THE
BLOB

Some penetrating observations by The Wizard of New Zealand, QSM

Christchurch, New Zealand, 2017

                             

                       

CONTENTS

THE BLOB

Foreword

Part One:   What is The Blob?

Part Two:   Where did it come from?

Part Three: Is the Blob still growing?

Part Four: The Blob and I

                                

THE BLOB AND I

Who am I? and Why Me?

                       

FOREWORD

We have seen the Future and it doesn’t work! As in the influential Communist Manifesto, I am combining both description and prescription here. Unlike that document however I do not call upon History as an inevitable unilinear progression. I consider History to be a man-made and deliberately biased selection of events designed to justify and conceal the political action that ambitious people personally desire. Nor do I urge others to follow my instructions, but just to copy my example. Instead I call upon Fun as an authentic motivation unpolluted with fake certainty about the future which does not belong to us but to those who will have to live in it. Let fun be the spectre that haunts those madmen who believe they know what the future will and should bring. We can only do our best to know what happened in the past and learn from it. Like the writers of the Communist Manifesto, I mix historical analysis and philosophical concern with abuse of those who I believe deserve it and to provoke controversy. I place myself at the head of the Fun Revolution since it has become clear to me after fifty years that no one else is going to do it.

Together Logic, Love and Levity will help guide our steps forward into the unknown. What starts here as a rather depressing description ends up as an uplifting narrative. This essay makes one fundamental assumption that I reached in 1968, that if our civilization continues on its present course we will shortly cause the irreversible collapse of the biosphere. Instead of denial or irrational panic, I decided to make a careful study of how we reached this situation and spent fifty years experimenting to find the most effective way to avoid negative confrontation and to persuade influential people to accept a new cosmological paradigm with a more evolved set of values than those embedded in the mechanistic ideology of progress. As an evolutionary social scientist, I anticipate a sudden world-wide cultural phase change into a process-based cosmology, transmitted through the electronic media.

Love without Logic is barren; Love without Levity is suffocating: Logic without Love is meaningless: Logic without Levity is out of control; Levity without Love is vindictive; Levity without Logic is asinine.  Love without Levity or Logic is juvenile; Levity without Love or Logic is suicidal; Logic without Love or Levity is Dr Frankenstein’s monster of artificial intelligence sparked into life by electricity.

Part One:
WHAT IS THE BLOB?   

Sometimes a potent metaphor is stumbled upon which clarifies what was previously only vaguely sensed. A few years ago, Michael Gove, the British education minister, found all his attempts to reform the failing education system blocked by a conglomerate of bureaucrats, academics and teachers’ unions. He began referring to them as “The Blob”, presumably after the 1958 science fiction film about an amorphous mass from outer space that absorbed human beings like a giant amoeba. However, I believe this blob came from inner-space. He may have underestimated the extent and rapid growth of the Blob which is mindlessly heaving and swelling and threatening to absorb the whole of mankind.

The Blob, which originated as the military-industrial complex that evolved rapidly during the Reformation and Enlightenment in Europe has succeeded in absorbing most of the education-controlling institutions Not only those driven by materialistic utilitarian aims, which are validated by reduction to digital economic assessment in a money-governed economy. It has even absorbed the traditional universal churches which claim validation by their commitment to transcendental love. Having lost their professional ethics and independence, these institutions were quickly corrupted by the economic and political aims of the military-industrial-ideological complex.

This largely covert anti-cultural phenomenon which had an early start in ancient Rome was restarted in protestant England and Holland with their reformed religious monarchies under attack from the Papal armies. It was then exported to enlightenment America and later took root in newly unified Germany. The complex mushroomed during the two World Wars and continued to grow during the cold war especially in the USA. Academics stood by as independent newspapers and telecommunication networks were furtively taken over and formed into a small number of monopolies by businessmen who would never allow a journalist to reveal the truth about the “concrescence” of the life-blood-sucking, war-mongering, currency-manipulating, information-controlling and fake-news-creating, Blob.

The amorphous mass of incorporated institutions which make up the Blob is united by one over-riding aim, “the will to power”. Since the late 19^th Century this has increasingly become the leitmotif of Western Civilization. The institutions and the individuals trapped in them have become so entangled that any sign of personal responsible action based on “the will to love” creates cognitive dissonance and hysteria and is punished by marginalisation, accusations of anti-social ego-tripping, racism, sexism etc. and even dismissal and impoverishment. No rational explanation needs to be given. The rule of law itself is being over-ruled by a revised version of Jacobin doctrine now disconnected from economic inequality but still based on the absolute value of egalitarian outcome. New human rights are created not based on economic status but on somatic differences such as gender, sexual preferences, skin colour and ethnicity. These are applied with the full force of new laws based on the subjective interpretation of “hurt feelings”.

The rights and responsibilities of such fundamental, organic and reciprocal social-role relationships as mother/child, husband/wife, citizen/ foreigner etc., based on the will to love, are being dissolved in an acid bath of hate based on the will to power. The only roles that have retained their unquestionable legitimacy are those of the managerial classes who have no human values other than power to enforce their rapidly multiplying new legalistic rules. Managers are skilled at taking power and avoiding responsibility. They are aided in this by the targeted use of fear and hysteria in the mass education and mass media institutions to demonise conservative critics who regard free speech and the rule of law as far more important than bureaucratic obfuscation and hypothetical hurt feelings.

Challenges to the Omnipotent Blob

The world has witnessed the power of the Blob in the recent campaign for the presidency of America. Like a Jack-in-box, a wealthy entrepreneur, who had become a media celebrity, popped up using the cunning tricks of his profession to outsmart his rivals in the Republican party who lacked his performance skills and did not have the media celebrity machine behind them, to become the Republican Candidate. The Blob rose up to absorb this outsider and the world watched in horror as respected ruling elites began hurling excrement like Swift’s disgusting Yahoos. The previous Democratic Party’s warmongering foreign policies of regime change which led to moving US and NATO troops up to the western border of Russia and the unmonitored pouring of weapons into Syria to overthrow the non-Sunni government, escapes all criticism by those who have been absorbed into the Blob and have lost all their mental marbles. The raging fury against Trump was almost off the meter. This Antichrist has not only legally dodged paying some income tax but private recordings of his locker room boasting about bottom pinching and groping thirty years ago, produce reactions like old ladies when someone says ‘bum’ at a tea party. A reasonable case for building a monitored wall between Mexico and the USA to act as national border to control the out-of-control drug trade and massive illegal immigration was made independently before the election, and Trump’s isolationist plans to avoid regime change and confrontation with Russia over Syria (which the deep state soon forced him to abandon) was regarded as proof that he is the demonised Putin’s stooge and enemy of America. This also enabled them to distract Americans away from the actions of their real enemy communist China, who with the help of global institutions was hollowing out their  economy whilst covertly building up their massive military.

Such a furore was not even anything new. A few weeks earlier, in the case of Brexit, the British Government, confident of winning, made the colossal mistake of letting people vote in a referendum to decide if they would remain in the European Union or leave it. There was no reasoned debate, since nearly all the mass media and mass education institutions were embedded in the Blob. The Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, produced fake future economic projections which prophesied terrifying consequences if the people voted to leave the trading agreement, which had slowly morphed to become an irresponsible political superpower or “blob” run by Germany. Against all protocol, President Obama personally intervened shortly before the referendum by appearing on TV to warn the people of Britain that if they voted to leave they would end up “at the back of the queue” in future trade deals with the USA!  Which leader of which super power is influencing voting in an important election in another country here?

However, to everyone’s amazement and against the directives of all the main political parties, the people voted to leave what had become in practice the United States of Europe. Since was structured by the Euro, in turn controlled by the Deutsche Bank it would be better called the Fourth Reich. The people of the British Isles have a deep desire for independence and hundreds of years of resisting attempts by continental powers, like the Papacy and the enlightened dictator Napoleon to invade them and turn them into their puppets. The Blob was forced to retreat, cursing those who wanted Britain to regain their sovereignty and the power to make their own laws.  The Brexiteers were abused as racists and mocked as ignorant rural yokels or senile old fools by the glittering metropolitans and media luvvies living in luxury in London, the great banking city. For the first time the Blob showed it was not all-powerful!

                                     

Who are the main players in the Blob?

It’s an impressive list. The financial wizards who rule the world by manipulating the currencies through criminal financial institutions; the gigantic global corporations, who by becoming legal persons in law cannot be held accountable for their piratical practices; the hedge-funders, stock-marketeers etc. in cahoots with corrupt banksters who help them manipulate the value of stocks, many of them fake; and the political parties who make lying promises to the electorate to get into power and who will loot the tax-take to bail the creditors out when their crooked schemes back-fire. They are too big to fail! Also in the Blob, is the commercial mass media, with very few exceptions a monopoly all singing from the same page, and together with the tax-payer-supported universities, teachers’ colleges and teachers’ unions of the secular education system, they provide the smoke-screen behind which the evil financial wizards are hidden. The gutless second-rate intellectuals in the traditional Christian churches, who daren’t be rude to the usurers manipulating their governments, or the Islamic Jihadists funded by oil-rich fundamentalist regimes, slaughtering their colleagues in the original churches in Syria and turning a blind eye to female genital mutilation and sexual slavery, have also been absorbed by the Blob.

All are being digested in the acid bath of the Blob, no matter how much they struggle, they cannot escape and are being turned to spineless pap. Although most of its individual components are salaried professionals always rather than wage-earners, the Blob acts a whole. It is a unitary and hyper-sensitive and increasingly hysterical emotional being compressed into a monetised managerial carapace. When its expansion is blocked, virtue-signalling like mad, the Blob spews out a cloud of fake news, politically-correct poison gas and unverifiable accusations of personal scandal etc.

Clearly the sovereignty of nation states is being seriously eroded by secret managerialised trade agreements, empowering free-floating global corporations with new laws which overrule the laws of previously sovereign states. The aim is to establish a new form of globalised imperialism without any cultural values, such as truth, beauty or goodness, which the economist Michael Hudson is calling Super-imperialism. Who else is being destroyed by the Blob? Professional associations lose control over their members and are instead subject to the orders of ill-informed, short-sighted bean-counting managers. Independent blue-collar workers are being rapidly impoverished, made homeless, and driven into servile dependency on the beneficiary system. Even the lower echelons of the white-collar class are suffering, and new information technology will soon drive them down into penury. Peasants all over the world who have lived for generations in balance with their natural environment are being “developed” against their will, by having their land seized, subjected to compulsorily secular education and urbanised. They watch horrified as their traditional cultural values are destroyed. The Blob knows what’s good for them, whether they like it or not, and is addicted to its power!

    

The Psychological, Social and Cultural Phenomenon of the Blob 

As Shakespeare put it, “All the World’s a stage”, but few people question the script or cultural scenario. All human beings live in cultures with adaptive and integrative values such as truth, goodness and beauty, which are institutionally structured and provide the necessary roles to implement the values. These role actors in turn are recruited from families who first socialise the young.  Regardless of the firm belief of the huge army of left-leaning educationalists, the psyches of the children are not tabula rasa. Although partly formed by their parents training and example and life experiences, they also partly formed by what ethologists call deep inherited innate response mechanisms which Jung and the ethologists show have been evolving for millions of years. 

I have been describing the Blob as an internally-consistent, collective cultural psychosis. All cultures up till now can be at least partly described this way but they vary widely in the amount of coercion needed to ensure enduring integration and adaptation to their environments. In the past Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were collective psychotic states maintained by extreme coercion. Today Communist North Korea is a good example of this, and the Kingdom of Bhutan is a good example of the opposite.

Scientology; a Blob within The Blob

Blob-like entities using extreme coercion can exist within less psychotic nation states even though unable to call upon the services of their own armed police or military. I can think of no better example than Scientology, which has achieved a degree of success not reached by other totalitarian religious cults. Their cultural scenario is no more than the cheap science fiction fantasy of its founder, a paranoid schizophrenic. This is hidden to most and is not itself the attraction of this fake secular religion with its modernist aliens instead of traditionalist gods. Like secular education in general, the attraction is the promise of increased self-awareness and personal power to ‘improve’ the current world. Unhappy and disturbed people want to change the world but most of them are attracted to the social sciences to learn how to do it. Gnosis or secret knowledge of the higher truth is only revealed to adepts after thousands of hours of study under teacher-guides. These teachers use a simple galvanic skin response meter they have renamed an “E-meter” to magically provide a “scientific” measure of the accuracy of their statements so they can move up to the next of an unending series of levels of consciousness. Our civilization’s absolute commitment to education as a continuously monitored process motivated by future promises of status, power and money, has reached its apogee in Scientology. Like the student loan racket and mushroom growth in the state tertiary education systems, adepts soon become deeply indebted and work at slave labour rates for their masters to settle the debts incurred.

Within this mini-Blob are all the important professionals that can be found in the big Blob, especially media manipulators, masters of business administration and lawyers. In the absence of legal, uniformed police, there are a huge number of Gestapo-like private investigators who intimidate those who manage to escape, as well their families, and who spread fake news about them and their colleagues and friends through the social media. Foolish media celebrities are flattered and feted and treated like spoilt brats to provide status to this increasingly wealthy organization which has invested widely in property, like those at the top of the pyramid of the world-wide Blob. Its psychopathic current leader, who has achieved almost absolute power within the organization, enjoys humiliating people and beating them up. Scientology, even with its naïve scientism, has a sophisticated propaganda machine, employs an army of corrupt lawyers and makes widespread use of fear. It is therefore an excellent example of how a collective psychosis can be created and sustained within a much saner society. This is only possible when the wider society itself is disintegrating and traditional values are being deconstructed by power-addicted academic social science educationalists.

“All You Need is Love” becomes “All You Want is Power”

There was a brief period in our recent history when the will to love and laugh suddenly arose to defy the fear that accompanies the will to power. For more than ten years the popular English masters of fun led by Spike Milligan’s imaginative “Goon Show” broadcast weekly by the BBC throughout the remains of the British Empire, had been revealing the absurd behaviour of the boring rulers of the new post-war establishment of money and power. At that time, young English musicians coming from this background, as well as skiffle and traditional British folk music, began their transformation of the underground rather self-pitying blues music. Beatlemania infected people from all walks of life. The Beatles visit to America in kick-started the public recognition of the marginalised rhythm and blues and folk music in the USA which was long overdue. Other English musical groups and pop artists soon followed. Meanwhile the West Coast Hippies, influenced by the international thinkers gathered at the Esalin Institute, including environmentalists, psychologists, sociologists and theologians from both East and West, were challenging not only the conformist consumer culture but the very foundations of western industrial society.

“It was the Best of Times, it was the Worst of Times”                           

This was how, in the opening lines of “The Tale of Two Cities”, Charles Dickens described a similar historical situation in the late eighteenth century. This was the most popular and best-selling novel in history even more so than “Lord of the Rings”. This brilliant literary description popularised the process by which a bad social system metamorphosed into a worse one. For a few years there was a new hope and trust that civilization could be revitalised but the terror created by the enlightened egalitarian lawyers led by the Directorate and secretly backed by banksters only ended with dictatorship and military bloodbaths.

The American “Gung Ho” go-it-alone attempts to stop the spread of Soviet Imperialism in Vietnam led to the eclipse of the newly arising will to love. They had halted the Soviet push successfully in Korea, when they worked together with the United Nations. This time they used fake news about a naval incident that never took place as an excuse to start the war and tried to run it by remote control, using computers, chance-based conscription and with local people as puppet soldiers. Communist Russia, who were the more secretive puppet masters of the communist North, as they had been in Korea, took advantage of the resulting incompetent, indiscriminate and ineffectual American violence, especially against civilians. They made a determined attempt to destroy the USA from within by a barrage of propaganda aimed at the “useful idiots” in the universities which had suddenly grown in numbers, especially in the arts  departments. These young people apparently had no appreciation of the role being played by the Soviet Russians in what was essentially a Vietnamese civil war between the fanatical industrial north versus the corrupt agricultural south.

