 |
If all of the above is not challenging enough, there is a further great rift in the human psyche, because humankind is suffering from a great separation between its deliberate or rational nature and its instinctive and spontaneous nature. The British philosopher, Lancelot Law Whyte, called it ‘dissociation’, in the sense of a break or a lesion. Richard Wagner also acknowledged it in his final work, Parsifal. It is at the root of many of today’s obsessions and is bringing much grief to individuals and society.
Another affect of this dissociation is that by concentrating on our ‘rational’ side or making moral judgements using inadequate information or awareness (as in mob hysteria) and trying to suppress or ignore our instinctive side, we think or attempt to be aware, in what we might call frozen snapshots, biased labels or doctrinaire beliefs, as distinct from a more unified awareness that reflects the flow that embraces us and our world.
The dissociation is expressed dramatically through human sexuality which today also exhibits an exaggerated form of the more general dissociation or dualism by being criminalized at the same time as we are all being increasingly eroticized. In the forty years since Lancelot Law Whyte died, the obsessions and social distortions he feared from the dualism have worsened. On this web site and in a related book human sexuality has been selected as the major human issue where the dualism can be both examined and dealt with. Whyte recommended this approach but did not follow it through.
In our unhappy and distorted state, many of us, not all of course, need to disavow our hated and often seemingly obscene desires and project them onto others and there is no better object for this than the bogeyman. We’ve always had bogeymen, such as heretics, witches and homosexuals, but for as long as there was an identifiable different and more important enemy to hate, such as the Soviets during the Cold War, the bogeymen did not appear to get out of control. A new bogeyman to emerge recently, however, was the ordinary adult male transmogrified into the rapacious (and raping) ‘woman and child abuser’ by victim feminists. In addition to bogeymen we had bouts of public hysteria and moral panics, Salem, the recent satanic abuse scares and UFO abductions, the last of which also appeared to have the objective of sex abuse.
When the Berlin Wall came down and signalled the end of the Cold War, we lost the big bogeyman of the Soviet enemy. Almost in the same year, 1989, the world saw the first big sex abuse moral panic that was through American channelled globalization to sweep the world. It was the public trial phase of the US Mc Martin pre-school sex abuse scandal, the first of many to come and possibly the beginning of the child sex abuse moral panic. Now the victim feminism that began the moral panic or set out its conditions was joined by a much more powerful ally – the need for a new bogeyman. All the erotophobic sadism that was once foisted upon homosexuals and other ‘monsters’ now began to migrate onto ‘paedophiles’. And with ordinary men now regarded as potential abusers, if not rapists, by a feminist ideology that was invading virtually all educational establishments and becoming a normal part of everyday life and work, no man was safe from accusation.
The latent and often patent self-hatred smouldering within many of us, stoked by the dissociation and the contradictions it imposed upon us, was channelled into a malignant misanthropy masquerading as ‘child protection’, child protection being the vehicle for the ‘othered’ misanthropy. The concept of the ‘child’ itself became a signifier, the object signified being the ‘abused child’, or one likely to be abused if not at all times protected from prowling paedophiles – that is, any man that might be one. In fact by now we all see children through the eyes of the ‘paedophile’, who probably never really existed except in a tiny minority, but it is too late for that consideration now.
One development, made possible by a combination of moral panic and legislative creep and aided by disingenuous individuals and groups seeking influence and power, has been the emergence and rise of a new fascism based on social behaviour, heavily orientated towards sexual activities. The fascists are the new moral leaders who legislate for and monitor and police us, principally in matters of sexual behaviour but also in how we talk or write about race or religion or minority groups. The empowering of ordinary police to investigate many of our sexual inclinations or activities has given them authority away beyond their abilities to understand what they are investigating. The new fascist administration is made up of legislators, the already corrupted legal profession, the judiciary, the police and a host of social workers, probation officers and ‘experts’. There is an enormous disproportion in power between these fascists and the citizens they claim to police. One example is that if accused of a sex crime, one finds it close to impossible to find either a defence solicitor or a defence expert witness. The latter tend to work only for the prosecution and the former tend not to want that kind of client.
As in all triumphalist fascist regimes, through a compliant media those in power easily obtain a public veneration bought by preaching about their cause - that of witch catching, jew-baiting, paedo-smashing in which both bully and ardent public admirer appear to be enjoying a form of obscene sadism.
Genocide occurs when there is an enormous disproportion in power between aggressor and victim. In the American gulag that plans for and overseas the programme for the labelling, naming, shunning, hounding and displacement of ‘sex offenders’ (paedophiles) there are officials with enormous power. Ironically, the ‘offenders’ are the victims. The gulag also is made up of politicians, police and media. The genocide, however, is directed at (by now millions of) mainly male individuals spread throughout all walks of life and all communities, very like Salem where no one was safe either.
Disavowal and projection
Disavowal and projection, or ‘dnp’ for convenience, is the denial or disavowing of shameful and even hated desires and their transference or projection onto others, in this process creating a hated enemy. Let us call this disavowing and projection ‘dnp-ing’. It is how the monsters of the ‘paedophile’ and ‘sex offender’ have been created. These monsters are thus creations bred within oneself, suppressed, denied, rejected or disavowed, and transferred or projected onto others with all the hate and venom their inherent contradictions have inspired.
Disavowal and projection of unwanted sexual desires is a common expression of the dissociation just discussed. It is not unusual to see high profile male practitioners caught out performing the very acts they claim to abhor when done by others.
Disavowal and projection in matters of human sexuality are so universal and so powerful that they have permeated the legislative, social and police systems, creating a ‘ruling class’ or cartel of ‘the policers’ and an underclass of offenders, the latter for example shamed and shunned by sex offender registry rules, and, as in America, hounded from home and state.
