A MINISTER FOR TOE NAILS

The idea of a Minister for Loneliness is profoundly sinister.  The Tory Party is transmogrifying at an ever accelerating rate.  I have a view, a sort of general theory, that we, as humans, are in a continuous process of becoming consciously aware of the truth of our existence.  Part of this seems evident in the way that we persistently reveal our unconscious existence, via the material world, to our conscious mind.  It would be a bit heavy duty to try to justify that argument here but I see it continuously in the arena of abuse.  The more people hide from their own pain by attempting to deny it any conscious recognition then the more they behave in a manner which externalises their worst fears for all to see.

This idea is not new.  It is referenced (chronologically) in the I Ching, by Pythagoras, Plotinus, the Talmud, Rumi, Freud, Jung, and most schools of psychology since.  It is an axiom of much philosophy echoed in ideas such as that by discovering more about the world we are actually discovering more about ourselves.  This whole crystal ball of revelation includes what we experience both as good and evil.  It is almost the raw bones of existentialism and linguistic philosophy.  We are interpreting a world that mirrors ourselves.  A beautiful poetic illustration of this idea is summed up by Plotinus "Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful."

So what exactly is going on with our good leader, Theresa May, appointing a Minister for Loneliness?  We know she doesn't give a damn about the people, the actual living people, in this country.  What?  You disagree?  In order to avoid too much digression I will clarify that by saying that she may have sentimental feelings which she interprets as caring about people when she is at home with friends or drifting off to sleep at night but as Prime Minister of the UK she continues to interpret the world in such a way that she promotes and advances policies that evidently erode the social fabric and escalate the harm caused to the least well off in Britain.  She continues to support the wealthy and their tax havens as they pillage the country of all its wealth with the help of her government.  You don't need examples such as Grenfell and Carillion to prove the case but they do a fine job of highlighting the effects of her and her Party's policies.  Her government, and May specifically, vowed to re-house the survivors of Grenfell within three weeks.  Why?  To externalise her desire to appear, maybe even to herself, as a caring and compassionate human.  But they are still not re-housed.  She helps the Saudis bomb Yemen in secret whilst publically exhibiting serious concern for the devastating consequences for the people in Yemen.  But there are too many ways to illustrate that May's evident purpose is to convince the public that her concerns reflect their concerns; that she is what she thinks they want her to be.  It is the act of attempting to convince people rather than the act of being genuine.  It follows that she does not care, in any meaningful way, because it is an evident pretence.

I am not sure what world she lives in but mental health has risen on the political agenda in recent years.  It has risen largely because of the increasing number of problems becoming evident in that domain.  Those problems are mostly a consequence of a fundamental breakdown of a sense of social security.  This is clearly created and illustrated by the most horrible regime of the DWP and the privatisation and profiteering by vetting doctors assessments with corporate tick box exclusion mechanisms with targets.  I won't go on at this point but suffice it to say that Ken Loach's "I, Daniel Blake" will forever stand as a cultural indictment against this government and their ruthless democidal extravagances.

The Tories are clearly losing ground in the political tug of war and there have been numerous attempts recently to increase their share of the public vote.  They have even announced their intent to impress more people with very feeble and flawed policies they say are addressing the concerns of the younger voters such as housing and green issues.  But it is all vacuous, smoke and mirrors, and bluster.  They are perversely attempting to analyse the reasons for Jeremy Corbyn's popularity and Labour's rapidly increasing demographic reach with the sole objective of imitating them to steal their thunder to gain power to continue their ravages against the population of this country for their own benefit.  They are genuinely hideous parasitic beasts.

In attending to the welfare of people in this country the Tories have succeeded in even alerting the UN to their criminal inhumanity.  All their actions with respect to helping the poor have been aimed at getting rid of the poor.  They are not concerned with helping the poor out of poverty but in riding this country of poor people.  They do it in a number of ways including changing definitions and measuring points by which we count poverty.  They devise complicated methods of removing people from categories such as unemployed by fuelling what is called the gig economy, by advancing tax credits, by obstruction using sanctions and what has been judicially cast as slavery in their demands that people do voluntary work for their euphemised 'benefits'.  They encourage and enforce zero hours contracts to remove people from the status of unemployed whilst they are still receiving nothing for their efforts.  Their utter destruction of support for disabled people is almost beyond belief.  These policies are no accident.  These policies are well crafted methods of shrouding their greed and cruelty with a veil of good intention.  These policies are not made up in a back room but rather they are the sophisticated results of studying psychology, sociology, and methods of manipulation and controlling the populations.