In the USA hatred of their own country filled the air and the alternative society lost its autonomy by joining in to become an alienated counter-culture. Soon the word “power” as the reason for action replaced the word “love” and images of clenched fists replaced those of flowers. Even the majority of the hippies, who had sought independence from the intolerant authority of their seniors through practising a life-style based love and freedom, abandoned their original search for community and lost themselves in the mindless escapism of drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

Ressentiment

A hundred years ago the philosopher, Max Scheler, showed how Nietzsche’s “ressentiment”, a psychological mechanism he claimed was based on the “will to power”, operates in weakening or even inverting such fundamental values as virtue, love, self-sacrifice, modesty and healthy living. The psychological deformity produced by the will to power is experienced as an irrational sense of moral superiority and is extremely hard for psychotherapists to cure.  Scheler claimed that Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity as weakness was no doubt influenced by Darwin and blinded him to the importance of its great rival, “the will to love”. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, only imperfectly understood, had already laid the foundations for the false and wicked idea of survival of the fittest. This reduced the complex ecosystems of life and its social arrangements into mere retrospective and tautologous “survival” of individual organisms through fighting, fornicating and fertility, now being seen as the meaning of life. This becomes the justification for Social Darwinist ideology which commits its believers, both capitalist and socialist, to the view that organisms are survival machines with no authentic autonomous intentionality or agency.

A terrible mistake is often made by those self-righteous individuals, often with an inferiority complex, who believe in power for its own sake. They delude themselves and protect their fragile egos with the belief that attacking and destroying what they believe to be evil is more important than protecting and cherishing what they believe to be good. This is exactly what the young Jihadist martyrs of ISIS believe. Developing wisdom, courage and unassertive self-sacrifice, requires much more ego-strength. Such angry, self-righteous people are completely opposed to the reflexive Golden Rule of Confucius. Jesus took reciprocal love even further with Agape which involved forgiving one’s enemies even though they have intentionally harmed one. Such love is offered freely without calculation, like Shakespeare’s “quality of mercy” which cannot be enforced and may even be rejected.

Born in the Universities as Student Power

I believe that it was in the new sociology departments of the 1960s that the Blob originated, or at least took on its present autonomous form. It could be said to have been conceived on the campus at Berkeley as the “free speech movement’ in the mid-1960s. This meant free speech only for the power-seeking, self-loathing, left-wing of course. Following 1968, that amazing year of cultural transformation, it was finally born as the “anti-free speech movement’ in the universities which exploded in the early 1970s. Anyone who criticised the shallow left ideology and violent behaviour of the student power leaders, who had suddenly taken over the student unions and their funds together with the student newspapers, was shouted down, marginalised and threatened with violence.

Universities were the first publicly funded institutions in the West since WW2 to openly prevent free speech by the use of force. The cowardly and increasingly bureaucratised academics did nothing. Consequently, forty-five years later, following the 2016 victory of a non-Blob Republican Party candidate in the American election, the infantile and hysterical behaviour of many academics, administrators and students in senior universities in their self-righteous echo-chambers, has been unbelievably bizarre.

The founders and leaders of the 1970s ‘ressentiment’-motivated protest movement throughout the Western World were so driven by their will to power that they soon reached important positions in the political, educational and media institutions. The traditional authorities were despised for their out-date values of love, tolerance, a sense of humour and concern for their people. They were now described as “patronising”, “cosmetic”, or “propping up an evil system”. Cutting-edge, progressive, administrative ideas were embraced by the rising classes of enlightened, salaried, white-collar executives in the cities, regardless of the consequences for the working classes and rural dwellers. They regarded such people as uneducated fascists, sexists and racists anyway or even worse, bigoted and deluded Christians. This bourgeois empowerment process was not new, but it accelerated in the universities, now almost completely devoted to serving Mammon, and they soon went out of traditional control to embrace infantile continuous micro-managing assessment and to expand rapidly. Student loans were extended to all. This rendered the universities very vulnerable to become integrated into the monetised managerial Blob.

 

The Axial Age Origins of Contemporary Consciousness

All human beings, except madmen and soulless mechanical bureaucrats, live as role actors in social groups whose interaction can only take place if there is some sort of symbolic validation. Since the Axial Age of around 600 BCE that validation has taken forms depending ultimately on either some transcendental supernatural authority or on reductionist materialistic utilitarianism. Put simplistically, either The Mandate of Heaven or the Mandate of The People. Accordingly, personal validation and purely personal agency is uncommon. However, experience teaches us that only single “liminal” individuals acting solely on their own personal authority can deconstruct the Blob as the mercurial Nigel Farage and the egoistical but cunning deal-making Donald Trump in their limited ways have shown. In terms of Victor Turner’s theory of social transformations, both major American political parties are, at the time of writing, “social anti-structures” and both will be going through the “communitas” stage before becoming revitalised social structures. The Brexit phenomenon in the UK went much deeper but no politically organised group has arisen yet in the splintered multi-party arena to represent those who voted to leave. The signs in Continental Europe of discontent over the loss of cultural identity are more hopeful for the development of such temporary political social anti-structures.

 

Reductionist Identity Politics

The influential post-war Parisian school of deconstructionists were neo-Marxists who criticised the values of the institutions in contemporary society as little more than cosmetic manifestations of the Nietzschean “will to power”. They were academic intellectuals employed by the state whose assessments would determine the employment prospects of their students in the French public service.  One can imagine the fate of any of their students who dared to disagree with their virtue-signalling teachers. They would soon experience the workings of naked power for themselves. Despite their deliberately obscure language and neologisms, these academics became celebrity intellectuals and by the 1970s social scientists everywhere ceased analysing social systems as interlocking reciprocating role-action complexes and had adopted their mechanistic conflict models. In their new view, human individuals are little more than biological machines and consequently can’t act out roles, their behaviour is ‘determined’ by Social-Darwinist “historical inevitability” which, like the “market forces” of the atheistical capitalists, is also a loveless, puritanical mechanism. People who act out their social roles responsibly are despised as superficial conformists. At the mere thought of a violent Jacobin uprising, like the hyped-up student riots in Paris in 1968, they become as excited at the prospect of the catastrophic end of civilization as a deranged schizophrenic prophet of doom.

The Blob actively discriminates against those responsible people who hold society together. Human rights legislation, which can be imposed over the customary law of the land, not only carries few if any reciprocal responsibilities but in practise only applies to certain categories of being human. “Some people are more human than others”. To break down any collective resistance to their increasing power over everyone’s lives, teachers, who are all now certified in the mass compulsory secular education system, have been trained, without necessarily being conscious of this, to create deep divisions in the population through new gender, racial and religious “identity politics”.

 

Inventing Identity Politics to Destroy the Will to Love

The first step is to identify a target group who must be made by their educators to feel like victims and to be told who to blame. Secular human rights without any reciprocal responsibilities were adopted from the French Revolution and are imposed by coercion or by emotional blackmail. Women are still being told they must be ‘empowered’ or risk being ridiculed by their intellectual superiors and are encouraged to turn against their sons, husbands and fathers who, being male, are ipso facto, “sexists”. Women cannot be sexists because they were born as “victims”. Women are no longer allowed to act as responsible mothers, exercising authority over male children so that they can love them and be held accountable, because they are not role actors they are just women. Men are no longer allowed to act as responsible husbands exercising authority over their wives so that they can love them, and be held accountable for their treatment of them, because they are not role actors they are just men. Men however can’t be victims, because they are all born as sexists.

The result is that children are being continuously encouraged in the mass media and mass educational systems to reject the authority of their parents, and for the first time in history all wives are being urged by governments who control the compulsory education institutions to reject the status authority of their husbands in all fields of competence. The common cultural values that bind communities and nations had to be destroyed to prevent any democratic opposition to the increasing power of the Blob. Racial and religious minorities were targeted and told they were victims of discrimination unless they compelled the members of the traditional society they had chosen to live in to abandon their own traditional values and grant them equal rights. In England, some schools banned the celebration of Christmas because it might upset recent Muslim immigrants. No-one considered banning Islamic holy days in their Madrassahs and the Blob-controlled government turned a blind eye to the teaching of an extreme version of the Jihadist philosophy that Christians and Jews were not human but evil. Fundamentalist Moslems were not even prevented from preaching the virtues of female genital mutilation and execution of homosexuals. Sharia law does derive its authority from the Koran, it was created by the priesthood to give themselves more power over believers. In Europe and North America and elsewhere those diehards consistently practising their Christian and traditional humanistic values are being defined as racists and discriminated against. Religious and racial minorities can’t be racists because the educationalists in the Blob have defined them as ipso facto victims.                

                        

The Blob Empowers itself at Everyone Else’s Expense.

The Blob doesn’t just divide and rule, it aims blindly at the progressive destruction of the traditional culture of an entire people using recently-arrived ignorant minority groups, married women irrationally reverting to their roles as mothers and treating their husbands as children, and rebellious immature youngsters. The aim is to undermine the entire ideological and historical foundations of successfully functioning cultures. Responsible love without legitimate power is impotent. Irresponsible power without responsible love is tyrannical. In other words, The Blob.

The professional monetised-managers (social engineers) in the Blob who control the bureaucratically-administered empowering process through their monopoly of education, thrive on creating victims and disempowering those people trying to love them. No-one notices or points out that this empowering and disempowering process makes them all dependant on the Blob, which is itself greatly empowered by it. “One Ring to rule them all.”

Neophilia replaces respect for the wisdom of the past and, as the magician-poet W.B. Yeats prophesied just after the First World War, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned”. From another famous poem written earlier by Matthew Arnold the words “where ignorant armies clash by night” evoke similar dread. The corporate Blob’s destruction of human communities is facilitated not only by the all-encompassing Nanny State bureaucracy funded by compulsory income tax but is increasingly empowered by new “hate-speech” laws. Having begun in the universities in 1968, free speech, that most precious protection against the growth of tyranny, is being redefined, stifled and legally punished. If any collectivity defined as a targeted victim group, women for example, claims that their feelings have been hurt by a statement which may or may not be true and where no specific act of discrimination of any kind can be shown, action can still be taken to punish the offender. As in witch hunts, incestuous religious cults, lynch mobs or street riots, the individual ego boundaries are blurred by hysteria, basic values are weakened, distorted or even inverted, and highly infectious “ressentiment” takes over. It is not easy for individuals who have been through such traumatic experiences to fully recover their individual autonomy and self-love and there are some who become addicted to provoking, organising and leading ressentiment-motivated social behaviour as it gives them the addictive “high” of personal power to coerce others.

Part Two:
WHERE DID THE BLOB COME FROM?

The Blob, although a global phenomenon, is a very recent emergent. To understand its essential structure and function and to prepare ourselves to survive its attacks and to take evasive action, we should look at the history of explanations of the overall meaning of life, or cosmology, that are relevant. The last coherent cosmology in the West was created by St Thomas Aquinas and the Christian Scholastics before the mercantile-industrial society replaced the previous agricultural civilization in Europe. Their cosmology depended on control and feedback and even allowed for qualitative upgrading through the awaited Second Coming. All levels in the hierarchy of being were controlled through the governor’s will to love, supported by the will to power. Active “participation” of all levels in the process, provided the feedback. The Governor in this cosmology was an ingenious synthesis of Aristotle’s power-based rational Prime Mover, a hierarchical neo-Platonic aesthetic being, and the religious love-based moral Christian Trinity of transcendental governor, human exemplar and all-pervading immanent spiritual energy.

                                      

The Scientific Revolution

The new less-inclusive and much less-coherent metaphysics assumed by the materialistic technician-scientists of the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution and updated in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, was of a heartless, machine-making, monotheistic god and his mathematically validated mechanism they called Nature. This was not an integrated cosmology and its designers deliberately excluded what they dismissed as irrelevant and useless metaphysics from their consideration. Since they believed the material and biological universe was a soulless mechanism they could not imagine there would be any “participation” or feedback from the lower levels. The cosmos was no longer “other than the sum of its parts”. The technician-scientists were motivated to understand the various laws of nature so that they could achieve improved control over them. The measure of what represented improvements was based on better physical functioning of the body as machine and the more efficient manufacturing and distribution of commodities which market forces would deliver. Increasingly religion was being “explained” as outdated superstition holding up the “historical inevitability” of material progress.

Survival of the Fittest Fighting, Fornicating, Fertility Machines

In the Nineteenth Century, inspired by the utilitarian mechanist metaphor, anti-theistical, materialistic scientists found a new “retrospective explanation” for all life including mankind, as survival of the fittest organisms selected by chance through purely mechanistic causation. This evolutionary theory was an old one, but new data and geological advances made the case more convincing. Social-Darwinists extrapolated from this new biological explanation the belief that “the will to power” was the only true dynamic that drove political and economic development. This theory fell upon fertile ground. In rapidly industrialising Europe, psychological forces were building up for a fight. Catastrophic violence followed. Wars were fought between secular states armed with ever more deadly weapons and traditional peace treaties based on compromise were replaced by total victory or total defeat, “survival of the fittest military-industrial machine.”

 

Globalisation and Bureaucratisation

Human cultures either expand or contract. Local deities either become world religions or decline and may even disappear. Since the early Iron Age, the general trend has been for the universalising market forces of urban manufacturers to progressively demolish rural fertility technicians and believers in salvation from sin. They were transformed into manufacturing technicians and spellbound worshippers of commodities. Local and even national economies are either absorbed into the global economy or go out of business. The scientific-technological revolution, the harnessing of steam and the burning of fossil fuels made Britain, then Europe and America, industrial giants. Their expansionist colonial policies destroyed rival cultures and established market economies throughout most of the world. Now, other superpowers are rising.

The USA Seizes a Unique Opportunity but Drifts Towards the Rocks

The dollar of the Reserve Bank of America was established in 1944 as the new world currency after Europe was bankrupted by two world wars. The USA has been maintaining its dominance by force of arms ever since. In 1971, the American government legally detached their currency from its material base in gold. The anchor having been cut loose, the entire global economy began to drift towards the rocks. There was now no limit to the manipulation of the commodity value of paper currency by banks, governments and currency speculators. The sovereignty of nation states was being dissolved by the legally unrestrained market forces of laisser faire economics and the legalisation of globalised monopolistic corporations as “persons” in law. The monetised managerialism of the Blob became the new world order.

                         

Voluntaristic Love replaced by Compulsory Legislation

This was accompanied by increasing secularisation through welfare-state legislation including compulsory education aimed mainly at white-collar job creation. Although based on the will to love, which it inherited from the declining and despised religious welfare institutions, providing these welfare services needed a power structure to be effective. The welfare-warfare states were, like communism, organised by highly centralised bureaucracies administered by the secular central governments and were therefore not love-based and voluntary, but power-based and compulsory. They were financed by a high level of compulsory taxation which considerably increased the numbers and the power of the administrative bureaucracy of the central state. The monopoly of teacher training, school curricula and certification, health care and welfare, and grants to the politically correct or transgressive arts, resulted in a massive arrogant bureaucracy which frequently over-ruled voluntary associations with love-based aims This produced a deep sense of powerlessness and despair. Their distrust of the citizenry in common sense matters led to free citizens being treated like the domesticated animals in a fenced-in farm. Others saw it as mature adults being transformed into irresponsible children bossed around by the health-and-safety and politically-correct social control engineers of the Nanny State. Consequently, deep cultural values were replaced by and shallow fashionable anti-tradition-based modern ideas of identity imposed by secular education and backed up by the mass media of escapist entertainment with its puppet celebrities or “luvvies” as the new role models.

