This extraordinary slide into totalitarianism has been recognizable as a pattern retrospectively from around the late 1970s. The excellent New Zealand author, Lynley Hood, has named books, and individuals speaking at seminars at certain dates, that, for example, spread the moral panic of child sex abuse, and she traces the origins of this process back to America in her A City Possessed, the story of a Christchurch scandal that divided New Zealand and still simmers there. While it was to be the most potent element in the creation and maintainace of the current inquisition, the emerging moral panic about sex abuse was just one element in a changing semantic environment.

A number of quite dramatic changes became apparent to some people involved in youth and general voluntary work around the early 1980s, corresponding with the sudden awareness of AIDS, although one can only speculate about whether there was a direct connection with it. One such change was that young people involved in voluntary work and attending camps and other outings were less inclined to hug and kiss one another in public. A more serious change was a dramatic decline in young volunteers, including girls, using their leisure time to help others. By the 1990s this trend had worsened to the point where even doctors would not help strangers injured in the street. A culture of fear and distrust and victimhood and a tendency to blame others and demand compensation had all but swamped that of volunteering and helping others in need. By the first decade of the 21st century, the trend had worsened to the creation of a society where one feared photographing children, as all children were now being seen ‘through the eyes of the paedophile’. The Orwellian state of no one who owned a PC being safe had also arrived, as anyone who did own one could be accused, whether guilty or not, of having possession of child pornography. Finally by the middle of the decade, the police in America and Great Britain could boast that they operated the child pornography web sites for the purposes of entrapment

The wild card as this spectacular, if dismal, trend was taking place was the Internet itself. When it first evolved, it was hailed as the great new technological step forward. Philosophers and other optimists saw it as the dream of Teilhard de Chardin now realized – the noosphere, the next step in human evolution, a heady breakthrough for both intelligence and liberty, an emancipation of the human imagination. While being all of these in part and having the potential to become each of them in a fuller way, what also happened was that the Internet quickly became an instrument of repression and fear. If this reads like an exaggeration, please consider this. Would any man in particular, and any father or mother of a teenaged family, be happy they had a PC in their home if the police called with a search warrant?

Despite this, however, the Internet grew spectacularly and evolved in the most interesting of ways. It allowed the emergence of special interest groups that could operate message and discussion boards over which the propaganda and the disingenuous ideologies of self interest groups could be challenged. Some went so far as mounting a resistance to increasing police corruption. As this is being written, a battle is going on between those who want to censor and control the Internet and those who want to keep it free. The most dangerous development for those wanting freedom is the emergence of the so-called ‘hotlines’ that were ostensibly set up to monitor for child pornography but which in fact became organizations (one for example in each European country), that were managed mainly by ex-police and child rights organizations and soon began to put pressure on servers to shut down web sites that published inappropriate ideas, this amounting to draconian censorship of free speech and thinking.

A reasonable conclusion, however, is that while the Internet is a formidable tool for the police – they can for example and do easily plant illegal material onto the PCs of those they want to neutralize or destroy – on balance it is difficult to see how the discussion boards can be contained and controlled, as, once tasted, freedom of speech and discussion are not easily extinguished.

So the Internet is the wild card in this apparent slide into darkness. Over it for example one can read the anguish of those who have seen not just the emergence of police states, but also the apparent willingness of the general media to help them evolve. Only the Internet has remained to help people understand that the media have always been a part of the ruling cartel, applying the ruling ideology, whether that was the persecution of heretics or the hounding of other scapegoats.

Of all the elements in this wild card, however, the most intriguing is that of human sexuality, for as the cabal attempts to use the Internet to control human sexuality, the Internet itself has caused a revolution in it and created an enormous wave of eroticism. It is no exaggeration to say that the Internet has caused a new eroticization of the human race. More about that in the next section.

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