We look back in recent history and begin to realise how the two World Wars were driven by the industrialisation of robbery with violence.  The world has moved on and it is less successful to pursue those obvious and transparent industrial methods and so more clandestine ways must be found.  Britain moved from its industrial base to a service economy during the 1980s and what I believe we are seeing is the evolution of the methods of these criminals to something akin to a service based approach to render their objectives of rape, pillage, death, and destruction for their own warped and demonic aspirations.  So the impetus to address mental health issues, for example, has rendered what is described by some as oppressive coercion by putting counsellors in every school, installing 'work coaches' in job centres, and establishing 'talking therapies' as the only available psychological assistance which is designed primarily to keep the chickens quiet whilst they are having their necks wrung.

What continues to happen is that people raise legitimate issues and concerns and the Tories process these topics through their tragically egocentric cognition and render an illusion of addressing the matter whist materially benefiting themselves.  They see this as good business; "What's in it for me?"  The culture, meanwhile, is so distorted by these egocentric authoritarian paradigms that, so far, the majority of the public are clearly fooled by these warped and distorted interpretations and proposed political policies to address the issues in the world.  All the time the evidence is mounting that the rulers are criminally insane and so, inevitably, their attempts to disguise reality are compelled to escalate to a new level.  You really can't criticise someone who wants to help lonely people so obviously the Tories want to appear to be concerned about lonely people.  They are so up their own backsides, to coin a phrase, that they create a Minister for Loneliness to impress the ignorant plebs (to use one of their own terms).

Altercast people as lonely with a feigned concern for their condition and they will interpret their own condition as lonely and will have no choice but to be grateful for the meagre cold bowl of companion gruel they are offered.  There is no accident here.  These are well studied methods of sociopolitical control.  This is the utilisation of information technology, metadata, and complex analytical algorithms, as a service based approach to creating mass ontological insecurity to the point of destroying the manufactured poor.  It is a self consuming, self contradictory, parasitic, and very sophisticated manifestation of the cruelty which the perpetrators are pathologically compelled to deny within themselves.  They are externalising their pain by projecting it onto others in order to manifest it in the world to be seen and acknowledged.  This is the very worst of humanity.

It is perhaps worth bearing in mind that what causes this 'evil' is the simple act of denying reality in the first place.  The evil is the imbalance, the distortion, the deviation from what is good.  It is not that we, as humans, are fundamentally evil and wish to deny it, but rather that we are vulnerable, sensitive, and creative and dare not own it because we are afraid of our own power.  It is actually the denial of the reality that is the evil.  But evil it is.  And, as far as I can determine, the denial of reality is most prevalent in the minds of those who wish to judge, demonise, and control others.  It is inherent in the Tory mindset to cling on to an internal construct of what the world 'should be' and to scream, fight, control, damage, and destroy all evidence in the real world that threatens to counter their desperate internal construct which is, by definition, a delusion.  In their denial of reality they are destroying reality and the evidence is clear for anyone who is looking with their eyes open.  We, collectively, are raising our subconscious knowledge into our conscious awareness and whilst we deny reality we deny ourselves.  Whilst we destroy reality we destroy ourselves.  All of this is only the consequence of a refusal to be what we are.  So we end up experiencing the denial instead of the reality.

Tories are now hoist by their own petard insofar as they have to maintain the illusion of their own goodness reflected in the magic mirror of their distorted world.  They have no choice, they are compelled, they are inevitably and inextricably drawn by their own denial into ever more ridiculous demonstration of their goodness.  It is clearly nonsense to have a Minister for Loneliness since that is one small category of emotional distress which is a mental or emotional health issue which comes under the auspices of the Department of Health and Social Security which they dismantled in the first place.  They cannot 'help' the lonely and will only make matters worse by attempting to force them to integrate with the Tory mindset which is probably a significant cause of the problem in the first place.  They will also attempt to draw people out from the shadows who are hiding from the dysfunctional Neoliberal State in order to coral them into the convenient pens for future slaughter.  The next thing, of course, will be to demonise them for costing the tax payer too much.  This nonsense, which is off the scale of toy town politics can only end in disaster.