The Blind and Irresponsible Collective Will to Power

A hundred years ago the intellectual rationale of the mechanistic cosmology and its supernatural designer created during the mercantile-industrial Enlightenment, collapsed and broke into innumerable irreconcilable fragments. Most scientists in the specialised university departments and research laboratories simply ignored this and carried on their sponsored utilitarian work in the universities and technical institutes. When “the Centre cannot hold”, the disintegration of any coherent world view leads to cognitive dissonance, schizophrenia and the inevitable emergence of the blood-stained Blob.

In the absence of any coherent metaphysics the Blob acts as a blind, irresponsible collective will to power. There is no narrative other than the belief of the reductionist atomists of ancient Miletus in unending, godless, material, technological progress. This unilinear and meaningless view of history is only interrupted by sudden violent outbreaks provoked either by expectations of immanent divine intervention or by the Jacobin fantasy of a great egalitarian revolution, which is essentially a godless version of the biblical “End of History”.

 

Although its form as a whole is resilient, and its outer managerial protective shell is like steel plate, the Blob is blind, fearful and paranoid and, as a collective psychosis, is easily provoked into irrational rage. The behaviour of the Blob is that of a huge thick-skinned monster driven by psychological, political, ideological and economic forces that it is not even aware of itself. Like all evil entities, it is drawn unconsciously towards goodness, beauty and truth, which it has a desperate need to destroy. Its enemy need not be particularly virtuous, just good, beautiful and truthful enough to provide a target for it to aim at.

                           

Human Rights and Identity Politics

The ethnocentric and historically determined doctrine of secular egalitarian human rights was, and still is, largely driven by a largely unconscious ressentiment of hierarchy as the basic principle of human organisation which characterised both the American and French Revolutions based on the mechanistic paradigm. Unlike the moral egalitarianism of Christianity, from which it was derived, such human rights are not only ripped out of the cultural contexts that all human beings depend upon but avoid the vital issue of reciprocal obligations based on the Golden Rule of treating others with consideration as we would have them treat us. Owing to its origins in a secularised version of the Abrahamic exceptionalist “chosen people” religion, the Left see the Right ( by which they mean everyone who is not Left)  as “Evil” and they aim to eliminate them by coercion since even the secular rule of law itself is part of the evil old world,

                        

The Class War becomes the Classroom War

Initially, inequalities of income provided the justification of the revolutionary destruction of the old order. However, the standards of living for the peasants and industrial workers in North America and non-communist Europe had greatly improved by the mid twentieth century. Since the second world war, the industrial revolution had rapidly evolved from a pre-eminently manufacturing society to a consumer society where even manufacturing is outsourced and which requires great numbers of educated intellectuals in the service sectors. To create sufficient anger to overthrow the “unjust system” and bring about the Revolution, ressentiment in its Nietzschean sense, now had to be focussed away from income inequality. Intellectuals of the Left were not only abandoning their traditional base in working class unions and the collapsing Soviet Union but were now putting their hopes in the powerful middle-class welfare-state bureaucrats now organised into industrial unions. Who is the boss such unions are organised to oppose? The authoritarian old Marxists in the West, although still embedded in large numbers in the humanities schools in the universities, were exchanging Marxist humanism for Gramsci’s theory of Cultural Hegemony to become neo-Marxists.

                            

In the consumer boom of the Nineteen-sixties there had been a youth rebellion fermented and augmented by the rapidly growing electronic mass media conglomerates transmitting not only more sensually arousing popular music but flooding the world with sexually explicit images and sensational portrayals of violence, previously banned as disgusting and disturbing. The newly affluent teenagers with their considerable disposable income provided  a major source of revenue for the purchase of associated commodities and services. The older generation, with their traditional less materialistic beliefs and more polite practices, were increasingly marginalised. Inspired by Gramsci, the Neo-Marxists transferred their hope for finding foot-soldiers for their revolution away from the declining number of workers in the factories to the increasing numbers of over-educated middle-class students in the class rooms, especially in the exponentially expanding universities. The main recruiting ground was established in the newly-established departments of sociology. The Revolution was now to be run by the educational institutions of the ruling establishment, top down, not bottom up. The bureaucrats with help of the money-lenders, lawyers and MBAs were planning to take over the Earth!

The New Materialist Biological Ideology

Instead of easily-measured income differences, the Neo-Marxist materialists now focussed on easily-measured biological differences. So-called identity politics was aimed at breaking up any cultural cohesion provided by values more meaningful than superficial phenomena, like race of origin, skin colour or gender. Teenagers are of course more likely to be attracted to an ideology which is superficial and not based on any experience. Once ripped out of their embedding in the now-hated traditional, cultural contexts and “moralised” as a collection of unquestionable new egalitarian “absolutes”, human rights can be imposed by force, even over-ruling the rule of law based on historical experience. This provided the revolutionary leaders with guidelines for a managerial “long march through the institutions”. The result was the elimination of all cultural values that could stand in the way of a monopoly of power without any of the responsibility previously provided by the law and by ethical systems such as patriotism, religious ethics, or tradition. This is meaningless managerialism triumphant.    

Deconstructionists Chew Up and Swallow Culture and then Vomit Bile

Socialists are reductionists who ascribe ultimate meaning to materialistic social phenomena, devoutly believe in the coming of a great levelling revolution, and regard cultural values such as Christianity and other ethical-spiritual traditions not as a people’s main source of meaning but as dispensable and counter-revolutionary epiphenomena. This ideology has been growing since the Enlightenment and has led not only to total mind control by ruthless dictators but also to the mass society, mass education, mass world wars, the infomercial mass media, fake news and the growth of a huge army of salaried business managers, bankers, lawyers, consultants, and economic jargon mongers. With the creation of the welfare-warfare state there was a huge increase in the numbers of parasitic unionised public servants living off the huge compulsory income-tax take.

Despite having been brilliantly pilloried earlier by such disillusioned socialist writers as George Orwell in “Animal Farm” and “1984”, the entire range of heterogeneous beliefs and practices other than those encouraged by puritanical, authoritarian, socialist ideology, became anathema. Free speech is now carefully monitored by the new Ministries of Truth established in the universities who ban the use of certain words and designate all non-left-wing language as hate speech.  Blasphemy, obscenity and hate speech directed at the “evil” Right flourish free from control, but any slightly unorthodox political opinions are quickly labelled Right Wing, Fascist, Racist, Sexist, etc., and forcibly excluded from respectable discourse in politically-correct educated circles. There are as usual a hundred doltish Sancho Panza’s temporarily sucking up to each deluded Don Quixote, who can provide a source of material support and moral superiority.                        

The Protective Managerial Shell

With the backing of the banks, stock exchanges and the powerful military-industrial-complex, including the secret services, the managerial elite is an institutional conglomerate which acts as the major constituent of a protective shell formed around the evil malevolent entity of the Blob. I must emphasise that it is not material gain that motivates the Blob, it is prepared to foul its own nest and destroy the source of its own wealth. It is the addictive Ring of Power, that once put on is almost impossible to remove.

                                                        

In 1968, that pivotal year of youthful uprisings, the coalescence of institutions in the emerging global consumer civilization finally established a legitimising base in the universities. The Blob could now become an autonomous, irresponsible, super-imperialist monster. Gramsci’s Cultural Hegemony was realised as the Blob! At the same time, very different and little known but highly relevant events were taking place in the Antipodes at the newly established School of Sociology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. These will be described later in this essay.

Part 3:
IS THE BLOB STILL EXPANDING?

The Guardians

Jane Jacobs has written eloquently about the need for an elite of Platonic guardians to protect cultures from behaviour which may even be well-intentioned, but which has disastrous consequences. Depth psychologists even doubt whether people claiming to have good intentions can always be believed and urge us to look deeper. “By their fruits shall ye know them”. In our civilization, democratically elected representatives must rely on public servants whose duty it is to give advice and administer the social institutions in the interests of the electorate. To prevent corruption, like all guardians they are rewarded with honours rather than money or fame for such service.

The universities were established to educate the guardians, but they are being taken over by economic and political interests that are inimical to responsible guardianship. Sovereign governments, the world economy, the biological environment, and the universities themselves are currently rapidly disintegrating. Fortunately, there are hopeful signs of a last-minute rescue. Foremost of these is a change of consciousness stimulated by the transformation of our global civilization being brought about by the radically different technological transformation created by the use of electricity, especially the decentralised internet. Previously highly stable Stone Age cultures were transformed by the new technologies of bronze and then iron. In a similar way, electronic communication, information storage and retrieval, as well as power generation and distribution, has thrown our traditional industrial civilization into such a crisis that this could stimulate a radical adjustment of our clearly malfunctioning institutions. If not, another Dark Age like the one that followed the violent Bronze Age will be upon us.

                                                                        

Unfortunately, the psychological, economic and status pressures acting on most intellectual guardians in the universities are driving them to neglect their duty and they are marginalising or ignoring this fundamental truth. Following contradictory findings in all fields of scientific enquiry, belief in the old mechanistic model of the enlightenment can no longer be justified, even by materialists.

Who Guards the Guardians?

This is the age-old problem. The early Christian church in Europe operated a dominance hierarchy founded on theologically-constructed canon law which was administered by bishops. As guardians, these administrators were expected to remain free from control by internal commercial forces such as usury and bribery and the outside political pressure exercised by the barbarian invaders, who were fortunately soon converted. Independent holy men moved amongst the people helping to keep the bishops in line and to convert the Barbarian kings. Later, St Francis and other friars tried unsuccessfully to prevent the Church from sliding into secularism and corruption. Other examples are the roving prophets who fulfilled a similar function in ancient Israel, and the independent bards in preliterate, pre-Christian Ireland, whose skill in poetry and music made them into popular celebrities. Any ruler who was too brutal or too lazy could be made the subject of a narrative poem portraying them in a bad light throughout the region. Since they relied on their reputation to maintain their authority, this was often enough to persuade them to remain honourable or reform. In more recent times, independent artists of all kinds helped to create and lead the early 19^th century Romantic Revival of spiritually based values of beauty, love and transcendental truth against the corrupt and heartless enlightenment rationalists.

The materialistic Philosophes of the enlightenment used the new printing presses to ridicule the decadent ancien regime with its ecclesiastical rural support base, and to promote the values of the new urban bourgeois capitalist society. These values were founded on the utilitarianism of the new mechanistic cosmology of the scientists. Like the Christian religion of love and forgiveness which greatly improved human relationships, there were both benefits and disadvantages. Physical health was greatly improved but mental health deteriorated, eventually leading to an increase of meaningless narcissism and the new problem of sensationally-deranged schizophrenia which first arose in the cognitive dissonance of the modern world. The population increase following medical and agricultural improvements led to the formation of mass societies held together by enforced conformity and uniformity with a loss of individual initiative and creativity. Agricultural science improves short term fertility but in the long term scientific factory farming destroys the fertility of the soil everywhere. The Industrial Revolution made labour-saving devices that ended slavery but polluted the land, sea and air and is fast destroying the biosphere and causing unpredictable climate change. The mechanisation of war and the loss of honour codes for warriors has led to wars of unconditional surrender and mass annihilation. Nuclear weapons have multiplied and still represent the possible extinction of mankind.

Historical Inevitability

The universities, and their feeders the secondary schools, were founded by the Christian establishment charged with training the guardians and independent professions. They now resemble the bloated, corrupt and self-satisfied Church of the late Medieval and Renaissance period who, having mistaken their means (achieving and maintaining power) for ends, were in bed with banksters and mercenary armies. Currently, tax-payer and commercially funded universities are torn between two forms of determinism. Amongst the hard sciences, expanding global economic development is assumed to be an absolute good, and in the social sciences, radical action to deconstruct hierarchically organised institutions encouraging beauty, truth and goodness values is also assumed to be an absolute good.

Neuroscientists studying the function and interaction of the cerebral hemispheres have revealed that left hemisphere dominance leads to fixated concentration on the means to achieve specific ends, and dominance of the right to a fixation on the meaning and importance of such ends. If the interaction between the two is out of balance then the consequences are dire. In his book “The Master and his Emissary”, the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist sees the current obsession with measurable but meaningless economic progress as explicable in these terms. Because of this exaggerated left hemisphere focus on efficient but meaningless means, a restricted right hemisphere focus on unachievable ideals based on wishful thinking and imaginative but irrational escapism develops. These can astonishingly naïve, such as a burning desire for the end of the economically unjust evil world through a great revolution, or very similar desire for the end of the morally depraved evil world through divine intervention, or simply unending economic progress until the environment is damaged beyond repair. The time has come for the guardians to intervene to stop the economically-driven enlightenment machine from destroying the biosphere, as well as putting an end to ressentiment based idealistic desires for a catastrophic end of the evil world.

Process Philosophy as the Beginning of a New Scientific Revolution

How can the publicly-funded degree factories trapped in the managerial Blob churning out physicists and engineers working for the military together with lawyers, MBAs and violence-seeking revolutionary neo-Marxists, be brought under control? Is there a fundamental flaw in the consciousness of those who should have been the guardians of the institutions that were trusted with training them? If there is, what can be done about it? Why is it that if we even question an obviously catastrophic course of action, we are regarded as either “unrealistic” or “evil”?

 

We already have the potential for the solution in the form of a new non-mechanistic philosophies, especially process metaphysics, and there is hope in the fact that there is a growing number of process thinkers, especially those inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, who are promoting a radically different paradigm of the cosmos as a whole. This new non-reductionist and non-dualist paradigm replaces that of the universe as a soulless mechanism evolving by pure chance with disembodied and quasi-divine “observers” describing it and manipulating it.   Process thinkers concentrate on what actually happens, rather than trying to understand events within the outdated mechanistic framework that is still the cosmological paradigm for most intellectuals.

 

As a process thinker I assume that the cosmos acts as an integral whole in response to crises and even the wisest and most sensitive human beings are only partly aware of the significance of events taking place. Since, as an interactive communicated symbol system, our contemporary human culture is playing a significant but destructive part in this process of degradation, it must be assumed that cosmological self-correction at the cultural level of complexity and even at the highest personality level is also taking place, though largely marginalised by the managers of the Blob. This has profound implications for a new approach to socio-political action. We need not only to adopt an interactive rather than confrontational approach to disagreement over the best actions to deal with crises of all types, but also to avoid the predetermination of desirable outcomes. Means and ends should modify each other.

Cosmological Self-Correction

Process thinkers can better explain the current anomalies in materialistic science with a new cosmology demonstrating that the universe is a self-creating, self-organising and self-sustaining super organism, of which human beings are an intrinsic part, and which is evolving through love, beauty and curiosity. Such thinkers aim to follow Whitehead’s emphasis in avoiding the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” by carefully focussing their attention on what really happens rather than idealistic abstractions and temporarily useful but essentially man-made models of reality. This is crucial to avoid the irrational Cartesian conceptual bifurcation that accompanies separating the highly subjective intentions of human ‘observers’ from culturally communicated symbolic models of the world. Since the 17^th century these models have adopted for their usefulness to the military-industrial complex. In mechanistic metaphysics, the models chosen for utilitarian purposes are mistaken for absolute objective reality and human intentions suffer from many subtle forms of psychological, social and cultural distortion of which they are unconscious. The two cosmologies cannot co-exist, one must make way for the other.

