God is dead.....again!

If we apply a general definition to thought as simply 'the neuronal and/or electrical impetus towards behaviour', we can assert that - to a greater or lesser degree - all life experiences some form of thought, whether it be instinctive, or the lofty imaginations of homo-sometimes-sapiens.

In this respect, the distinction between the entity we refer to as 'life', and that which we describe as 'thought' becomes less clear. As far as we humans are concerned both thought, and life, are mutually dependent, yet we cannot be completely certain that one can exist without the other? We don’t exactly know what thought is. And yet it is relatively easy for us to imagine the existence of thought that is not attached to a particular material form. We do this when we consider entities such as Gods, spirits or ghosts etc, and of course it is easy enough for us to recognise matter that is apparently devoid of thought, which we describe as ‘inanimate’. Therefore perhaps it is not unreasonable to suggest that life may be defined as 'matter that is animated by thought'.

In the context of human beings, we possess as much certainty about the purpose and process of thought as we do about the process, and purpose, of life. Undoubtedly it is for this reason that the origins of both are often attributed to the particular deity, or scientific vogue, of the day. Perhaps this uncertainty is a reasonable starting point for any philosophy that aspires towards an understanding of either? It may be an indication that our quest might ultimately conclude that there is no distinction between the two at all.

The notion that ‘only humans experience thought, or that the human variant of thought is superior to that experienced by other forms of life, has been as problematic as it has been alluring for various theologies. As a result Buddhism, and Hinduism, find it difficult to distinguish between the sanctity of different life forms. I recall a recent experience with a friend from Sri Lanka who was helping me to paint my house. The poor man became quite distraught after he had caught a spider in his wet paintbrush. He hurried into the garden, and covered himself in paint, whilst making every attempt to release the paint-soaked arachnid back into nature, undisguised, and no doubt an easy prey for the next passing blackbird. My friend informed me that the 'tragedy' could have been avoided had he been “more careful” and brushed the door frame beforehand with a dry brush - to warn unwary life of his approach.

Though touching, the experience did not turn me into a vegetarian; to my mind, there is perhaps little difference between the life that animates a spider, and that which opens the petals of a flower in the morning. Nonetheless, I wondered whether this indiscriminate respect for animal life is not at least a little more philosophically sound than the Christian notion that all life is sacred, but some (our own) is a little more sacred than others.

As my Sri Lankan friend proceeded to apply Buddhist caution in the form of a dry brushing before he continued to paint, I recall him telling me he was glad to be out of Sri Lanka whilst the Tamil Tigers, and the Sri Lankan government, were inflicting atrocities upon each other, and thousands of civilians in the ongoing conflict that was dividing his country. For Sri Lankans and Westerners alike, the respect for life does not always extend further than a spider. We concluded the painting without any additional tragedies, and we both agreed that religion is clearly a personal phenomenon, and perhaps the application of its morality can only ever be evaluated on that basis.

In functional and practical terms, Buddhists, Muslims and Christians alike readily apply a moral, political, and economic paint to distinguish between the various forms of life with whom we share the earth. I have no doubt of the answer if I were to ask my Buddhist friend to choose between the life of his son, and that of the paint spattered spider. We feel quite comfortable with the assertion that the life of a man is more valuable than that of a spider, however what (other than our ability to step on the spider) allows us to make this assertion with such confidence? In a philosophical sense what perhaps gives the Buddhist the upper hand is the fact that he accepts that this rather homocentric discrimination has no definitive philosophical basis. Therefore we must construct one, and it is arguable that this is the very point at which each, and all, of our religions were born.

The Christian and Muslim alike apply a more palatable, but less logical rationale in the general assertion that man has a ‘special’ relationship with god, one that renders him distinct from all other life, and thence must proceed to establish a doctrine upon the basis of this initial mother of all assumptions. In many respects this primary distinction is the first question that is encountered by philosophy, and by religion. It may be as essential to ethics, as it is to economics, to distinguish between the life and the thoughts of a man, and that of an animal. However outside of religion, the justification for this distinction has no logical basis, why should the life of a man be superior to that of a sperm whale or a butterfly?  It is as a consequence of this discrimination, this first contradiction to logic, (the first occasion that we must lie to ourselves), that we are ejected from the Garden of Eden, and an entirely necessary theology is born.

