediately following 1945, the pressure caused by this grim situation in England created even more playful fun at the expense of the increasingly bureaucratic and incompetent state institutions. This was evidenced particularly in the commercial comedy films made by Ealing Studios and various comic radio programmes broadcast by the BBC. It all culminated in Spike Milligan’s inspired “Goon Show” which, like “Alice” and “The Hunting of the Snark”, took English Comedy into new realms of both the sublime and the ridiculous. The continuous interaction of the choleric Anglo-Saxon and melancholic Celtic cultures is best exemplified in this famous poem performed in a nasal sing-song by Spike himself.
I’m walking backwards for Xmas, across the Irish sea
I’m walking backwards for Xmas, it’s the only thing for me.
I’ve tried walking sideways and walking to the front
But people just laughed and said, “It’s a publicity Stunt!”
So I’m walking backwards for Xmas to prove that I love you.
Apart from Mark Twain and Al Capp’s L’il Abner, the American sense of humour is almost as puerile or self-hating as that of foreigners. It took decades for a small number of Americans to grasp the subtlety of “The Goon Show”. By contrast, many people in 1950s England, especially the young, were never the same again. ‘Bluebottle’, the little Boy Scout, was a completely new type of doomed but continually resurrected hero with whom Englishmen (including the young Prince of Wales, a friend of Spike’s) could identify. Milligan’s legacy culminated in the outrageous film Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, made possible only by being filmed in a non-Christian country with funding from George Harrison, the deeply religious member of the Beatles. Spike himself was given a cameo part as a tribute. I must also mention the BBC TV comedy series “Yes Minister”, making fun of a new MP finding out he had no power at all, being outmanoeuvred by the permanent public servants on whom he depended, terrified of his authoritarian party boss, doing anything to avoid looking bad in the media, and ignorant of the treachery of the lobbyists for national and international business sharks. A much more realistic guide than any unimaginative political science department would ever teach their students. Aristophanes would have approved however.
Ideology, Word Mongering, and refusal to live in the real world. The means of communication distorts both the means of production and the means of salvation. Analysis was finally applied to the field of symbolic human communication itself by Innis and Havelock. These were the founders of the Toronto School of Information Theory from which, in the 1960s, the “electronic prophet”, Marshall McLuhan suddenly appeared. A world expert in modern and postmodern English literature and influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, he began preaching from his television pulpit announcing the arrival of a new existential and more sensual age. Like Einstein, another playful oddball, who was not particularly good at maths and had only a slightly above average IQ, but whose completely original ideas about light and visible reality shattered conventional wisdom.
I too refuse to bend the knee to serious ideologically motivated bullies. Instead, using love, logic, and levity, I activate the cosmological Ideo-dynamics and Symbol-kinematics of my existential, fun revolutionary, non-reductionist, and postmodern, process cosmology. What can stop mankind now from choosing my adaptation of Teilhard de Chardin’s combination of subjective ‘involution’ and objective ‘evolution’ with radiant ‘e’ converging to unite at the Omega Point? My dynamic identity fields of intention are inspired by Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance, and my cultural ideo-dynamics kept from fixation on belief or action by McGilchrist’s pioneering work on the cerebral hemispheres. I used the Classical Four Temperaments to account for personality kinematics. Like Whitehead’s process cosmology I avoid his fallacy of misplaced concreteness and all is based on what happens or what we assume happens. Popper’s falsifiability tool keeps dogmatic belief at bay.
What a powerful new discombobulating weapon is the power of careful chosen words to protect us all from ideologically-motivated madmen and fools, desperately undermining love in action, common sense in action, and courageous animal elan vital. The time has come for existential Fun Revolutionaries to implement carefully crafted and imaginative practical jokes to continually discombobulate the stupid. I have set an example of this many times over the past half century. Now, inspired by the recent publication of Carlos Eire’s daring history “They Flew”, I can assert with confidence that man’s deep inherited Promethean desire to ascend and Kierkegaard’s ‘Leap of Faith’ can be regarded as a rational aspiration. We can start sending ourselves up to make our rigid egos more flexible! In my legitimate role as an existentialist hunter-gather shaman, I made an attempt to do this on my 42nd birthday in 1974. Humourless people however stopped me getting my imagination experiment off the ground. It didn’t even need to succeed. It was a practical joke at my own expense. What has been stopping me so far from making any impact on the reality controllers? I quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words written in prison awaiting execution by the German National Socialist Worker’s Party:
“Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
CONCLUSION
Some other quotes to stimulate badly-educated intelligences
From Chemistry and Bergman would come the basic paradigm of elective affinity, from literature and Goethe its application to the portrayal of social relationships, from philosophy and Kant the affinity of all things and their possibility. Weber opposed elective affinities to Mechanistic causation and quasi-organological functionalism. Weber’s thought moves in concepts between the elective affinities of existence and consciousness.
Jerome Bruner. “A self is probably the most impressive work of art we ever produce.”
Wittgenstein. “The work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself.”
Enoch Powell. “All history is myth. It is a pattern that men weave out of the materials of the past. The moment even a true fact enters into history it becomes mythical, because it has been taken and fitted into its place in a set of ordered relationships which is the creation of a human mind and not otherwise present in nature.”
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I leave the last words to Einstein. We can now leave Socrates’ cave and walk out into the real world:
“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It will transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology.”
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”
“Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world.”