                       

Waking up from the Mass Psychosis

Fifty years after its birth, the socio-cultural phenomenon of the Blob, which like National Socialism and International Capitalism is a kind of suicidal mass psychosis, is showing signs of breaking up. Fiat currencies have a limited lifespan and the most violent efforts to maintain them are bound to fail especially if they are not founded on any material security. The global economy is nothing but a huge Ponzi scheme run by criminal banksters, a puff ball that will suddenly vaporise like the magical world of Prospero. When the Roman Army abruptly left Britain it was the remote Irish scholarly monks who stepped into breach to act as guardians preserving and even improving on what they could of their Christian and classical, scientific and artistic heritage and to give it back to mainland Europe. We cannot afford to lose so much learning again. Meanwhile the integration of all current learning into a process cosmology ready for the collapse of the current mechanical civilisation is going quietly on.

Running in parallel with this is the revelation of depth psychologists and ethologists that we are not thinking machines but animals with long-developed inherited neural predispositions to respond to our organic, social and cultural environments. The scenario for the future of mankind as role actors in social institutions is evolving with rest of the universe. As a symbolising animal who can create cultural reality, we cannot avoid living in a partially artificial world. The best we can do is to accept this fact and by combining love, logic and levity, avoid any form of cultural determinism, such as historical inevitability, economic progress, or a divine destiny.  As Socrates pointed out, we are capable of amazing self-deception and when confronted with contradictions which render our assumptions absurd, the cognitive dissonance produced can lead to hysteria and irrational behaviour. We are particularly subject to collective psychoses generated by ressentiment.

PREPARING FOR BATTLE

To understand one’s enemy is as important as understanding oneself. To design effective outflanking manoeuvres required in a culture war when a small number are up against a host, good knowledge not only of psychology but sociological role theory and cultural symbolic interaction is required. One must get off the rails provided by blind belief in unilinear time and the imaginary buffers at the end which involve divine intervention, or its secular version, the egalitarian revolutionary bloodbath. Human beings are being maddened by the strain of living in a compulsorily educated society poisoned by lies and fake news and offered material things and mass-media mental escapism as compensation. Even for believers in enlightenment “progress”, the continual never-ending enrichment of the bottom-line materialists, real buffers do exist. They are the pollution and degradation of the soil and seas and possibly the collapse of much of the biological ecosystem.                                                 

To survive the vitriolic attacks of the Blob one must have nothing to lose except one’s self love and self-respect and to be clad in the solid, hate-proof armouring that can be provided by a good grounding in the insights of the great religious and philosophical exemplars like Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha and Jesus. We can augment their insights by studying the pioneers of depth psychology, Nietzsche, Freud, Adler, Kierkegaard, Frankl, Reich and Jung, and their later interpreters, who describe and explain the behaviour to be expected of neurotics, psychotics, narcissists etc. Neuroscientists have recently produced evidence which enables us to recognise and understand the deformed and dangerous social behaviour found in power-mad psychopaths who of course make excellent managerial CEOs. Being born with deformed brains, and not narcissistic, neurotic, or psychotic in the usual way, they are not easy to identify. A satisfactory scientific explanation is still wanting for the fast-growing number of schizophrenics and the widespread schizoid behaviour that is increasingly found in modern society, but at least it can be easily recognised. Both mental disabilities and physical disabilities are facts of life but, unlike physical disabilities, mental disabilities require recent psychological knowledge to be identified. Recognising individuals suffering from these psychological deformations can enable us to distrust their judgements and if possible to counter their stupid or malevolent actions.

Looking to the Periphery for Change

Like any government or major institution, the centre can easily lose touch with its peripheral parts and it is there that any would-be opponent of the Blob should strike. Its rapid growth in just a few years means that in some places its skin is getting thinner, having been stretched tight. It’s main weapon of fake news, poisonous abuse and destruction of the reputations and careers of those who dare stand against it, depends on the profound lack of self-knowledge and ignorance of human psychology, or its willing repression, of those embedded in it.

What is it that drives the individuals at all levels of control in the Blob, from the financial wizards in the driving seat along with those who monopolise much of the communication media, down to the multi-national corporations, military-industrial complex, stock marketeers, investment bankers, compliant political parties, state-controlled educational, scientific and medical institutions and the corrupt mass entertainment and information media, right down to the managers of the welfare-state animal farm? It is best understood to be the satisfaction of their will to power, to which they are addicted. As the sociologist Anthony Giddens points out, power addicts are true addicts and deceive not only others but themselves and will lie and cheat and kill to maintain their self-destructive habit.                          

Power Controls Money, and Money Measures Power

The Blob can only function efficiently if the interlocking managerial elite, who have no other values than power and who bind its heterogeneous constituents together like cogs in a machine, can only be coordinated through dependence on a reliable and unambiguous measuring system. This is currently being provided through monetised bottom-line control and feedback which is made possible by the monopoly of the issue and management of currency and credit by the banks and other financial institutions. Being detached from any dependable base in precious metals, such once reliable validation has been increasingly weakened through the currency and bond manipulations of unscrupulous currency wizards who set the meaningless aims and govern the overall behaviour of the maddened, irresponsible Blob.

 

The Coming War of the Currencies

At the height of the financial crisis in 2008 an anonymous individual or team created the Bitcoin by fiat, a new electronic form of currency that was linked into what is called a “block chain protocol”, a self-contained network with a fixed parameter. This means that the economic value of a bitcoin cannot yet be so easily manipulated and which, with increased acceptance and use, can only increase in unit value. Cybercurrencies are therefore rather like gold, a measure of economic value, a transactional currency, and a commodity, but without the problems caused by materiality. It takes only a few minutes for the transfer of such currency via cell phone from one app or “wallet” to another and these transactions are recorded on both. This effectively bypasses all the middlemen in the banking and other financial institutions. As well as buying up the available gold, India, China, Russia and others are looking to such cybercurrencies to help them break the centralised currency monopoly of the American dollar established at Bretton Woods in 1944. This is still the world’s reserve currency but, having been degraded by the irresponsible behaviour of the American government, is now only maintained by America’s immense military might. The transformations produced by cybercurrencies could only be prevented by deconstructing the web itself, a hazardous undertaking.

                                

The socio-economic consequences should Bitcoin and others become widely used cannot even be imagined. Similar electronic economic innovations are in the pipeline. The driving force behind those who are “mining” the remaining bitcoins, an increasingly expensive process, is of course greed and might eventually lead, as is the case of the current dollar currency situation, to a tiny percentage of individuals owning a large percentage of the bitcoins. Only people, mainly on the left, whose greed or envy overrules their other human emotions, will be concerned with this. What is more interesting is that a potential civil war between the heavyweights of the rival currencies will drastically reduce the control being exercised throughout the Blob by the power-driven managers who depend upon the collapsing financial institutions to provide economic justification for their authoritarian behaviour.

In such an implosion, the Blob could collapse, a desperately needed Jubilee might take place by fiat and the plutocratic elites and their servile managers who control the world economy could, as Jane Jacobs recommended, be brought back under the control of more ethical, status-motivated, “guardians” in polycentric governing hierarchies linked through the decentralised electronic media.

             

The Rise of Internally Generated Populism

The rise of what is rather misleadingly called populism is being seen by most political analysts who are in the psychotic Blob themselves as little more than a blind reaction to the rapidly increasing impoverishment, disempowerment and ethical abuse of the blue collar and lower middle-class wage earners by the economically-educated and highly-salaried managerial elite. However, working and middle-class beliefs and practices, especially outside the major metropolitan centres, as well as those of the landowning gentry and smallholders, are also being disregarded and destroyed by the same elite. The non-fundamentalist Christians and others who are also powerless to stop the demolition or degradation of their ethical beliefs and practices. Another mistake is see these public reactions in Europe and North America as likely to lead to similar political outcomes as Communism in newly industrialised Russia and later in China and South East Asia and of Fascism and National Socialism in the suddenly united nations of Italy and Germany.

This criticism is highly misleading, since it must also be understood that fascism is a very different totalitarian form than socialism that had originated earlier in the French Revolution. It was originally created by Mussolini who began his political career as a left-wing journalist specialising in fake news but who, realising the power of the new mass media, changed course using a monopoly of the media and education systems to manipulate the ruling establishment to revive what he believed to be the values of Imperial Rome. Like the USA he adopted the fasces to symbolise the reductionist idea that unity is strength rather than the similar socialist slogan of “Solidarity”. Both Communist and Nazi populism was created initially by historically unique internal conditions and was greatly empowered by building up hatred of fake enemies.

Ressentiment

The difference between Fascism and what happened in Germany and Russia in particular, is that in the latter cases the main characteristic of the new political movements was the psychological phenomenon of “ressentiment”. Max Scheler took this analytical concept from the great psychological pioneer Nietzsche who had found its germ in Kierkegaard. Adler also owes his insights into the inferiority complex to this same psychic deformation of values. In Russia’s Marxist class-war, left wing internationalist socialist leaders portrayed all entrepreneurs and even small-holding peasants as evil exploiters and brutally eliminated them. Both Italy and Germany had recently been united into autonomous nation states and needed to go back to their ancient pre-Christian past to compete with the proud history of other European nations. With a national history lacking in depth, Germany claimed superior blood and like the USA embraced the racial eugenics movement. The National Socialist leaders portrayed mental defectives, Slavs, Gypsies and especially Jews, with their ancient history and international connections, as sub-human agents of pollution.

 

Normally varying in any population, once ressentiment is actively promoted through books, or even more effectively by the electronic media, human values of love, admiration, generosity, self-sacrifice, honesty, sexual self-restraint etc. become increasingly weak and may at a certain point even become “inverted”. Love becomes hatred, admiration becomes envy, generosity becomes greed, gratitude becomes revenge, sexual love becomes pornography, etc. Scheler describes the amazing speed and spread of the infectious feelings aroused by the promotion of expressions of ressentiment. Crowds quickly turn ugly and become riots, lynch mobs and violent street demonstrations. The main emotion expressed by ressentiment-driven mobs is hysterical hatred.

Over the past few years led by social-scientists in the universities and promoted by the mass education and mass media monopolies in the Western World, largely unfocused fear, hatred and puritanical self-righteousness have reached epidemic proportions. However, recently there are signs that can be seen everywhere in the wider community that hypocritical self-righteousness, although still erupting violently in the educational institutions, is on the decline and more love, trust and even fun and delight in genuine debate are finally on the rise again after fifty years.                 

A Major Perturbation of the Political Steady State

It is impossible at this time to foresee the consequences of the appearance on the world stage of a new, deal-making, millionaire American President in the populist tradition of Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. He admires the historical record of the British and his role models include Winston Churchill and Nigel Farage, the maverick who master-minded Brexit.  He even appears to trust and love his own countrymen so long as they love their own country, even including the so-called racist, sexist, homophobic, working classes despised by the Democrats and Republicans alike, both of whom have been partly swallowed by the military-industrial-complex.

To wrong-foot his self-loathing Blob opponents, he is using unexpected verbal distractions, whether deliberately or unconsciously, that bear some resemblance to those of that extraordinary boxer, Muhammad Ali. Another successful tactic that requires great patience and self-control, which representatives of the Blob can rarely manage, is to tease one’s enemies out along the branch of more and more absurd rationalisations until they can no longer find any justification for their position. When they can no longer scramble quickly back, the branch can be sawn off behind them. As a non-exceptionalist American, Trump has had to back-pedal on his stated aims of destroying pernicious economic globalisation and military adventurism all over the world aimed at regime changing. His dislike of the EU mini-blob and attempts to treat Russia, China and the British Commonwealth as trading partners he can make deals with are also being thwarted by the Blob. He makes it clear in his writings that it is better to back away from a deal and improve one’s bargaining power than to fail or compromise too much. His strength lies in his ability like Andrew Jackson to win the hearts and minds of the oppressed people in his struggle against the current two-party Tweedledum Tweedledee establishment.

It is also most interesting to a psychologist to observe that President Trump has just replaced President Obama, one of the most talented and irresponsible narcissists the world has ever seen, even surpassing ex-President Clinton and Tony Blair the British ex-PM, the great smoke and mirror salesmen of our time. Narcissism has largely replaced neurosis, the mental disease of the Industrial Age, as the mental disease of the Consumer Society. My long-time guide to its socio-cultural characteristics has been “The Culture of Narcissism” by the populist Christopher Lasch. Although he is no narcissist, since he doesn’t mind being hated and even finds it useful in his deal-making, Trump appears to be a workaholic and rather egotistic neurotic. He doesn’t usually back down or take the bait unless it suits him, nor does he show signs that he is suffering from the fearful anxiety that usually characterises neurotics. It looks increasingly as though he lacks the political skills needed to take up the advice issued by President Eisenhower in his final speech and bring the massive American military-industrial-complex, including the deep state operatives in the secret intelligence services, under political-constitutional control. Who else but populists like Eisenhower and the two Roosevelts would even dream of attempting such a thing? Any reader who reacts with disgust that I should look at Trump with anything but hysterical horror is suffering what is being called “Trump derangement syndrome”. They are victims of the mass-media aspects of the virtue-signalling Blob. He is nothing like Hitler or Stalin, he is a liminal figure and is unintentionally and rather naively disrupting the neo-Marxist narrative.

By contrast with the those trapped in the Blob, the new populism is not arising out of fear and hatred for an out-group like left and right-wing fundamentalists but is accompanied by love and trust in charismatic leaders who are defiantly opposing the powerful, irresponsible anti-cultural globalisation which is vociferously backed by the universities and mass-media monopolies. Such trust and love and refusal to take the furious, self-righteous and largely self-appointed Blob spokespersons seriously, deeply offends the leaders of highly politicised and humourless Neo-Marxist organisations whom nobody really likes.

Left is Wrong and Right is Evil

Throughout the Western world, the simplistic division between warring political factions is now mindlessly described as Left versus Right. This was previously seen as Progressive or Liberal versus Conservative, and before that, Whig versus Tory. These opposed political party factions emerged after the British Monarchy lost most of its powers to parliament following the Civil War between Nonconformist Puritan Republicans and Anglican Monarchists. A point sometimes raised by commentators is that there is a fundamental difference between these parties in the way they see the world and hence the means they adopt to bring about their ends. The Left hold the moral conviction that the present world is evil and must be utterly changed by overthrowing the Establishment, by violence if need be. The heterogeneous Right, who for the Left are regarded as little more than a collective residual category, generally believe that although nothing is perfect, the present world is fundamentally good.  Except for criminals, madmen and adventurers, tried and tested traditional beliefs and practices are intrinsically enjoyable, radical change is dangerous and the Establishment will always need careful reforms. Young, inexperienced and easily excited people are attracted to left-wing extremist political activism, and mature people to reform and charitable work. Conservatives are prepared to debate with the Left because they know they are wrong. The Left do all in their power to stop the Right from speaking to the general public because they know they are evil. This I believe is the due to their puritan origins in Biblical eschatology. Delaying the great egalitarian Revolution through reforms, is against the “Will of History”, as revealed to prophets like Marx.

                                       

A Fun Revolution is Starting

The new populism, like the British populism that arose in 1940, shows no signs of being driven by the sort of venomous hatred shown by the fanatical populists led by idealistic socialist intellectuals during the 20^th century. Social democrats had just first thrown out their corrupt traditional rulers when almost immediately the fanatical socialists seized power in the newly established democratic governments of Russia, Germany and China in the Twentieth Century whilst they were vulnerable. Today, the hatred currently filling Western Europe and the USA is coming from the economically-privileged and left-leaning-professionals now enmeshed in the Blob with their excitable dupes. The Blob’s central nervous system is located in the universities and fashionable suburbs, not in the villages, tenements, trailer parks or workshops.