I can't think of any other example of such trite, fatuous, and glaringly nonsensical government stupidity.  How utterly ludicrous to create a Minister for Loneliness.  What next?  A Minister for fucking Toe Nails?

DECAYING IN THE TOXIC WASTE OF HUMANITY

One week into January 2018.  In that week it seems I have lost two friends.  They've not died, just deserted me.  On one level it hardly matters but on another level it is profoundly upsetting.  It is upsetting because piece by piece the connections with some group, some history, some society, are being eroded and severed leaving me adrift in a world which makes no sense and one which I clearly don't belong to.

I can sense the fear.  It seems to be what often happens to children when their parents divorce.  Their friends at school, usually with no awareness of why, simply don't want to associate with them anymore.  They become ostracised and isolated.  It is not long before they become the object of criticism and cruelty.  It looks like an animal instinct of avoiding the sick, the weak, or the injured in the group.  These erstwhile friends are shunning me as a consequence of the breakup of the family.  In part they don't want to be associated with me lest they end up on the wrong side of the fence with the outcast, the leper, the mutant disease of the family.

We all have a diverse range of emotions and to some degree we need to express them.  I have a good friend with whom I can vent my frustration and fury about the state of the world.  There is a kind of adult consent.  For a while the internet provided an outlet for that rage.  I could make my criticisms of the social structure, the conventional norms, or the downright misconceptions of the culture.  In part the reason was anonymity.  By having a pseudonym, a Nom de Grrr, people who knew me didn't have to read it.  And there are people out there, the minority of course, who feel the same way.  They appreciate the expression because it begins to create another group of like minded people with which they can identify.

Another point that needs to be brought into this mix is that in needing someone to understand and accept us, parents all too often seem to think their captive innocents, their children, are some God given gift that they are free to abuse.  A plain sheet of paper upon which to spill their darkest ink.  Our culture has created the isolated family home, the hidden back room where torture and abuse can be played out with impunity and no one outside has the right to interfere or even express an opinion.  It is rife in our culture to the point that all institutions in the hierarchy from the education system to the government, rely on, utilise, and protect, this secret inner chamber of horrors.

The internet is facilitating the breakdown of the medieval castle and as it collapses the horrors and turmoil are spilling across communities.  The facade of respectability defends itself with expressed outrage at the crimes being exposed and attempts to bolster the charade by publically decrying the evils.  But these hideous writhing creatures emerging from the depths of the rubble are mere scapegoats and whipping boys for the monsters still compelled by the urge to dispose of their distress by injecting it into others.

My mother used to lock me in the porch "And you'll stay there until your father gets home." It wasn't as nightmarish as it sounds because the porch was cold but I was allowed a dressing gown and my father would just send me back to bed when he came in.  I would spend hours in that porch most often for something I had not done.  The internal dynamics of dysfunctional families are complex and unfathomable.  I don't recall the girls being punished in this way, just the boys.  Maybe my mother felt righteous in beating her daughters but was somehow inhibited from beating her sons lest it break their manhood.  Who can tell what is going on in the minds of these disturbed individuals.

But now I feel imprisoned and isolated in the porch of my life.  Those on the outside dare not break the spell, they dare not question the current arrangement, the power structure that appears to maintain their survival.  They collude with, and protect, the hideous abuse lest they get singled out and dragged screaming and undefended to the torture chamber within.  They know, by their own acceptance and compliance, that no one would come to their defence.  They know it is wrong but they are caught by their own sense of guilt at being party to it.

Of course we will continue to vote for and support, hail and promote, the most hideous, the most stupid, the most judgemental authoritarians amongst us, because it protects the failing hierarchical structure which currently appears to sustain us in our secret guilt.  We are victims of our own inhumanity.  We will rally round those opposing authority in other lands because it is a proxy for our own resentment whilst we dare not stand against our own oppressors.  We are tragic cowards clinging on to a life with no meaning, no substance, and certainly no value.