Christianity begins its vindication of this initial assumption with the notion that man, having being 'made in God’s image', occupys , a sanctified, and special, place in the universe. Out of the assertion that Man is therefore closer to God than a butterfly, arises the birth of materialism, this first notion of relative 'value' assigned in this instance to life itself. This is the primordial, and seminal, ‘currency’ of human civilisation, the birth of our class structure, our belief in the superiority of varied forms of life.  Once we humans can assert with certainty the life within us is superior to the life within all other creatures, it becomes realitivey easy for us then to asssert that the life within some humans is superior to the life within other humans. In this initial assumption class and class distinction are born and the seed of most if not all our self inflicted suffering have germinated.

This is a notion, a delusion that has proved morally indispensible throughout the history of civilisation for it lies at the heart of our ability to possess material, and power, and to insist, and believe, that these bounties are the blessings of a just God, rewards or recompense for our inherant class or moral superiority. Indeed the more material and power we possess, the more likely we are to believe ourselves more blessed, and closer to our God. The spiritual journey becomes conveniently attached to the material journey, and usually with disastrous effects. Here is the fundamental moral basis of our assertion that 'some are more equal than others'. It is for this reason that species are extinguised by us, and it is the reason that many live in comfort and ease whilst many more starve in squalor.

In this sense it is not simply the creation of a God, or the idea of God itself, that has proven destructive, but rather the secondary assumption that man is closer to God, that man has a greater ownership of God, a greater entitlement to God, than other life. In this sense God has been raped, for that is how a rapist considers his victim,that she exists entirely for his gratification and his pleasure. It is in this sense that Nietzsche is correct in his assertion that “God is dead, and we have killed him”.

This view of human life as superior to all other is the first lie. this materialisation of God His transformation into an entity that exists solely for the benefit of man. This is the birth of capitalism and it is the birth of much theology as this first lie must be justified by an increasing complexity of lies, each subsequent lie is necessary to justify or prop up the preceeding one, all of which can be traced back to the initial assumption that Man is closer to God than all other forms of life. If there is a God and a heaven wherein he might reside, one wonders what he might make of our wonderful and entirely self-serving assumption?

Whale Weeping.

Annually, the western world looks on with horror as a Japanese whaling ship hauls the carcass of a whale from the sea, and butchers it before the teary eyes, and lenses, of the Greenpeace eco-warriors, who each year try in vain to intervene in the whalers’ exercising of the Japanese whale 'quota'. Ironically, many of us find this particular form of cruelty to be infinitely more immoral, and unjust, than the mass slaughter of cows and pigs for our hamburger meat, or the battery farming of chickens for cheap eggs and roasts!

It is undoubtedly because we have invested thought, into the whale, and the dolphin, that this is so. Hollywood has given us Flipper, Free Willy and Whale Rider. Popular science and National Geographic have confirmed whales, and dolphins to be more 'like us'; to communicate with one another, to be 'intelligent' in accordance with our definitions, and to perhaps have feelings as we do. An alien observing humanity from afar might find our yearly whale-loving indignation to be ironic, if not quite entertaining. The yearly deluge of Western crocodile-tears on behalf of the whale was gainfully employed in the South Park episode ‘Whale Whores’. At the end of this very amusing caricature of a real, and prescient irony, the supposed Japanese hatred for whales, and dolphins, is converted into an apparently more appropriate contempt for chickens and cows, at which point the Japanese are deemed to be more like the people of South Park…to be ‘normal’.

Perhaps the Japanese look at the whale in the same way that we look at the pig and the cow? Perhaps they are more ethical in their thinking, in that they fail to apply the ultimately ludicrous discrimination between the life of a pig, and that of a dolphin?

Probably the Japanese are no different to westerners in that they too have their 'preferred animals', and might be equally horrified at the sight of an Englishman eating pheasant, or a wealthy Vietnamese businessmen treating cancer and infertility with a pulverised rhino horn? Perhaps the only conclusion that can be drawn from our contemporary notions of animals, and their 'rights', is that we humans have a morality that is no more, or less, valid than most of the animals we butcher.