 

                           

            

Part 4: THE BLOB AND I

        

“ I” is the only pronoun that can Provide Responsible Personal Agency. Up to this point this essay has taken the form of a traditional “objective” analytical description of the phenomenon of the Blob by an intellectual commentator whose identity is not supposed to be particularly relevant, but whose intentions in communicating can of course be inferred. Since the essay is titled “The Blob and I”, it must now become a personal narrative. It is time to follow the examples of many before me like Augustine, Rousseau and Newman, and attempt to describe the personality, history and intentions of the “I” whose experience and intentions provide the final part of this essay.

 

                                                WHO AM I,  AND WHY ME?

Who I am, my intentions and my extraordinary narrative, is in my opinion, of paramount importance in providing the way to destroy the cohesion of that completely different phenomenon, the irresponsible, buck-passing, Blob. Since the pronoun that provides active ultimate responsible agency is “I”, this manifestation of “I am” or “Ego” can only flow from the intention generated by the purified, irreducible personal soul, the intentional “Me”. We are usually only aware of our souls when they are under attack. Before making the claim that my personal identity is socially and culturally constructed well enough to avoid adsorption into the Blob, I wish to make a few points about the context within which we are psychologically, socially and historically located.

                                      

In the metaphysical system that grew out of the Iron Age market economy the outer world mankind had previously experienced magically was increasingly transformed into “made things” that we “observe”. This is the subject of Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” and Marx’s concern with the “fetishism of commodities’. At the same time, instead believing we are souls, we ourselves progressively became nothing but minds in bodies in space. As “things”, there is little observable difference between a recently dead person and a sleeping one, whose inner self is of course experiencing itself wildly. The biological self in its boundary of skin is however far less real than the psychological or mental self whose boundaries are far less fixed and objectifiable, being made up of the social roles we are enmeshed in from birth and which grow with us. Since humans are organisms like other animals, but with more complex nervous systems, we obviously share with them many behavioural challenges of living in the world. Fortunately, in the academic world, zoology, the study of living creatures as ‘things’, has been replaced by ethology the study of animal behaviour in the wild, just as depth psychology has replaced Freudian rejection of the concepts of both super-conscious and sub-conscious or the mechanistic study of rats in mazes in the attempt to understand the human mind.

As an implicate part of the cosmos the involving/evolving animal self inherits thousands of years of experience that can be activated by suitable stimuli coming from our environment. This also applies to our experience as social beings living in cultural scenarios. Nietzsche described us as the “mad animal” living in fake history, and Jonathan Haidt’s experiments revealing the social pressures acting on his students’ interpretation of the meaning of events and their emotional responses, confirms this. His conclusion is that we are nothing like Plato’s charioteer balancing the pull of the two horses of reason and emotion. Instead, Haidt claims we are like riders clinging on to huge elephants influenced by the others in the herd and our efforts to control their behaviour is very limited, as conservatives realise.  I should add to this analogy the fact that elephants are very intelligent herd animals and socially almost entirely matriarchal. The males however are great ego-trippers and their irrational behaviour attracts the females when they are on heat. I also assume that in Haidt’s analogy when they reach the edge of a cliff, the herd might slow down and change direction. In human terms, I mean by this that they could undergo a change of paradigm or cultural scenario when faced with the ‘cliff’ of the collapse of the biosphere. This happened in the Axial Age transformation of consciousness after the collapse of the Bronze Age and long Dark Age, which was made possible by the sudden socio-economic changes associated with the easily available iron ore. The bourgeois individual as an egalitarian commodity trader with a belief that he or she has a mind of their own, was the ultimate creation of this cultural paradigm shift.

The transformation of our current cultural scenario is taking place as a consequence of two factors. Unprecedented electric power and communication is beginning to transform the cogs in the economic progress machine into electronic circuits and at the same time the oil is running dry. The cogs can no longer mesh together smoothly and friction is bringing the mechanism to a grinding halt. The utilitarian cogs are crying out for meaningful roles denied to them in the ugly, cruel and soulless economic-progress machine. They are looking to each other in the social media to escape, but this narcissistic conformity is hollow and only makes things worse. The only solution is a completely new cultural paradigm. The machine metaphor needs replacing with a new one based on electricity. Electro-magnetic fields, neural networks and instantaneous current flow etc. are all better analogies than things in space that impact causally on each other, one after another, on a unidimensional time line. We must re-join the other animals by becoming organically re-embodied. In other words, accepting a cosmology based on process.

 

Only Idiots have Minds of their Own

It is worth pointing out that the Greek word for a man with a mind of his own is “idiot”. As Shakespeare frequently reminds us, the social self is an inner-space world peopled by many characters who act out their parts when the scenario or narrative calls for them to do so. Age and gender are of course taken into account, but there are many factors that make up this fascinating inner-space universe. Family of origin can start one out on an easy or difficult life but can’t guarantee it will last. Inherited factors like artistic talent, intelligence, strength, size, imagination, physical beauty and so on will influence not only one’s choice of roles but how well one performs them. Moreover, as Grey put it so well in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”, chance plays a major part. We are all born into cultures with dogmatic rules which function as the script or scenario for the play we are acting in. We don’t “observe” social roles, we experience them and respond to them with our own, though extreme woke neurotics respond very badly to our role actions and without a shared culture and language our inter-action is very limited. Some remote pre-literate cultures continue for generations without major perturbations and the validity of the script is not questioned. Environmental disaster, civil war, economic imperialism, invasion, and charismatic personalities, can upset the equilibrium, the script loses its meaning, the narrative becomes absurd and the actors become distressed. At such times a new script can appear and a revitalisation movement can suddenly take place. Like all evolutionary breakthroughs, these transformations take place at breath-taking speed.

 

Three Different Missions; Love, Logic and Levity

Important foundations of our civilization are based on the certainty of the existence and value of their personal souls of two men in particular, and the devotion of their followers, just as those of the East depend on similar liminal personalities.

In opposing the corrupt actions and explanations of the priesthood who, as Jeremiah had pointed out, were rewriting their history and were justifying their power over the people by creating unverifiable texts which they claimed were true and validated by Yahweh. Jesus is reported as saying, among other things, “It is written, but I say unto you.” As a unique teacher and healer, he wandered around the countryside teaching everyone he met who showed interest, the way to free themselves from spiritual determinism through love and forgiveness not only from personal guilt, but from original sin created and maintained by the Jewish priesthood to gain and maintain power over others. He provided the Western foundations of the doctrine of the equal moral value of the souls of all human beings, even slaves, women and children.

Five hundred years earlier, in a similar way, the philosopher Socrates had walked around the city of Athens conversing with anyone who would argue with him. He did not claim to know or speak the absolute truth. His opinion was there were two different types of personalities. Those that wanted to believe and those that wanted to know. As another highly liminal character and exemplar of his own values, he claimed he was mostly concerned with keeping his own soul free from corruption by avoiding self-deception. He spent much of his time demonstrating that everyone deceived others, and especially themselves, to justify their beliefs and actions. He urged us to examine our true motives, thereby being a major founder of the later science of psychology.

In a similar but more self-critical and less self-confident way, I have lived out my own narrative. Fifty years ago, I was the first qualified academic sociology lecturer in Australia. I was not a Marxist but a non-conformist and rather bohemian lecturer with years of differing experiences outside academia. In the late nineteen-sixties in spite of an excellent teaching record, I was expelled from their formal ranks without explanation, apparently for the sin of starting the wrong revolution, a fun revolution based on love and logic. Without fully realising it at the time I was a social-scientist traitor to the new neo-Marxist revolutionary narrative. I hope here to try and explain what motivated me, using my knowledge of psychology and sociology to cautiously destroy my formal identity and reputation to become the first official university-appointed Wizard. I began wandering about the city streets in Australia and New Zealand in provocative attire, often standing on a ladder as an orator and speaking to attract attention? I never claimed that the ideas I was expressing were true, being only my opinion or useful fictions, and often exaggerated for dramatic impact, though any purely factual statements I made could be checked. Through my playful symbolic interaction with all and sundry, men, women and young and old, I wanted to demonstrate the power of playful symbolic inter-action, or fun, in freeing both logic and love from being frozen in formal social structures dominated by inauthentic individuals?  I will try and explain myself.

 

Framing the Living Work of Art 

As I understand it, the universe is essentially an unpredictable process. Not a salvation narrative heading towards a sudden violent conclusion, nor an unstoppable engine accelerating towards a meaningless materialistic utopia. I cannot fully identify with our rational tradition, given a kick start by Socrates and Plato, that truth, beauty and goodness only exist as ideals, eternal unrealisable forms that should be striven for. Nor could I accept our religious tradition kick-started by Paul’s interpretation of the words of Jesus that the soul-cleansing therapeutic process of love and forgiveness is only possible when motivated by the desire for immortality and future eternal bliss in Heaven. Although I have faith I am not a perfectionist, more of a situationist, I just muddle through. One thing I was sure of, I could not myself evolve without taking my cultural ecosystem with me.

I believe that all human cultural values, such as ethical systems, truth systems, and beauty systems, evolve and devolve with the human cultures that express them. There may be eternal transcendental realities that are uncovered and lost again, but that static idealistic view inhibits human creativity and can lead to the uncritical worship of unknowable absolutes. Our souls may be immortal and if purified earn us a place in paradise or escape from the wheel of re-incarnation, but I assume that virtue which is not its own reward can be life-denying and sterile. To me, Jesus appears to be a Promethean figure releasing us from the old religious rule of the eternal cycle.

Like mathematics, language is a man-made symbolic system that functions primarily as a control and feedback process. However it also gives birth to metaphorical meaning which has contributed to the evolution and “involution” of the unique cultural consciousness of human beings who have already evolved psychologically and socially.  The progressive refinement of models of material, psychological, social, and cultural reality into an articulated cosmology can only be achieved by constantly revising what were previously believed to be fixed truths as well as fixed ethics and fixed concepts of beauty and harmony. As the official Cosmologer of Melbourne University Union in the early nineteen-seventies I did the best I could to achieve this by creating the bare bones of a subjective evolving process cosmology.

                           

Immoral Rationality and Irrational Morality

The obvious progressive refinement of love from its animal origins into inclusive agape is closely associated with religious institutions. Artistic expression in all its mimetic forms only flourishes and evolves with social support. Since the scientific revolution the institutions responsible for nurturing carefully-tested truth systems and those nurturing love-based ethical systems had been developing in competition with each other. The result has been what I have been calling immoral rationality and irrational morality.

I was determined to remain loyal to the best hypotheses of science and the scientific method based on reasoning and evidence, as well as to religious ethics based on love as shown by its fruits, and I did not allow my idiosyncratic aesthetic taste, based on gut feelings and learned empathic discrimination, to be over-ruled by social disapproval. Process metaphysics seemed to me to be the only way to reconcile them.

I was unwilling to validate my symbolically expressed explanations of meaning by referring them to any absolute source of authority independent from my inherited intuitions and personal interaction with my psychological, social or cultural environments. I created a subjectively-validated cosmology which included and explained all previous human explanatory schema that I was aware of, including those which claimed, falsely in my opinion, to be non-subjective. I was also driven by my aesthetic sensibility to continue the neo-Platonic magical tradition of expressing cosmological explanations in harmonious diagrammatic form informed by a synthesis of truth, beauty and love. The main heuristic diagram of my subjective process cosmology takes the form of both The Tree of Life and The Caduceus. Like the wizard and proto-scientist Newton I have used numerology to created an inner space model of reality. In this case the astonishingly magical origins of my appearance in the world.

Irreducible Fun as Touchstone

My special mission has been to attempt to reconcile immoral rationality and irrational morality through play. Although carefully structured, with strict rules arrived at modifiable through experience, play is neither irrational nor immoral and has flexible short-term narratives which can be reformed as a result of experience. From the classic “Homo Ludens, the Play Element in Culture”, by the historian and philologist Johann Huizinga, I adopted his choice of the Anglo-Saxon word “fun” to encapsulate the irreducible essence of the spirit of play. In stressing the importance of play as a higher level of consciousness that can unblock tangled consciousness or double-binds, I have been influenced by Gregory Bateson’s theory of logical types in his collected essays, “The Ecology of Mind”. Like logic and love, play progressively evolves or devolves usually in association with both. I also adhere to the principle of falsifiability as the essential difference between unverifiable dogmatic assertions and explanations as working hypotheses or “useful fictions”.

As a fun revolutionary cultural activist, I am personally attracted to playful “reductio ad absurdum” as the most efficient falsifiability technique, though it makes me many dogmatic enemies. Fun is frequently seen, especially by what Wilhelm Reich described as emotionally armoured Puritans, as a threat to the smooth functioning of both ethical and scientific institutions which is due not only to its potentially disruptive characteristics but its refusal to accept any cultural ends as absolute. However, if carefully balanced with both logic and love, as I have been attempting to do in my mission, fun (or levity as I frequently call it) can resolve rather than reduce the tensions (or cognitive dissonance) that arise when actors are single-mindedly pursuing particular rational or moral narratives at the expense of all others. My first writing on the topic was in 1968,  in a short and rather naïve article for the student newspaper at the University of UNSW which I titled “Soul Power and Funpowder versus Will Power and Gunpowder”.

Logic Love and Levity

Within a few weeks of my arrival in Christchurch as a teasing postmodern prophet speaking outside the Cathedral in the centre of the city, I published a statement in a local magazine on my reasons for combining Love, Logic, and Levity in my idiosyncratic way. To summarise;

 

Love without Logic is barren; Love without Levity is suffocating: Logic without Love is meaningless: Logic without Levity is out of control; Levity without Love is vindictive; Levity without Logic is asinine.  Love without Levity or Logic is juvenile; Levity without Love or Logic is suicidal; Logic without Love or Levity is Dr Frankenstein’s monster of artificial intelligence sparked into life by electricity.

 

My daily symbolic interactions with the general public were conducted with the same synthesis of logic, love and levity with which I had conducted my classes as a lecturer and which formed the essence of ALF or Action for Love and Freedom, the university reform movement at UNSW which I called the Fun Revolution. In doing this I made my liminal role as the legitimately-appointed university Wizard clear to all so there could be no mistaking me for any kind of established rational, moral or aesthetic authority. At the time, I just wanted to act out different roles in different narratives derived from different ideologies just for fun, and to see what happened.

In those heady days, by 1972 I had already soon settled on my current role-set or role-complex as University Wizard, Shamanic Therapist, Cosmologer, Living Work of Art, Anglican Prophet, and founder of the Imperial British Conservative Party. With my subjective process cosmology as a framework for my working hypotheses, I could quickly assess what I believed to be the psychological, narrative, and ideological intentions that were being manifested in the behaviour, role performances and symbolic expressions of my interlocutors and respond to them playfully. This provided essential feedback for me in checking the validity of my cosmological hypotheses.

By carefully selecting these transitional liminal roles and having had them legitimately validated when possible, I could conduct open-ended process experiments in psychological, social and cultural phenomena which I believe were unprecedented. Adopting fun as the ultimate rationale for my role actions, freed me from commitment to the narratives of both never-ending materialistic progress and eschatological redemption through a history-ending Revolution or Divine Intervention. This metaphysical position has much more in common with Daoism than Monotheism, Capitalism or Socialism and was ideal for providing me with the detachment needed as a trained social scientist to experiment and to construct working hypotheses.