The zeal and hatred, with which the policers hound the offenders, are fanned by the dissociation of their natural or true selves from their desired or assumed selves. They are, however, fighting a projection and when one fights a projection the war is never over, but it is also ultimately doomed, although many people will be destroyed in the process. Witness how the Nazis became even more genocidal when their extermination programme had failed to expunge all the Jews. Those who remained seemed terrifyingly more dangerous to them.
Some psychologists also call it 'othering' – the planting on other people or groups of one’s own secret or tortured desires. Virtue purchased by means of othering unwanted desires can become a violent and potentially genocidal lie.
As for the concept that 'paedos exist in vast shadowy conspiratorial 'rings', it is extraordinarily difficult to relinquish such a horror story precisely because one has been surreptitiously enjoying it and evidence is usually relatively ineffective in persuading someone to relinquish a pleasure, especially when it is socially sanctioned.
The child
The child could be a symbol of our sought after unity, an object of our love and adoration, a manifestation of beauty, but the Establishment has transformed the child into what some linguistics practitioners call a signifier (the signifier being the word, the signified the thing or idea it represents). Child thus becomes 'sexually endangered/abused child'. For the more thoughtful, this of course creates the paradox where we have become accustomed to see children through the eyes of the ‘paedophile’, thus all in a sense becoming ‘paedophiles’. This new signifier of the ‘child’ is more virulent than just about any other term in bringing out the very worst in human misanthropy and paranoia. Why it has happened in our times requires much reflection and perhaps future historians will provide some answers.
We have a limitless capacity to believe our own preferred lies, especially if this promises to get us off the hook (me good, others bad); and certainly, most people prefer their own self-deceptions to someone else's truth. A colleague who advises me says, “The authorities' fraught preoccupation with endangered and abused children, from a psychoanalytic perspective at least, tells us a lot about their unconscious desires. Whilst the concern to protect is consciously embraced, it is of course the unconscious desire to violate and obscenely enjoy that is projected. People who get institutionally labelled as paedophiles are being used as screens to portray the refused desires of the virtuous. The authorities are using a crudely reductionist psychology, based on cognitive behavioural therapy. In this there is no ambiguity in language or behaviour, no fundamental opacity, no unconscious: bad people have 'inappropriate' erotic fantasies, fantasies are intentions, perched directly on the surface of behaviour where they can be read off straightforwardly by 'good' people like policemen, judges, and psychotic feminists. There is a wholly spurious omniscience at work here (ignorance and narrow-mindedness inevitably appear as authoritativeness and knowingness).”
Operation Ore - an example of disavowal and projection caused by the distortion.
One of the best examples of the travesties that can be caused by the dissociation and its tendency for disavowal and projection was Operation Ore, carried out by the British police in the full glare of the media and, at the time of writing, the subject of a class action against the police and prosecution service (group action in the UK). Operation Ore affected thousands of British men and their families and was an FBI-inspired spin-off from the infamous Landslide case. It now appears that of the thousands ruined in dawn raids, some of whom committed suicide, most, if not virtually all, were victims of credit card fraud. Those close to Operation Ore have received a first hand insight into the ruin and devastation caused by the moral panic of sex abuse and its accompanying inquisition. The editor of this web site and author of the new book above sought many explanations and finally came up with the dissociation as expressed here.
The human unconscious may be spreading the news. Here is a very perceptive response-comment to a news story about a new UK system for issuing local sex offender warnings.
The main response-comments to the story contained the usual ‘hang all pedos’ outbursts, but then came this one: “Incidentally, it's well known that those who profess their hatred of 'nonces' most loudly are actually attempting to deflect and deny their own secret desires. Perhaps those are the ones that we should take a close look at, particularly those that have a fondness for violence.”
There exist both an individual and group unconscious and we have good reason to believe that we communicate with each other through that unconscious and that some of us at least even know things in our unconscious that our conscious is not yet aware of. Mass beliefs and hysteria work through the group unconscious. The literary critic, Leo Bersani, once noted that our unelected sexual rulers can sustain their domination on a populist basis simply because the most effective messages to transmit are the ones which are already there - the ones hiding in the unconscious, which can only be 'seen' when they are painted onto to an 'outsider' who is then considered 'not us.' For example, grand-standing and creating legislation and extra police powers to control the monsters that lurk in our unconscious.
There are thinkers who regard even parental hatred of children as completely normal and understandable (although some of us might find that hard to accept) and that it becomes dangerous only when it is subjected to ‘intrapsychic censorship’ – that is saying, “I don't hate children, but they - the abusers - hate children"). When it is seen in a more unified way as an ordinary emotion, to be experienced alongside love and devotion (and mitigated by its proximity to these very emotions) it is merely an aspect of everyday life. Our kids can drive us nuts at times and even fill us with despair. When this normal reaction is frozen, turned into a thing (as opposed to the flow or a process) and mentally split off, it ends up feeling as though it exists only 'outside' (which is, of course, precisely where it has been thrown). And once outside, it has to be tracked down, hounded, eradicated. Except, of course, it never can be, because in looking for bogeymen one is looking in the wrong direction: only balanced (and truthful) introspection can locate it. Those who spend their lives tracking down monsters are actually most likely to be on the run from their own unconscious impulses.
The great physicist/philosopher, David Bohm, who is discussed in more detail in the section on the Interiority, suggests that ignorance can be evil and that the ignorance of humanity is a matter of closed mindedness, the 'darkness in the human brain'. He sees it as the human ego closed to the Universal Mind, to the supreme intelligence who communicates through the mode of insight.
NEXT
BACK
Modified: 11:15 9 Aug 2006
|