We can ask - at least in the context of philosophical reasoning - what is the real basis of this arbitrary assignation of relative worth between the species? For the ancient Egyptians the cat was sacred; for Indians, the cow; for Westerners it is our pets, the whales, or those species that remain on life-support in our zoos. Why should it be immoral to kill a whale, and not so immoral to eat one’s sausages, or not eat them and throw them in the rubbish bin? In Yemen it is an honour to give and receive a jimbaya: a ceremonial dagger presented to young men, and fashioned out of polished rhino horn? The simple answer is that on the whole human beings are quite stupid, and when stupid people have access to money stupidity becomes a pathology, spreads like a virus and ultimately kills everything including the stupid people.

Ironically we humans posses an intelligence that (for the present at least) allows us to dominate all life upon the earth. For the most part, and for today at least, it is we who decide who stays, and who goes; what forms of life will be preserved in our zoos and our parks; and what, must become extinct as we require more lebensraum for our civilisation, and more Rhino horns for our dagger-handles and aphrodisiacs. This temporary ascendancy has encouraged us to declare ourselves masters of the universe, and arbiters upon the relative value of all forms of life.

In a brutal and violent sense, we are indeed the ‘Masters of Nature’. However, not even Nietzsche would suggest that the schoolchild who can beat up all the other children in his classroom is the ‘superman’; the prisons are overflowing with such illiterate ubermensch. It remains to be seen if the reign of man will achieve a mere fraction of the sixty-five million years during which the supposedly less-intelligent dinosaurs were the undisputed masters of everything.

The relative superiority of our thought is only irrefutable when we apply the measure of our own intelligence, and declare that no animal can think as we can. Yet if the owl were in the ascendancy, he would perhaps have no difficulty consuming men in the same way he devours mice, and declaring mankind redundant for his relatively poor vision, near deafness and incapacity for independent flight.

Ultimately, an ethical system that positions human life, and thought, as 'superior' to all other forms is co-dependent upon a divinity of some kind. Without it, there is perhaps no reason to consider the life of a man to be worth more than that of a toad. In order that we might rate ourselves as ‘superior’, the earth, and all of its inhabitants, must have been bequeathed to man for the purpose of satisfying his material wants, as is the traditional Judaeo-Christian view. Yet this is a view that has surely reached its sell by date. Ecology, and common sense, have confirmed that man is as dependent upon global ecology as he is the master of it, and that we are here (as my first biology teacher wisely counselled) - as 'the guests of green plants'.

One is not suggesting in practical terms that the life of a child, and that of a butterfly are on a par, or should be considered so. Human beings exist at the top of the food chain, and to persist as such, we are dependent upon the consumption of plants, and animals,. The view whereby we humans apply a higher value to human life above other life (animal or vegetable) is ultimately not in question here. To a greater, or lesser degree, our continued existence as a species is dependent upon this distinction. What is being questioned is thenotion that we are unique in experiencing thought, that we are inherantly superior to other species. The ethic we apply to this discrimination, and how it pertains to our view of the living world and our place within it must be re-considered if we are to develop a philosophy of living that is sustainable and compatible with an ecology upon which we are entirely dependent.. Previous ethical models, religions etc, did not have to consider man'ns impact upon ecology because up untill recent times that impact was considered to be negligible. Our views here - our notions of the inherent superiority of our own life above that of all other life - are the bedrock upon which much of our contemporary philosophy is constructed. It is upon this premise that our entire ethical system is defined. If our views here are flawed (and the irony of our consumption of mass produced meat and our 'love' for preferred animals would lead us to suspect that it is), then it is no stretch to suggest that our view of the world, and our place within it are also, flawed. As such we require either a stiff drink, or a divinity, to help us believe ourselves.

In truth, our ethical system has been built upon the simple instinct that bids us to consume life so that our own might continue. Therefore, an understanding of philosophy, a 'correct' view of the world, one that would obviate the need for gross inconsistencies, and for the creation of creators, and divinities, is predicated upon an understanding of our instinct, and the true motives behind our thoughts.