Transgressing the Taboo Banning Social Science Experiments in the Real World

Uncommitted and personally authorised liminal experimentation of this kind has traditionally been out of bounds for employees of rational and ethical institutions such as universities as undesirable, since it brings into question the absolute values they are founded on. I was walking on egg shells but managed in my liminal and absurd-appearing role as Wizard to avoid being stopped on the grounds of illegality, insanity or immorality. Since I began my experiments there has been rapid growth in puritanical managerialism, which is increasingly monetised and less and less rational or ethical. It is certainly not beautiful nor therapeutic and severely punishes individual initiative. As a consequence, my symbolic interaction in all fields has been increasingly limited. I am still hoping that an approach to academics with an understanding of process theory will enable me to sum up and place my results with the academic community, to guide others and encourage them to continue my “Great Work”.

It might help academics to understand what I am doing if I compare these experiments of mine with the first protoscientific experiments, including thought experiments, conducted between the ninth and thirteen centuries by the sponsored Jewish, Christian Muslim intellectuals in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. Teams of scholars had already set about translating learning from the Greek, Hellenistic, Indian and Chinese manuscripts the Muslims had come across as their empire suddenly expanded. This was facilitated by using the new medium of paper invented in China, for their writing and illustrations. Their synthesis of Hindu and Arabic numerals led to great advances in mathematics and their experiments in so many fields, including optics, chemistry, physiology, medicine and mechanics provided the foundation of the Scientific Revolution, almost a thousand years later.                                

The encounter by European intellectuals with these scientific and philosophical writings following the establishment of the Kingdom of the Normans in Palermo, the Crusades in Palestine and the long period of the Reconquest in Spain, inspired the independent magicians who appeared during the Renaissance. They incorporated them into their theories, and their radical new experiments led eventually to the invention of modern science by the mechanistic branch of the magicians. The mechanists achieved this by splitting completely from their colleagues like Paracelsus and Kepler, who maintained the connection with the ethical metaphysics of God’s love and the Neo-Platonic strain to beauty. They actively persecuted magicians like these during the seventeenth century and their importance to the development of human consciousness has been ignored and even deliberately demonised ever since.

Following Galileo’s example, the mechanists concentrated on the provision of useful technological truths about kinematics for the rising class of manufacturers, entrepreneurs and travelling traders. Reason and morality were separated, with only moral philosophy attempting unsuccessfully to bridge an unbridgeable gap. The Enlightenment was characterised by the conceptual separation of god-like subjective “observers” from soulless objective matter which they manipulated for utilitarian reasons. This was made possible by Pythagorean idealism which Rene Descartes made reputable by his commitment to God whom he believed was essentially a mathematician like himself. Only through ecstatic surrender to his mathematician god could he detach himself from corporeal embedding in the material world to become an “objective observer”. The Pythagorean belief that mathematics is so pure that it must be located outside the universe, although nonsensical and falsified mathematically by Gödel, has continued into the Modern period with disastrous consequences for any internally consistent and inclusive cosmology. Those who still claim to be objective observers are either liars, fools or insane.

Responsible Personal Agency

The impersonal, irrational, irresponsible and immoral slaves who have sold their souls to become part of the Blob can never exercise true personal agency and can never afford to doubt that they are in possession of the absolute truth and must force this truth on everyone else. I trust I can persuade readers not trapped in the Blob to follow my arguments. When opposing the monster, I have discarded the “we” masks that often hide our less honourable intentions and enable us to avoid personal responsibility. To be realistic I admit that I am, like everyone else, unavoidably a “we” as a member of a collectivity distinguishable from others, whether it be organic versus inorganic, male versus female, teacher versus student, British Crown subject versus American Republican citizen, Christian versus Moslem, and so on. However, in 1968 there came a point in my life when I could only say “I” concerning matters where I had identified problems and solutions but could find no-one else prepared to act or speak out to the public about them. I have never experimented with consciousness-raising drugs but this was as near as I have come to an epiphany.                                     

Accidents of History

Although, like many others I was socialised into becoming a young socialist through family upbringing and compulsory secular education, I was “de-conditioned” by my mature experiences as a mad keen Boy Scout, RAF navigator, paper merchant’s representative in the city of London, long-term backpacker in the Balkans and Middle East, CEO of a major university sponsored arts festival, and pioneer academic sociologist of religion.  I had already developed a deep responsiveness to creative play to become an innovative cultural administrator in two universities. By an accident of history, I was caught up as a child in the populist uprising in what was then the British Empire against both the pro-Stalin socialists and pro-Hitler capitalists when in 1939 the two dictators suddenly joined forces to enable the Nazis to attack and occupy Europe, with France unexpectedly collapsing in utter demoralisation. Miraculously British morale was revived and raised up to fever pitch almost single-handedly by Winston Churchill, an old-school Tory. Many intellectuals today are frightened at the prospect of a populist revival. Who would now judge the 1940 populist uprising in support of British Christian Imperial values threatened by an unprecedentedly brutal German National Socialist tyrant in a mutually advantageous pact with another even more brutal Russian International Socialist tyrant, to have been dangerously deluded or wicked?  

The Classroom War Replaces the Class War;  Cultural Hegemony.

As I have already mentioned, I believe that the events that led to the independent emergence of the Blob took place primarily in the nineteen-sixties and were focussed in the suddenly-expanded university social science departments of the time. The Marxist academics of the post-war Parisian deconstructionist school were still playing an important part in interpreting all cultural phenomena as little more than, what was for them, meaningless power relationships. A check of the indices of their theoretical works reveals that the essential concept of social roles, as the playful but fundamental action components of social systems, has been completely eliminated in their puritanical reductionist writings. In spite of an abundance of unreadable jargon and neologisms, these career intellectuals who were employed and financially rewarded by the state were made into celebrities by the commercial media already embedded in the developing European Blob.

These celebrity academics were important in facilitating the managerial takeover of the professions that permitted the emergence of the all-powerful Blob. At the same time the Hegemonic Culture theory of the Marxist revisionist Antonio Gramsci was now becoming popular amongst social scientists. Without stating it explicitly, Gramsci assumed that institutionalised cultural values such as love and beauty and virtue, as rival human concerns to hierarchies of power, had to be deconstructed as epiphenomenal and only egalitarian power relationships were to be given any significance. As the first academic lecturer in sociological theory in Australasia (1965-6 and 1967-8) I was deeply concerned by the events taking place around me and elsewhere in the universities in Europe and North America. Seeing them undergoing rapid political and economic changes away from partly autonomous institutions, previously idealised as communities of scholars, I started a playful “university reform” campaign in 1968 to oppose this drift away from “communitas”.  

 

Why Me?

The accepted belief of the most significant modern process philosophers is that the cosmos is a kind of giant evolving organism with its own overall intentions largely unknowable to us but moving towards increasing complexity. Human beings expressing through their culture, values such as beauty, truth and goodness, are part of this process. The only explanation of my unique personal career, both within the academic community and in the world outside, that makes any sense of what has been happening around me since 1968, is that by designing and acting out new but coherent and responsible roles in a spirit of fun, without consciously intending it, I have somehow been formed by the cosmos itself to becoming the dialectical opposite and leading opponent of the enemy of truth, beauty and goodness, the Blob!  Hence the title of this essay. It really is “The Blob and I”. Are there any other claimants to the title?

 

This is truly disconcerting to me and my friends. This burden seems not only rationally absurd but, since I am not a megalomaniac, it is very hard for me to shoulder as I take no pleasure in leadership roles, preferring to teach by setting an example or by setting up new structures and  leting them run themselves. But if it’s fun, and avoids cognitive dissonance, I’ll do it, even if it is absurd! This why I felt it necessary to compose this essay, giving my personal understanding of the nature and history of my enemy, the Blob, which has been progressively foiling almost every attempt I make to spread my message of logic, love and levity. The narrative describing what happened around me in the universities in Australia between 1968 and 1974 is in my as- book, “The Fun Revolution; Jack’s Adventures in Ideologyland”. I hope that this will help to show that I am not insane in making this seemingly preposterous claim.

 

Between 1968 and 1974 I was the only academic in Australia concerned enough with the welfare of students to be active in attending their meetings and speaking out clearly against the misuse of sociological theories and the increasingly violent elite of student-power activists on the campuses strangely obsessed with occupying buildings by force. Motivated by burning ressentiment and with the help of negative sensationalist publicity in the mass media and using shameless creation of fake news and skilful manipulation of bureaucratic procedures, these student power leaders went on to obtain managerial roles in the educational and political institutions in Australia. Their published comments about me and the fun revolution in their newspapers of the time, which I have preserved in my archives, had the emotional intensity of those recently made by the hysterical Blob chorus in the mass media and mass education institutions preceding and following the 2016 Presidential Elections in the USA. It indicated to me that I must be a very powerful wizard. I have since come across a fascinating description by Scott Adams in 2015 of what characterises a paradigm-changing wizard when he tries to understand Donald Trump’s career. The description fits me very well yet I began to affect major institutions in Western Civilisation at least thirty years earlier and in a much deeper way.

I was prepared for an emotional reaction with my instinctual creation in 1968 of the university-based Fun Revolution emphasising the importance of play guided by both logic and love. Play is only seen as important if one believes that the universe is an evolving, self-organising process with its own intentions. Most academics assume that the universe is a unidirectional time-machine. For them it has one over-riding purpose, never admitted consciously of course, to provide economic and political power for those human beings who, having a monopoly of the means of communication, can maintain and control the dysfunctional paradigm to maintain their positions in the hierarchy of status, material assets and power over others. For such people play is “a distraction from the real issues” though it may be tolerated as recreation to prepare us for the serious work of making and selling, despite polluting the environment to the point of destruction.

                                      

Academic Crucifixion and Magical Resurrection

At the end of 1968, to my complete surprise and with the backing of the professorial board, my academic career was suddenly and incomprehensibly destroyed by the head of the School of Sociology who was also my thesis supervisor. At the time, as the official history of UNSW shows, I was the most popular and most successful teacher in the sociology school but, most unfortunately for me, I was not a materialistic Marxist in favour of class war and violent revolution. My varied past career and my academic training in the history and philosophy of science, as well as in psychology and sociology, specialising in the sociology of religion, urged me to stay and fight. Rather than suing the University for unfair dismissal, as recommended by the Staff Association, I decided to resolve the conflict by wisely taking my threatened role-set to a higher level, as Jesus recommends..I made a creative effort to stay on campus. Instead of accepting the economic compensation I was offered and running away, I would ‘up the ante’ even further by stubbornly increasing my revitalising reform activities which I called the Fun Revolution. There are many politically motivated versions of what happened in circulation and targeted at discrediting me and to dismiss the importance of what I believe was a seminal historical event.

Early in 1969 I approached the Vice Chancellor and his about-to-be-appointed successor and showed them the correspondence between myself and the Head of the School of Sociology at UNSW whilst I was a tenured lecturer at the University of WA. They were shocked by the promises made and then broken. They appreciated the immorality and irrationality of what had happened to my academic career but had no authority over decisions of the Professorial Board. At this point history took a strange turn. I had come across a highly placed manager and his deputy with integrity, compassion and courageous enough to take a risk on my ability and integrity. I obtained their cooperation in creating a provocative and entirely new role which would allow me to remain on campus supported by a small honorarium. This would be a non-contractualised relationship based solely on trust involving both university and student administrations and free from control by the academic staff. Both bodies had to agree to the proposal, and they did!

I chose the archetypal title of Wizard, currently fashionable in the youth- culture. I did this for many reasons, not least to annoy those puritanical students and academics who had demonstrated their visceral hatred of the fun revolution, even though my friends and I had achieved many reforms. I was encouraged by my success with the fun revolution based on my synthesis of my studies of revitalisation movements in pre-literate cultures, the hippie phenomenon, the current unprecedented popularity of Lord of the Rings, and Beatlemania, which was “turning on” the Global Village. I seized the day to escape being crushed in the heartless, inhuman, degree-awarding machine that was inhibiting learning and producing unnecessary psychological, social and cultural stress and causing my best students to drop out.

At this time, dropping out was a common phenomenon. I decided to do the opposite and to “drop in”. Gradually I attempted to “re-embody” myself organically, not just psychologically but socially, culturally and even personally. I did this by learning from the hippies that were the subject of my lectures. I began gradually “disembedding” myself as much as possible, but not completely, from the social institutions which derive their meaning and their material support by their enmeshment in the scientific mathematical-mechanistic paradigm created during the Enlightenment. What would happen to my consciousness if I did this?  Marx himself claimed that our consciousness is determined by our evil socio-economic relationships and was similarly concerned with alienation.

I began adjusting my set of interacting roles, while it was still possible, so that I could occupy what Victor Turner, the first significant experimental process anthropologist, refers to as a “liminal” role-complex in the universities. I wanted to avoid cognitive dissonance and its expression in irrational hysteria that was surrounding me in academia and growing daily. I undertook to reinvent myself by integrating those opposing aspects of human expression. I wanted to retain my active membership of the major existing cultural institutions, not just the university. Being in the world but not of the world. This would not be difficult as my past record demonstrates. However, my experience was now refined by the psychological, social and cultural theories and processes I had studied and taught at university and had been experimenting with in the Fun Revolution. I felt confident that I had matured to the “autonomous” stage of personality development, described by David Riesman in “The Lonely Crowd” and to guide myself I had adopted the concept of a “neural” psycho-social stage which could only take place when the oral, anal, and sexual phases of psychosocial development (frequently hypothesised by psychoanalysts) had been successfully negotiated and I was now “self-actualising”. Since culture and personality are symbiotic, this meant I was living in a different cultural reality whilst, like a good Confucian, going through the motions of acting out my remaining social roles conscientiously.

As a charismatic personality I could easily have become one of the gurus flourishing at the time, but my past experiences as an evacuated child in England during the Battle of Britain, head choir boy in the ancient church of Framlingham in Suffolk, boy scout troop leader in Kent, RAF pilot officer trained in astro-navigation in Canada, co-founder of the first Hector Berlioz Society, rep for a paper merchant in the City of London, backpacker in Europe and the Middle East, teacher in Shia Iran in a school for Jews exiled from Baathist Iraq, sole community arts organiser for two universities, and currently the first qualified lecturer in theoretical sociology in  Australasia, rendered such an idea ridiculous. I was only 35 but one could say I lacked experience. Nor did I have any record of failure,  except in my folie a deux marriage based on friendship more than passion. Apart from this I had not suffered any mentally damaging personal experiences except from compulsory secular education, and even that was interrupted several times by evacuation in the early years of the Second World War.                

Throwing Myself on the Mercy of the Universe

To achieve this disembedding from the universe as a machine and reinvention of myself as part of the organic world, I would have to rely much more on playfully expressed trust and love and upon my realisation as a sociologist of the currently neglected but vital who dared to make responsible decisions which they judged to be right even when their colleagues might object. Creativity had not yet been completely smothered or deformed by importance of role theory. Fortunately, in the late 1960s and early 1970s there were still a few administrators left the spin and conformist political correctness of the growing malevolent Blob. I was able in that transitional time to persuade important university and artistic authorities to grant me roles that although still legitimate within the existing cultural paradigm, were based on mutual trust and hence were uncontractualised, peripheral, and without clear purpose. Such social roles are “liminal “since they provide transitions or doorways to other models of scio-cultural and personal reality or character.