I have no desire to be here on this planet in this form.  I am isolated, scorned, blamed for others' failings, and deprived of any reasonable existence.  But I am here, with a daughter who I would not desert even to save my own soul.  My most sincere regret is that I was in any way responsible for bringing her into this conscious material existence.  All I can do, contained in the porch of my life, is hope that what I imagined might be possible can still happen for her.  Maybe humanity can turn some corner, maybe collectively we can alter course from this insane decent into hell.  Maybe another world is possible.  I might never know it, but if she finds herself in a good place, all of my suffering will have been worthwhile.

I am trapped in an echo chamber ringing with the cries of the lost souls around me.  I am immersed in a pit of their disowned failings and guilt.  I am smothered by their failure to deal with their own problems and choking on their desperation to hide it from themselves.  I am decaying and dissolving in the corrosive waste of humanity.  Roll on 2018.

ONE A DAY

Maybe I should determine to write a post every day in 2018.  It would be more sensible to aim at 4 or 5 a week.  That would either give me the weekends off or allow me almost 2 days per blog.  I could take another approach and aim to do 180 posts in the year and pace myself leaving space for a hypothetical holiday.

One problem I have keeping a blog is that it is not focused.  When I started writing on the internet it was primarily anything at all.  Pages like Something Interesting which takes a perspective on the vast complexity of the universe by examining the number of possibilities in a simple 8 by 8 grid of black and white squares.  I find this kind of enquiry useful and revealing when considering other complex issues related to science, politics, or even one's personal life.  Then there were pages like Do Aliens Wear Ties? which was a meandering ramble about the protocol of wearing ties in society whilst also being a suitable subject to attempt to advance my forays into affiliate marketing (which came to nought).  Of course I couldn't resist incidentally playing with the HTML and CSS to get a graded text colour from black to green.  It wasn't long before I was writing pages like God won't save stupid people! and weird satire like ICHTHYS FISH.

All of this was happening as the likes of Facebook and Twitter were being born and soon I was drawn into writing pages about issues in the world of politics.  Pages on the Arab spring like Egypt and the evolving Simulacra.  Then there was the profound information earthquake as WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video which I immediately became concerned about and put up pages like Julian Assange and WikiRebels: The Documentary.

As my own life was cascading uncontrollably down the rock strewn abyss of global neoliberalism I became more and more immersed in the collapse of Western Civilisation and, as it turns out, the possible collapse of humanity per se.  I was writing pages like Education or Indoctrination?... a potted history of state education and I BLAME THE PARENTS introducing Philip Zimbardo and his insights into the subjects of good and evil.  And there were the thousands and thousands of words written about my own personal difficulties including the well documented complaint against the Children Services at Children Services Abuse: Main Index.

I became quite perplexed at how the minutia of my life was mirroring the monumental happenings on the global stage (or vice versa).  Of course my interpretation of my personal world would affect my interpretation of global events but I knew that there was something else going on.  I won't begin to attempt to dissect and explain it now (perhaps that's a subject for the 180 posts in 2018) but with the accelerating growth of social media it became clear that I was not the only one experiencing this phenomenon.  I began more soul searching and wrote posts like Facing the terror and This Dystopian Matrix of Illusion.

My poor head, or rather my cognitive conceptual field, is boiling furiously with a billion issues ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic and from the personal to the global.  I am constantly comparing conceptual patterns in the realms of quantum physics to the collective global existential crisis.  I have a million things I want to say and no time to say it.  I am undisciplined in my pursuits and end up quite incredibly frustrated and consequently distressed.  So perhaps it is worth my while attempting to construct an approach, a methodology, a regime, for formulating at least some of my ideas in a half way coherent manner.  Perhaps I should commit to 180 blog posts in 2018 which could possibly be aimed at a book or at least something constructive and meaningful.

In the mean time you will just have to follow this blog or email me from the slightly odd contact page on Toxic Drums and I will endeavour to keep you notified of progress.  Maybe I will write 180 blog posts and maybe I won't.