To understand instinct is to return to the beginning of our understanding of the ‘self’. Here we must dig beneath the flawed foundations upon which the greater portion of modern thought, and contemporary philosophy, have been falsely construed. We must begin a quest for truth that travels in a different direction entirely. Not beyond and outwards into civilisation - the essentially and inherently unstable edifice that has been constructed upon humanity’s greatest mistconceptions - but inwards, into the realm of our own minds, into the instinctual basis of our thought. We must leave behind the material trappings of the external world, our carefully crafted divinities and our notions of superiority, we must make this journey alone, because the crowd, the herd, the vast majority, are moving in the opposite direction.In Irish mythology when the Milesians, the ancestors of modern Irishmen, came to Ireland from the European continent, they discovered that the island was already inhabited by a race of men called the Tuatha de Danann. This race of demigods had themselves seized the island from a fierce race of miscreants known as the Fomorians, who besieged the Tuatha de Danann from their stronghold on Tory Island, north of Donegal. The Tuatha De Danann were also at war with a race of one-legged giants called the Fir Blogs, whom the Tuatha de Danann had just defeated when the Milesians arrived from the Iberian peninsula to offer them yet another challenge. After a bitter exchange and another exhaustive battle, the Tuatha De Danann, and the Milesians came to an agreement whereby they would share the land of Ireland between them. The Milesians would take the surface of Ireland and the Tuatha de Danann would take everything underneath. The Tuatha de Danann were quite satisfied with the bargain, as they felt they had obtained the greater share. The numerous mounds or tumuli that are scattered about the Irish countryside were believed for some time to serve as the portals through which the Tuatha De Danann would occasionally come from below to look in upon, or intervene, in the complex affairs of the mortal Milesians.

Perhaps in keeping with this mythological metaphor, the philosophers of the future may partition the world, and move into the subterranean world of our thoughts and our instincts, and may find themselves on the better side of the bargain. The material civilisation we have constructed at the surface of our instinct, and our thoughts, is fleeting and ephemeral. A great many civilisations have already turned to dust before we have carved our present version of Ozymandias, ‘King of Kings’. Yet despite the relentless march towards obscurity, the thought that is stamped upon these lifeless things remains infinite, and accessible, to those of us who might -as a tired cliché puts it - 'close our eyes and see'.

Whilst it is perhaps essential for human life to consider itself entitled to end life in order to support our own, the ethical system we apply to our preservation must be based upon a sound philosophical footing. If and when it is not, we find ourselves in the rather ridiculous position of eating our hamburgers, and weeping for whales and of kneeling before a God that is entirely of our own making.

The Life and Times of the Mentally Retarded.

Mental retardation, as a term has fallen out of favour with the politically correct, and it is no longer in general use to describe mental handicap or 'intellectual disability'.  The phrase has undoubtedly faded from polite vernacular because of its popular use as an insult. One often encounters the word 'retard' bandied about to entertain; the American comedy 'South Park' makes frequent use, as do comedians and teenagers when they wish to joke or to insult.

To my mind it is a pity when a phrase that is highly useful in terms of its descriptive nature falls out of favour simply because it has been hackneyed into an insult or joke. Ironically our predilection for politically correct terminology may be more a reflection of our own 'intellectual disability'.  When language is twisted to fit with our fashions and superficial sensibilities, it's primary objective of communicating the 'truth' of a thing is fundamentally compromised.  Although our feelings and delicate sensibilities are perhaps better preserved, the 'truth' and our intellect are no better for the exercise. 

The more favourable term of 'intellectual disability' seems empty and less informative. Who amongst us does not have an intellectual disability?  Whilst preparing for medical school in the US, part of the pre-med curriculum is a class in  Differential Calculus, and one in Organic Chemistry, both of which I had to take twice on account of my own intellectual disability in these particular areas.  Whilst I would admit to intellectual disability and indeed I see this disability in each and all of my fellow humans, I would not readily admit to mental retardation, as this implies a process of mental development that has been fundamentally restricted or retarded in an absolute or final sense.