As part of my process of “organic re-embodiment”  I pursued harmonious coherence above all else, bringing together the fragmented roles and narratives and doing my best to avoid cognitive dissonance in the symbolic expression of the ideological/ metaphysical basis of my cultural being. To make this manageable I combined many theories including Jung’s multicultural depth psychology, the role theory of George Mead and others, the social system ideal typology of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, and Vaihinger’s “useful fiction” theory for the changing paradigms of the cultural/historical narrative.

The first significant event that should have come to the attention of the world both inside and outside academia took place on the first of April 1969. This was my appointment by the university and student administrations of the University of NSW as their official Wizard, supported by a jointly supplied honorarium. I believed the role of wizard, if culturally legitimated and not self-appointed, is the key transitional role-complex for the creative intellectuals of our time. The first scientists emerging from the religious agricultural civilization were culturally legitimated by the Church. Anthropologists have described how shamans made the transition to culturally legitimated priests as their societies were transformed from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists. But there was a deafening silence from the intellectual classes.

The Fate of an Outsider

Following my appointment as Wizard of NSW University I found myself on the periphery of the universe of discourse, dismissed without thought as little more than a drop-out, rather bizarre, entertainer. Most of the popular Australian magazines described me as a mad clown which I tolerated so that at least I was still visible to the public and I continued my enjoyable association with the counter culture happenings and music festivals. However, fanatics still treated me as a threat to their shallow, self-righteous confidence. This is when I believe the Blob found its secure base in the universities with the academics distancing themselves from the fury and bullying of the millenarian student power leaders who had taken over the student unions and newspapers.  We now know that they eventually became the professors and administrators of the woke universities.                            

New Roles and New Narratives

Once appointed University Wizard I had many new narratives to choose from. My earliest was finding myself in a narrative like that of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”, very popular at the time. I was acting out the role of the intellectual Gandalf who prefers the company of hobbits to that of elves, dwarves, and humans. He finds out to his horror that all the other wizards have been corrupted by power and are now “absorbed” into the featureless, dark, impenetrable Blob of Sauron. Coming across the lost master ring of power, Gandalf wisely refuses to put it on his own finger fearing that his skill as an intellectual will enable him to rationalise his personal use of the power over others that it brings. Instead, he entrusts it to be carried to be destroyed by “uneducated”, honest, fun-loving, riddle-solving hobbits in a team accompanied by himself, and a few trustworthy humans, dwarves and elves. He trusts the hobbit peasants to resist the temptation of using its magic for themselves since he knows they are economically independent, generally mind their own business, love fun, and lack all desire for power without responsibility.

I also took on the role of thaumatocratic shaman called upon to perform to heal the damaged souls of the over-educated career academics and the neurotic student power leaders driven by an insane hunger for power and puritanical self-righteousness who were at that time identifying with the angry and violent Red Guards in China and student Jacobins in Paris. This was the origins of the Fun Revolution of 1968 at UNSW. Between 1968 and 1970 I found a fellow spirit in the clinical psychiatrist Dr Neville Yeomans, the pioneer community therapist, and we jointly organised Fun Days in the Sydney parks. Another colleague at that time was Mad Mel, a disk jockey whose “Giant Stirs” featuring rock bands in spectacular open-air sites in the city, like Bondi Beach and the Harbour Bridge, were unprecedented.

                                                   

The Orestes Complex

Another change in my shamanic consciousness was provoked by the sexual revolution that exploded at that time. All my life I had been seeking a female partner who was not a mother figure providing security, food and shelter and offspring for male “womb envy”, nor a soulless thing, a sex object to satisfy my lust and as a trophy to impress other men, not even a folie a deux sister-companion to provide a base support for narcissism. I wanted my spiritual opposite, a true dialectical anima Yin to my animus Yang. I developed a new psycho-sexual-narrative for myself which inverted Freud’s Oedipus complex. This was based on the myth of Orestes who was instructed by Athena, the goddess of wisdom to kill his mother to save his soul, his life, and his kingdom. It is the narrative of the greatest of all Greek dramas and is unique in having a happy ending. I was also aware that hunter gatherers were insistent that, although their societies were generally matrilineal, once they reached the age of seven or so, to protect their souls, sons must leave their mothers to join the men for extended periods of time in their separated locations.

Ethologists point out that, since animals are not trapped in human ideologies, males are able to act as sex-objects whose display is not just about dominance but attracts females aesthetically. Hence females’ aesthetic taste influences the direction of much evolution. If sexual relationships are no longer patriarchal and focussed on salvation, fertility and land ownership, nor focussed on the separation of the educated wage-slave at work a nd the motivating uneducated goddess of the home of the industrial nuclear family, nor the unstructured egalitarianism of the serially-monogamous consumer society, then economically independent young women could develop a new ideology of romantic love. Like Eloise, my 12^th century ideal woman in love with the brilliant Abelard, young women liberated from patriarchal structures can now carefully select stable ego-tripping mature males for their own sexual, romantic, intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction.

 

The Alchemical Marriage

This was the most challenging of my psycho-social-cultural engineering projects and I found it necessary to model my behaviour towards a sexually bonded young woman on that of the love that a mother expresses towards a son. Once again, my liminal social position enabled me to adopt a unique processual approach. Already as a performer I was displaying in public rather like a rock musician. Having attracted a young woman, I could practise responsible non-possessive love aimed at allowing the loved one of the opposite sex to mature, become independent and leave should she choose to do so. I was not free to desert them without soul-damage and self-loathing. As the Cavalier poet put it, “I could not love thee so, loved I not honour more.” After a few failures, and after many years, one of these unusually romantic young women finally reached that stage. As Alison was a classics student, in 1972 I persuaded her to follow up Norman Brown’s pioneering mytho-dynamic work on the evolution of the Greek myth of Hermes and to write her required short thesis on the Orestes myth and its changes over time in allocating agency, as heroic age Greek kingdoms became a collection of plutocratic democracies.

Of course, I am inordinately proud of her patience and perseverance. Alice, as I now called her as she is extremely curious, is my ‘wife’ in an alchemical marriage, but although we are perfectly attuned at the cultural level we could not differ more temperamentally. I assume genetic inheritance is important here. She has Norse and Irish ancestors as well as talented English engineers whereas I come from many generations of East Anglian horse dealers and school teachers. who may be of Huguenot descent as I have an instinctive affinity with the French language. She is a rather shy and devout Roman Catholic deeply interested in Induian religions and raised in Melbourne, Australia who was transfixed by the new rock music and who fantasises about founding her own order of nuns. I am a restless and excitable Anglican Wizard born and raised in London and Suffolk during the Depression and Second World War and as a young man was fascinated by the Romantic movement especially in Paris during the 1830s. Parental influences may play a major part in forming character. Both us had loving parents who raised us to be honest and truthful and allowed us considerable intellectual freedom.                             

Liminal but Legitimate Social Roles

I am also proud of my successful social engineering in creating a coherent role complex of such liminal roles as University Wizard, Process Cosmologer, and Living Work of Art, each of which to be effective had to be legitimated by the relevant cultural authorities. Even those roles that I had to acquire purely by my deeds, such as postmodern Prophet of the Anglican Church, Founder of the Imperial British Conservative Party, creator of Alf’s Imperial Army performance group, famous orator and tourist attraction in the centre of the city of Christchurch. This required years of symbolic interaction with others. These roles together with accompanying models and explanations are coherent in the broad terms of the traditional fourfold magical matrices created by the polarities of Active versus Responsive and Inner versus Outer which have proved invaluable to me in understanding evolving psychology, sociology and culture as part of an overall process cosmology. This was how I avoided cognitive dissonance and the hysteria that accompanies it.

Having created these liminal and culturally-legitimated roles I was confident that I was proof against the Blob’s amazing ability to absorb professional intellectuals and to bring them under monetised managerial control. The only truly independent functioning roles in the Blob are the power roles of the anti-cultural, bean-counting, academic cv-flourishing managers, with one eye permanently fixed on the bottom line and the other on their position on the greasy pole. The managers in the Blob regard the highly-qualified and experienced professionals, whom they now control almost completely, as naive idealists. As for the working classes and peasants, having labelled them as despicable uneducated racists, sexists and homophobes, they are converted them into their grateful slaves on benefits or driven into abject poverty. After fifty years with no social security or income tax registration nor significant property, I remain far less “absorbed” than any other radical activist thinker with a high social profile that I have so far heard of. I would welcome news of another.

 

The incoherence and fragmentary nature of the cosmos as described by academic scientists is very disturbing. There is little interest in cosmology except by philosophers most of whom are lost in a maze of words and meanings and take little interest in culture or social system theories or even recent important advances of our knowledge of brain function and the evolution of consciousness. Reductionist astrophysics, which has been in a chaotic state of confusion for a century, is not cosmology. The machine has fallen to bits, but rather than abandon the antiquated model by studying the different streams of the evolution of consciousness since the Axial Age, they are content to simply stick to the old reductionist model of the Milesian materialists. Like the classical Greeks, they are content to leave “epiphenomenal” metaphysical reality to idealist philosophers and instead to rely mainly on digital bean-counting, like the democratic politicians with their bias towards bourgeois plutocratic values.                                  

                                         

Blowing up the World with Funpowder

Not only do I play with social roles and cultural frames of reference, but also with physical frames of reference, and that really upsets materialists. One of my favourite metaphysical strategies, chosen to provoke the arrogant astrophysicists who act as if they unconsciously still believe there is still an absolute frame, and hence absolute size.   I do this by insisting that a more up-to date model of the physical universe and solar system should be in the curricula of our compulsory education system. The Geoperipheral model, created by a simple conformal inversion of the mathematical coordinates, not only makes the Sun much smaller than the Earth but creates a new singularity in the centre towards which the entire universe is converging. Since 1974 I have printed and sold at cost tens of thousands of posters showing the model and the rationale behind it. So far there has been no comment from any astrophysicist.  Most people in the world would welcome this new model. Hopeful, harmonious convergence brought about by human creativity replaces the despair of being completely alienated from the meaningless diverging universe. Up is back. Heaven has returned, and the Centre can hold! Truth, beauty and goodness are evolving together. What deep fun it could be to watch the astrophysicists and missile manufacturers going ballistic at the very idea! I may not be the Messiah, but I am certainly a very naughty boy!                                                                          

 

A Man-made Universe as a Work of Art

Even as a wizard I was unable to conjure up an absolute frame out of thin air for my synthetic cosmology which adopted the Geoperipheral universe as its physical base, and with no pressure on me to lie, I admitted that it was my own subjective creation. I developed my cosmology without directly knowing of Whitehead’s earlier carefully-expressed philosophical process theory, which coincidentally he based on the same differentiations of involving intentionality, evolving extentionality, and most importantly of all, eventuality, as the key concept, with the potential for sudden qualitative upgrading. It can also be described as a non-materialistic artwork in progress designed by the shamanic Living Work of Art to spellbind, re-integrate, revitalise and provide therapy for an increasingly obsessional, fearful and hysterical civilization.

 

                                      

 

In 1974, in spite of insane and ferocious student opposition from the Maoist Student Representative Council at a specially convened meeting of the Union, the process cosmology I had created as their official cosmologer was authorised to be published by the University Union of Melbourne University as part of my infamous “Wizard’s Nonsense Almanac for 1974”.

 

The Living Work of Art

At their annual conference in Hamburg in 1969, I was appointed official Wizard of the World University Service commissioned to tour universities in Australia with a fun revolutionary show combining the new rock and roll music with recent social science theories involving the new open-ended process paradigm. Two years later, after conferring with the Curator of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Director of the National Gallery of Victoria announced to the media that in his opinion I had become the world’s first Living Work of Art. The idea was to experiment with the nature of aesthetics as process, like music and dance, rather than idols or commodities and to question the values implicit in the role of artistic institutions in deciding which art forms to support. This had been the subject of my suddenly terminated PhD thesis in the Sociology of Art. In normal times, these unprecedented events would have provoked vigorous discussion and given me a high personal profile for which I was prepared, but they passed uncommented upon and no further interest was forthcoming. It was ignored by serious commentators and the popular mass media treated the news as a mildly amusing joke by an eccentric. This gave me considerable pause for thought. What was new enough to be called news now? What was creative enough to be called art?  Were genuinely new ideas and their accompanying social actions too dangerous to be discussed in the public forum?

The living work of art also aestheticises art itself by taking it into the existential world, free from the distortions of economic or political determinism. The motivation of many artists in the Blob is to produce agitprop art works that will secure grants made by arts bureaucrats out of compulsory taxation. Art, in both its commercial forms as commodities or paid entertainments. or its ideological as conceptual art and installations loaded with ideological gobbledegook, has lost the magical quality of great creativity. Successful artists have turned their backs on deeper aspects of meaning and narrative to become uncontroversial well-paid providers of escape from boredom or fixated on shallow virtue-signalling from the high moral ground of political correctness. Others, showing severe signs of the growing modernist schizophrenia, are supported by bored and satiated nouveau-riche patrons for their shock value.                                                

Some Definitions of Art

“A self is probably the most impressive work of art we ever produce.” This quotation is from Jerome Bruner to which I will add one from Wittgenstein, “The work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself.” Another quote; “Art is not created from moral or rational principles, but from the depth of the soul of a people. The myth is the expression of that unique soul, but as soon we try to “objectify” or rationally explain its relevance, we slowly kill our cultural life and replace it with a clinical, materialist world-view. This world-view is the modern one, where we have literally killed the belief in religion, passion, magic and myth, because we no longer understand their function. We search for “objective” answers to the myth itself and unsurprisingly we find none, because the truth about life, according to Nietzsche, does not lie in the myth itself, but in its metaphorical expression of life.”

Jacques Barzun insists that “With its mechanical and historical bias, evolution reduced everything to something else; from fear of being anthropomorphic it de-anthropomorphised man”.  In a pamphlet called “The Abolition of Man”, later expanded dramatically into his most prophetic book “That Hideous Strength” C.S.Lewis  summed of the metaphysical basis of the soulless managerialised Blob? It seems that without consciously intending it Ego (I am) is its greatest adversary though I would be greatly relieved to find a greater pure egoist than myself that I could support. I take my fundamental stand as the world’s only Living Work of Art. The role was legitimated many years ago by art gallery directors in Australia and New Zealand with support from the Curator of the Met in New York, before they were all absorbed into the Blob and went silent about my very prominent existence in their midst.

The Blob Politicises, the Living Work of Art Aestheticises.

The aestheticising process, which began as I was studying for my doomed doctorate in the sociology of art, flowered in the patterns which were arising from the depths of my psyche and from the superconscious realm of heavenly inspiration, as physical, psychological, sociological and cultural theories began to shape themselves into interacting processual forms. It was an epiphany. I could see similarities between what I was experiencing and the beautiful cosmological diagrams of the late 16^th and early 17^th century magician-scientists. By 1972, in my department of cosmology on the campus at Melbourne University, I had produced a set of inter-related diagrams. The most important of these took the form of the Tree of Life and Caduceus. Others were the experienceable mandala-like double-dialectical kinematics and the nesting concentric spheres representing evolving nesting systems of location ‘space’, involving nesting systems of ‘identity’ and the probabilistic event hierarchy of ‘time’. Like Puck, “I put a girdle about the Earth” by making a conformal inversion of the current mathematical coordinates of the physical universe.

If there is no absolute frame, then the resultant inside-out Geoperipheral model is no more falsifiable than the old Heliocentric model of the 17^th century mechanists which was accepted for its ‘usefulness’ to the military for its contribution to the science of ballistics. Occam’s razor was no help in choosing between them. Any decision would be decided by its usefulness and to whom.  As an Anglican postmodern prophet, I could announce that Heaven, the centre of the universe, was now directly above the Earth’s surface again.

