— The dissociation —

There is a great rift in the human psyche, because humankind is suffering from a 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. Human sexuality can be selected as a 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 ironically known 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 paedophiles – that is, any man that might be one. In fact by now many saw children through the eyes of the ‘paedophile’, who probably never really existed except in a tiny minority.

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 tainted, if not 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 'guardians' 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’ 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.

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.

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.

The most common manifestation of the dissociation is fear, which is looked at shortly.

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Modified: 11:15 9 Aug 2006
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