A disability may be overcome; the immobile may become mobile with wheelchairs or crutches, a disability can be remedied by technology, in some instances by willpower alone.  However a retardation carries with it an element of finality, and is more suggestive of a problem that cannot be fixed.  In many instances the latter is entirely true, and individuals with a form mental retardation will never develop a mental capacity that is in keeping with the majority of their peers.  That is not to say that the mentally retarded have not developed in other ways, and have not cultivated other mental and emotional faculties that are superior to those of the majority, this is often the case.  It is a well known fact that the blind generally have a more acute sense of hearing than the seeing, a more refined sense of taste and smell and so on.

But here we go again!  The ideology of capitalism has so overtaken and consumed the psychology of modern humans that we cannot help but consider the world in entirely materialistic terms. That the seeing have more than the blind is undeniable on a certain level.  However this more is merely on the level of the amount or number of faculties. It does not follow that the blind are invariably less well-off or less capable than the seeing. Eşref Armağan is a blind painter, Helen Keller was blind and deaf, Aldous Huxley was blind, Erik Weihenmayer was the first blind person to climb Mount Everest. 

In the very act of considering the disabled as dis-abled, in their recognition as special in the context of their disability, we cannot help but reinforce their status as being or having something 'less' than others.  In attempting to help, in aspiring towards equality we often create or reinforce the very inequality we are attempting to escape.

When we campaign for 'Gay Marriage' and 'Gay Rights', we reinforce the difference and the distinctions between homo and heterosexuals.  We try to accommodate the disabled or the sexual variant, within the limited context of our own limited coordinates for normality, and when we do so we reach the point at which the disabled become truly disabled, and the homosexual becomes the 'sexual deviant'. The problem is not the lack of accommodation, but rather the very coordinates within which we are attempting to accomodate the marginalised within.  

Gay marriage is a classical example. I have a gay friend who is entirely against the idea of gay marriage, when I asked him why?  He told me frankly: "marriage is a straight thing. Its what straight people do. Gays need to stop trying to be straight, stop trying to make the gay world straight, to live up to some silly straight  ideal, like crippled people who want to walk.  We are not cripples. Let straight people have their weddings and marriages and let Gays find there own thing!"

Ever since hearing that, I have been entirely against gay marriage.

We demand equality, and yet equality in the modern world is a concept that has been materialised and consumed by our capitalist psychology. Women should have the same rights as men, disabled should have the same rights and access to services as the able.  Whist these assertions may have some merit, they have become entirely materialised in the sense that the amount, the number and the kind of rights loose relevance and relative importance within the our materialised notion of equality itself.  The concept 'equality' has effectively distorted the distinction between the able and the unable and between men and women, between gay and straight. In this sense equality has become the new inequality, the new sexism and the new racism and those who shout loudest and demmand it most voiciferously  are often the new abusers. 

We encounter the consequence of this when we consider the feminist movement and how women are presently  brutalised and abused by the very concept of equality itself, by the loss of essential and fundamental distinctions between men and women, by the loss of respect for women and for sexuality in general.  Women are encouraged to work in positions and roles that are 'equal' to men. They are entitled to equal pay  and (outside of the small allowance of maternity-leave) they are expected to function within the work environment on a par with their males counterparts.

This equality is a step backwards a step downwards for most women.  Men for example are not encouraged to be equal to women, they are not encouraged to take the same maternity leave, they are not encouraged to feel the same emotions that a woman does when she leaves her children at the creche or the playschool. Conversely women are encouraged towards an equality that is almost entirely male and materially defined.  Women are encouraged to work, to experience and to feel the same emotions as men, they are encouraged to stop being women and start being either men or the playthings of men.  This is the new sexism the new form of oppression and it is an inequality and abuse that is born out of our contemporary material notions of equality.

When a woman leaves her children at the creche, there is an entirely different series of emotional consequences that she must experience as compared to her male counterpart. The evidence for these experiences is plain in the context of her interface with modern medicine, of her presentations and those presentations with her 'sick' children' to the doctor.