In my new model, Heaven becomes a real singularity with a specific if unreachable location and satanic materialists would be rendered incoherent with rage as the fake absolutism of their  universe was unmasked. I planned an imagination experiment in personal transcendence, a shamanic ascension of the cosmic axis, and set off to NZ to attempt it but was unable to obtain the necessary support, even though, as levity is important to me, I would have been happy if it had been treated by most people as a practical joke.

 

       

Christchurch NZ, a unique city founded by Christian Romantics

On arrival in the city of Christchurch in 1974 I approached the City Council offering my services pro bono publico and requesting the transfer of my status as Living Work of Art (on extended loan to the National Gallery of Victoria) to the City Art Gallery. After being initially ignored, I was then rudely rebuffed and this led to my declaring aesthetic war on the aesthetically ignorant suits on the Council. It was not until 1980 that I was acknowledged by the NZ Art Gallery Directors Council as the world’s first legitimate Living Work of Art and issued with the world’s first Artistic License.

Creating and launching the Imperial British Conservative Party into the general elections in Australia and New Zealand was a deliberate attempt to call upon established status to aestheticise the grubby world of modern politics which was based on the alternatives of vulgar capitalist appeals to greed, or puritanical socialist appeals to power. On aesthetic grounds alone, I must admit that Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were exceptions. Mussolini had the support of the futurists. The German totalitarian state was aestheticised by Dr Goebbels, with his PhD in German Romanticism, supported by Hitler, who was an artist himself, and Himmler, obsessed with New Age occult symbolism. This probably accounts for their continuing negative attraction compared with the banal aesthetics of equally murderous left-wing totalitarian states, whose major symbol is the clenched fist or a hammer.

To aestheticise the ugly politically-motivated student mobs in the early 1970s I created Alfs Imperial Army, a performing arts group who declared war on friendly groups and fought battles on campuses. But unlike high-profile escapist team sports, which it superficially resembles, it is non-commercial and less formalised. The army is not like one of the common politically-motivated mobs of the time, but an example of ritualised aggression, complete with weapons’ inspections, and is beautifully contextualised by building up tension through provocative ultimata and thunderous declarations of war expressed in poetic biblical-style. Unlike the bloody and ugly wars fought by the Blob, Alf’s Imperial Army is non-violent and features colourful battledress with pith helmets, rival regiments in different centres, campaigns throughout NZ, victory celebrations after battles (held by both sides), and highly formal mess dinners in splendid uniforms at which specially struck medals are worn and the Queen is toasted. Reunions of old warriors and nurses and their loved ones are still being held after forty years.

To preserve my liminal aesthetic identity from being brutally deconstructed by the five-yearly compulsory NZ Census, I avoided filling in the schedules by transforming the inevitable conflict into genuine, not fake, living theatre in the real world. “All the World’s a Stage”. Dramatic scenarios that delighted the public were enacted when, in my role as a living work of art, I defied the authorities by going out to sea beyond the twelve-mile limit and during the next census when I cast a spell on myself to disappear for the critical few hours. This carefully planned political theatre by a social scientist defying repressive and pointless bean-counting was not recognised as truly radical theatre in old-fashioned, self-promoting ‘avant garde’ theatrical circles, funded by government grants with audiences buying tickets and sitting in theatres. These ‘plays’ of mine, along with the successful telephone box war against Telecom and my miraculously successful rain dances, with no failures, in both NZ and Australia have become legendary in Oz (Australasia).

The Anglican church authorities in Australia did not reply to my 1973 letter requesting that they examine my credentials as an Anglican prophet claiming I had received a call to speak on behalf of the people who felt that in their rush to be seen as politically correct, the gender-obsessed Church had abandoned their Christian understanding of good and evil to avoid upsetting the humanists. My excellent training in the sociology of religion would enable me to avoid acting foolishly and bringing the Church into disrepute with their traditional worshippers as their own priests were doing.

Arriving in Christchurch, I took up my position in the square in front of the Anglican Cathedral dressed in an artificial camel’s skin costume resembling that of St John the Baptist. As “Hammer of the Heretics”, with my plastic telephone receiver as my hotline to heaven, my initial task was to clear Cathedral Square from the gangs of self-righteous fundamentalists informing modest Anglicans that along with Catholic nuns they were going to Hell. Nor was I tolerant with humanists who believed that more and more compulsory secular education would make the world a better place. As Chief Cashier of the Bank of Heaven, I issued Heavenly Credits for good deeds as well as selling them for a dollar each and then holding rituals outside the Cathedral where I offered up Caesar’s currency as a burnt offering. I designed, printed, and sold below cost, a boxed well-produced game called ‘Salvation’ based on the game of Monopoly where, in place of the Bank issuing dollars, the Church issued Heavenly Credits. Instead of claiming dollars for rents, players earned these when others landed on the good works of other players. The council promptly prosecuted me for hawking without a license. Their lawyer, realising they were blinded by spite, since the games were produced and sold below cost deliberately, quietly let the prosecution lapse. This was definitely not hawking!

The Climax of my Creative enterprise

Relations with the Council had quickly improved once I had used fun revolutionary techniques to persuade them to make an area in Cathedral Square into a Free Speech zone, the only one in the centre of an Australasian city. I spoke most days from a ladder in front of the Cathedral like one of the now vanished breed of soap-box orators. Soon I was being featured as a major tourist attraction in all the overseas guide books. My acceptance as the genius loci of Christchurch and New Zealand as a whole climaxed in 1990, the sesquicentennial year of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi which brought the Maoris and the British settlers together as one nation. The new Prime Minister, Mike Moore, and I had become friends whilst he was living in Christchurch, and he had been Minister of Tourism. He was seen by his party as a caretaker PM and during his short term in office he issued a proclamation appointing me Wizard of New Zealand. My duties included driving out evil spirits, encouraging small business enterprises, cooling off fanatical hot heads and turning the world upside down to put NZ on top. He did this by fiat since his rather bourgeois colleagues did not share his populist convictions as a working-class self-educated man with strong personal connections with Maoris and working class “pakehas”. He told me later that, like myself back in 1968, he had reached the “F*** it” point.

Romance is not Dead

In 1992 I decided to collaborate with City Council in promoting their first Festival of Romance. My creation of a new romantic relationship based on animal studies and non-patriarchal hunter-gather social systems, could be made into a performance which completely reversed the usual polarity of sexual magnetism. Acquainted with Esther Vilar’s radical treatise, “The Manipulated Man”, I was already notorious for my criticism of the way many mothers and wives manipulated their naïve sons and husbands by using moral force. I gave my support to those independent ambitious women who supported themselves, did not particularly want children, and who could afford to stay single or indulge their romantic passion for men they were not able to control. In this marriage form, like male animals and hunter-gatherers, the ego-tripping males are instinctively impelled to display as sometimes rather bizarre sex objects and females then select them as their mates for similarly mysterious reasons. Some weeks before, I announced to a shocked city that I had been proposed to and was considering whether or not I should accept. The announcement would be made by Vicki Buck, the Mayor, at the opening of the Festival. The speculation and the tension grew as I pondered my answer. It was “Yes”, and amidst cheers my long-time partner Alice was brought forward by the Mayor to receive the ring. Publicly aestheticising this new form of relationship not only delighted Alice but I hoped it would encourage others. We are still engaged.

I have been in the public eye as a role actor in Australia and New Zealand for almost fifty years, sometimes creating sensational and unprecedented events to avoid bureaucratic social control that could have destroyed my delicate cultural identity which is not legally enforced but based on mutual trust. However, I am astonished and deeply disappointed that until very recently no thinker, not even a process thinker, has had their curiosity provoked enough to consider these unprecedented socio-cultural events significant enough to be worth studying. No-one seemed interested in the complex reasons why I have chosen this sophisticated approach to cleanse the polluted stables of our decadent civilization with a flood of cleverly-designed laughter. I can understand that most academics, blinkered as they are by their reductionist and fragmented models of psychological, social and cultural models of reality, will only be able to see me as a kind of harmless clown. The fact that this is the case, is worthy of study in itself. Has compulsory education really destroyed native curiosity as Einstein claimed? Was Shakespeare right when he wrote about the dangers of intellectual self-awareness, “Thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought”, and “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.”?

 

Encysted by the Local Guardians of the Blob

 

Events are reaching a tipping point. For the first twenty-five years that I was in NZ, I appeared as a well-known weirdo celebrity at all sorts of social functions and was regularly invited to give humorous and thought-provoking talks at schools and clubs all over the country. For the past twenty-five years, although I have no criminal convictions or reputation as a trouble maker, I have been encysted like a dangerous virus and have been “disappeared” by all the institutions in NZ and, although famous both overseas and locally, I am no longer invited anywhere and am rarely mentioned officially. Many people believe that I must have retired and left Christchurch even though I still appear in the city daily in my highly visible wizard’s black gown and pointy hat and spend much of my time in my role as “the living work of art”, posing for locals and visitors and chatting to them rather like Socrates. I still receive my modest honorarium from the Christchurch City Council granted me many years ago, as their “Wizard in Residence”, which is managed by my curator Alice. This was before the iron curtain came down and my name removed from all city council and national publications, even those designed for tourists. I have been on friendly terms with the elected representatives on the city council for many years but during this time the council administration has undergone a rapid increase in the numbers, status and salaries of their certificated managerial staff who are obviously frightened of real people “in the wild” and rarely appear in the streets. The elected councillors increasingly identify with the likeable but fearful and impotent politician in “Yes Minister”, the perceptive BBC television comedy series.

I can provide a metaphor of my art work in progress. A Russian doll. The outer Babushka is my easily-seen acting out of the inter-related set of liminal roles of the university wizard aimed at provoking reflexive responses. This doll contains the smaller Babushka of the culturally validated role-set, liminally linked through trust to the educational, aesthetic, therapeutic and political institutions of our contemporary mechanistic civilisation. Inside this, is the Babushka of the British constitutional monarchy; the government bodies who made my appointments derive their legitimation from the ancient non-mechanistic institution of the Crown which is sacred since it derives its legitimation from God and ancient tradition. Inside this Babushka is the shaman, who is both healer and trickster and the world’s oldest professional, who started mankind on its journey as an animal progressively evolving inside cultural containers.

What Happens Next?

Here, like Prospero, in my self-chosen exile in a small island nation in the South Pacific, I have been watching unprecedented events like Brexit and the election of Trump unfold in the faraway world. I have been writing essays for some time in the hope that I will eventually come across people who find my ideas and actions interesting enough to want to interact playfully with me. I believe the time is right to throw my hat in the ring which is why I am publishing “The Blob and I”. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation of the theoretical ideas and social experiments of Victor Turner on liminality and social-antistructures, whose work paralleled my own without either of us being aware of it. Meanwhile I pay tribute to the blob-defying academic integrity of Roger Scruton in the UK and Jordan Petersen in Canada for not only standing up to the deluded left-wing student mobs trying to shut them down through physical intimidation, but for refusing to give in to the enormous pressure put on them by their academic colleagues and the university administrators who have sold their souls to the Blob. I await a call to join the last stand of those who value love, logic and levity enough to fight for them. I can bring a light heart, vivid imagination, long experience as a performer, a powerful “inside-out-universe” spell, and the enthusiastic backing of tens of thousands of sensible, unambitious hobbits of Christchurch. After half a century, the worst of times and the best of times has returned. Only a strong dose of laughter can purge the constipation our anally-fixated global civilization is suffering from and cleanse the body politic from the accumulation of generations of poisonous excrement. Only then can we make a clear unclouded assessment of what must do to save the biosphere from imminent destruction.

                                           

My title of Wizard, which implies wisdom, trickery and personally responsible magic, helps to protect me from being associated with both moral and rational absolutism. By combining love, logic and levity, independent activists can support themselves by entertaining the public. By doing this they could take on a similar role to the prophets, bards and fools by using music poetry and laughter to lance the painful, poisonous boils which were once communities of scholars. The electronic media could greatly facilitate a world-wide fun revolution revealing the absurdity of most academic claims to be objective and devoted to serving mankind. The ‘spectre of fun’ is haunting academia and exposing fake learning.

 

For fifty years now, the cognoscenti has been acting as a professional elite, educating the masses and controlling the machinery of the state. They believe, like Scientologists, that they have a mission to organise themselves to rebel and take over the current world. Who can they rebel against? The answer for them has become those conservative people who are not suffering from ressentiment. Such people may not be rich or important or well educated, but they are all disgusted by angry street mobs, public displays of sexual deviancy, repression of all non-Left free speech in schools and universities, foul language and pornography-saturated mass media, collapsing families, unending attacks on Christian values of love and forgiveness, and the sexual manipulation of young children. It is these ordinary people that make up the current rising populist movement so feared by those who put their jobs and their contacts with the movers and shakers of power-addicted globalism above all else.

The British Constitutional Monarchy is the most important institution that remains mostly outside the Blob, having been expelled from political power by the plutocratic enlightenment machine of government by the Whigs in the 18^th century. Earlier King Charles I had used divine right to justify overruling parliament who claimed the peoples’ mandate. The result was civil war. Those with the divine mandate ‘present’ themselves before the people. As Heidegger puts it, they present themselves as they are, rather than symbolically, and frequently falsely, ‘representing’ others. This is true ritual enactment, not the use of theatre to disguise plutocracy. Royal weddings incarnate the archetypical mystical union of man and wife, and coronations incarnate the acquisition of legitimate authority. Both combine the magical beauty of true ritual with blessing by traditional religious authorities who are charged with the guardianship of ethics through prioritising love over the satanic attraction of naked power. Immense joy is released on such occasions amongst the general public who can identify with the participants.

Two billion people throughout the world watched the television broadcast of the recent British royal wedding which maintained its traditional solemnity but included an American bride, a gospel choir and an electrifying charismatic African American preacher on the fiery power of love! Logic, love and levity triumphed over the lies, hatred and heavy seriousness of the Blob. The ideological masters of the plutocratic Blob hate any idea of a divine transcendental mandate of the political process The Mandate of God is no more mystical than the Mandate of the People that the democratic governments and their armies of soulless bureaucrats in the Blob claim. Turning one against the other is pure evil.

Plutocrats use their global economic power to manipulate the reductionist vote-based ‘mandate of the people’ through control of the representatives in parliaments. They do this by means of lobbying, mass media support, and bribes in the form of donations to campaign funds to the undemocratic political parties under their authoritarian leaders who lie about fixing the perilous situation of the world. Their ideological stooges in the educational institutions deliberately promote fanatical anti-religious political correctness whilst supporting and protecting murderous  Islamic jihadists putting the fear of Allah into peace-loving Christians.

The Blob is an evil entity that must be destroyed before it destroys us all along with our biosphere. Who can be trusted to do this? A wizard and his colleagues and supporters drawing attention to the truth which is that we are doomed without the intervention of the Monarch and the British Commonwealth she depicted her life to nurturing. Let us sing loudly together the second verse of our religious national anthem, “Oh Lord our God arise, scatter our enemies and make them fall! Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks, on thee our hopes we fix, God save our Queen”.

POST SCRIPT

This word spell was written during such events as Brexit, the election of Trump and the hugely popular royal weddings, which were beginning to punch holes in the Bob’s overstretched skin, The self-loathing individuals trapped inside were beginning to become increasingly hysterical. Now that Trump is back in office with a loyal and talented team, the Blob has been even more deeply penetrated. It is deflating, and as the hot air comes out of the holes being pierced in it, there is an agonising screaming sound.