From the perspective of evolutionary biology the psychological basis of the maternal attachment to offspring is entirely different to that of the paternal. We know this to be true on  a deeply personal level, in the distinction between the relationships we share with our mothers and those we share with our fathers.  Historically and indeed as evidenced in most mammals, whilst the offspring are  unable to fend for themselves, it is the male who must leave the nest to hunt and gather whilst the female cares for the young.  It is to the female that the newborn initially attaches itself  both physically and psychologically, because she provides for immediate needs whilst the father provides for those needs that are more distant and more long term.  If one interferes with this bond or this attachment, if one removes the child from the mother during this period of intimate physical and psychological attachment, significant anxiety is experienced by both mother and child. Conversely the father is entirely unaffected by separation anxiety, unless he is made aware of it, through a recognition its consequences upon both mother and child. In this instance he is instructed to bring the child to the doctor, and often brings a list of symptoms in case he forgets what is supposedly worng with the 'sick' child.

In General practice a significant portion of the income of any practice is derived from the anxiety of working mothers, their guilt at having to 'abandon' their children with strangers, and the psychological consequence of disrupting the natural process of maternal engagement with her children.  This is manifest in several forms; Mothers present to family doctors far more often than fathers, mothers suffer ill-health far more than fathers. In many respects ill-health and disease are the only legitimate means for a mother to escape from the rat-race and spend time bonding with their infants.  Ill-health provides mothers with the chance to be mothers, and in this sense society encourages ill-health in both mothers and children alike. 

In Ireland various estimates at the inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics, put the figure at somewhere in the region of 80%. That is to say that in 80% of cases an antibiotic is prescribed when it is not needed.  There are several reasons for this; the capitalist structure of medicine means that most working mothers must pay a consultation fee to see a doctor, and in this sense, to come away from the encounter empty handed, or without an acceptable 'medical diagnosis' that will validate maternal anxiety, makes for risky medicine. 

In most cases of by-proxy maternal anxiety (well child whom mother believes to be ill) the illness or 'infection' has already been diagnosed by the mother or another lay-person, concerned relative or creche worker, long before the mother presents to the doctor. All that is required of the doctor is to validate the mothers concerns, to externalise both the maternal anxiety and the probable unhappiness of the child, in the form of an 'antibiotic for a week';  after which the anxiety and unhappiness will have passed or morphed into a different medical or non medical form.

Ironically there is enormous pressure and many millions are spent (with good reason) to try and prevent the prescribing of unnecessary antibiotics.  However, because of our suppression of the true nature of the illness (in this instance maternal anxiety), because the mother is actually seeking validation of her maternal instinct, of her role as a mother, of her anxiety and upset at abandoning her children; the antibiotic in modern western society has assumed an entirely different social and psychological role.  Although it is not being prescribed appropriately, it is entirely necessary for an entirely different sublimated purpose.  That purpose is the  treatment of maternal anxiety in the only manner that is socially acceptable. 

It is for this reason that all campaigns to encourage appropriate use of antibiotics are doomed to failure from the very outset, and it is for this reason that those campaigns are even supported by the manufacturers of the antibiotics themselves.  The various better prescribing campaigns serve no purpose other than to increase the maternal anxiety, for the mother must now wonder if indeed she has administered poison to her child and if indeed she is contributing to the 'antibiotic-resistance' that is killing other children the world over.  

The medicalisation of the dysfunctioning family does not stop at antibiotics, it has become an entire industry. A myriad of illness have been created to explain maternal anxiety, from food allergies, intolerances, sensitivities, to behavioural and intellectual disabilities; as anxious mothers proceed down these roads, countless 'experts' and charlatans  are waiting to relieve the mother of the fruits of her labour, whilst none have the courage to suggest the unthinkable, that it is her labour that is the primary cause of the disease itself.

In the context of paediatrics, a significant portion of the 'illness' ascribed to children is a consequence of their experience of abnormal relations with their parents.  Dyslexia for example is almost entirely a myth that has arisen as both a real and an imagined consequence of  'equality' and consequent dysfunction of the family unit. Because both parents are 'equal' working mothers have no time to address their own illiteracy and intellectual disability.  Ireland presently boasts one of the lowest adult literacy levels in the developed world.(See Irish Times Article this week) 

Mothers are not only deprived of the time to help their children with their intellectual development, but have neither the time nor the inclination to help themselves.  As a consequence, much of the 'dyslexia' in Ireland is merely the manifest form of a  willful parental illiteracy, one that is simply and directly passed from parents to children.  

In Ireland the diagnosis of dyslexia is not only entirely disproportionate to its reality as a condition, but it is actively encouraged by the state, in that children (or parents) who can afford to purchase the diagnosis (most dyslexia is diagnosed by privately paid psychologists) will then be entitled to a plethora of 'special needs' assistance, and additional help in exams such as readers for papers and different marking structures etc. There are numerous programs for dyslexic students to gain access to third level institutions, and whilst all of these special encouragements towards 'equality' might be considered by some as a good thing, in many if not most cases the initial diagnosis is at best questionable, and the labelling of a child as dyslexic may do them as much good as having the word 'retarded' tattooed across their forehead.

When a diagnosis of dyslexia is to be made if the literacy and the functional parenting skills of both parents were to be taken into consideration, the 'diagnosis' would neither be as easily nor as frequently applied.
  

The  pathological 'equality' of working mothers is not only evident in 'dyslexia' but across the medical and psychological spectrum.  Frequently diagnoses are applied to children that are entirely the result of a  dysfunctional family unit, and of wholly inadequate parenting. In the context of a modern capitalist society the emphasis is upon; work, productivity, consumption, spending, growth etc. School's themselves have gotten in on the act and presently, despite the ethereal notion of 'free education', Irish schools seem to derive a an almost sadistic pleasure in the pain they impose upon parents and especially mothers.

For example there is no psychological, material, health or educational benefit to be derived from the wearing of a school uniform that costs several hundred euros. There is no educational benefit to be derived from the purchase of several hundreds of euros in school books each year.  For the especially anally- retentive school board: grey school pants/skirt, a white shirt, and a sweater can be purchased at a fraction of the cost of the typical uniform, that must be purchased from a specialised store.

The fundamentals of mathematics have remained unchanged since Pythagoras and as such there is no need for new books to be purchased each year, a simple book by-back or rental scheme would do away with this abuse forever.  The latest and most repugnant of these socially sanctioned school-scams is the mandatory purchase of I-pads and Kindles etc etc, to the tune of several hundred euros. All of these entirely unnecessary abuses are perpetrated upon parents by schools in the guise of 'progress' and in the interest of the child etc..., when in reality they are a consequence of financial incentives and arrangements between manufacturers, publishers and schools. Most of the schools and school boards who are introducing mandatory ipads to their pupils are in receipt of sweetheart deals where teachers get them free, and schools are rewarded in other unpublished ways. 

In Ireland when one wishes to find child abuse one merely has to look at the institutions who ostensibly advertise the opposite, all of this compels mothers to work to pay for these abuses and thence to the doctor to misdiagnose and prescribe for these abuses.

This morning whilst driving through Rush on my way to work, I stopped at a traffic light and noticed that a man on the footpath stopped walking and began staring at me with a mixed expression of anger and suspicion. I looked away and looked back (as one does) and yet the man continued to stare directly at me, as though I had just driven over his dog.  My immediate reaction was one of irritation, 'what the hell is that feckin eegit starring at?'  I thought, however as soon as I had finished the thought, I felt a lump in my throat as I realised that the man was clearly 'intellectually disabled', there is a centre in Rush called Prosper Fingal which provides activities and training for the disabled and this man was on his way there.  When the lights changed and I drove on, I wondered if what had just occurred was a microcosm of what must occur if I am to achieve happiness and overcome my present intellectual disability; my anger at humanity, at the state of our society and the state of our world,  if I am to accept it all with stoic complacency.  Rather than be annoyed at myself and my fellow man for behaving stupidly, perhaps I must simply come to the realisation that humanity is (in its entirety) 'mentally retarded', that it is incapable of nothing more than our present social construct. That we might imagine a better world, but we lack the intellectual capacity to do much more than stare into the void, and continue to dream about it.

On The Insanity of Christ and the Rape of little Children.

If your best friend is correct and you are indeed crazy how would you ever know? An especially difficult question, particularly if your 'craziness' consistently provides the answer. The point being made is quite simple in that the more insane you might be, the less likely you are to recognise your insanity. Therefore what happens when the majority of people within a society become too insane to recognise their insanity? If you think this an extreme improbability, google some pics of the Nuremberg Rallies, in Germany of the late thirties, or recall how a society sanctioned the mass extermination of millions of fellow human beings, or recall the tale of weapons of mass destruction, that filled a hundred thousand body-bags.  Economies have collapsed, wars have been fought and countless books have been written on the hysteria of the masses; so much so that we might soon recognise that 'mass-hysteria' is not an isolated occurrence, but rather an ongoing and evolving phenomenon. What are the hysteria's, what are the madness's of today? The madness to which we all, (to a greater or lesser degree) believe to be the coordinates of our normality, our sanity?

This evening on my news feed the three top stories were:

1) Brother of Gerry Adams, convicted for raping his daughter over several years when she was a child.
2) Garda's Anonymity not to be preserved in respect of his Child Pornography conviction.
3)Two men arrested in connection with the abduction and rape of two children (Ages 6 and 9yrs) in Athlone.

Irish society is in melt down, grown men are raping little children and more, and we remain too insane to recognise that these perversions are not 'isolated incidents', but are the product of a society that has lost its way, of a society that has become insane.

Given the state of the world, of politics, the mass media and society at large, it might not be entirely unreasonable to suggest that those of us who declare their sanity with the confidence of a zealot, are perhaps least likely to hold a monopoly upon that illusive substance. Conversely, those who are aware of their insanity, of their individual contribution to the collective (and entirely self evident) insanity of our species, are amongst the least insane of all of us.

In this sense, if we are to save ourselves from ourselves (we ourselves are the greatest threat to ourselves) then we have no choice; we must seek the council of the insane. That is not to say that we should have institutionalised mental patients running the state (despite the possibility of a better job being done), rather it is to state categorically that the correct solutions to our public and private malaise will initially and invariably be perceived as 'madness'. That the real solutions to our unhappiness are to be found amongst those ideas that we have already or might readily dismiss as crazy. In this modern world of horrors of untruths and bizarre contradictions if we are to think, we must first pause and think again.

We must look to the radical and the revolutionary if we are to revolutionise our society, we must hope that deep down, beyond the 'Fakebook-self', beyond the materialism and the superficial existences we have meticulously created for ourselves, that we might retain some of that capacity that distinguishes us from all other creatures; our intellect, our rationality, our capacity for independent thought, and above all our honesty in a world that rewards only the inverse.  We must see beyond the market-forces that everyday try with renewed success to suppress those qualities. We must re-visit and analyse those 'solutions' that at first appeared to us to be insane, or ridiculous, and when something sounds crazy we must stop and think carefully, for the insanity may not be in what is heard but rather who is listening.

We might recall that Christ was an iconoclast, a revolutionary, and he was not crucified because his views were in keeping with the majority, with the media and the established doctrines of the day , but rather were the opposite. His teachings were against the law, against the establishment, they were the ravings of a madman. As were those of Gautama, Pearse, Socrates, Einstein, Marx and Freud.

Personally, as disturbing as the plethora of child abuse, (undoubtedly greatly influenced by the extreme nature of pornography that is readily available on the Internet under the guise of 'free speech'), was the news that 91 Elephants were found dead in a national park in Zimbabwe this week. The elephants were killed by poachers who spread cyanide crystals about a watering hole, where Elephants (and countless other animals) would go to drink. The poachers followed the poisoned elephants and hacked off their tusks as soon as the animals were too weak to defend themselves. The tusked lumps of keratin (the same substance of hair and toe-nails) are doubtless destined for the Chinese market where idiot-millionaires treat their erectile dysfunction with ground up tusk or rhino horn.

Not only did the elephants die but countless animals that fed upon their poisoned carcasses, and countless more who drank from the waterhole that had been laced with the seed of human materialism. We don't like to consider the fact that the money that pays the poachers and empowers the idiot millionaires, comes from our purchase of cheap Chinese product; most of which we rapidly dispose of and have no real need for in the first place.  Our products are made cheaply in those countries where human rights, minimum-wage and environmental protection have no meaning. We live in our democracies with our human-rights and environmental protection, whilst the third world does our dirty-work, our poaching and pollution. We are all party to theses crimes, we confirm our guilt with each cent we spend. The unhappiness and psychological dysfunction that defines the perversity of child abuse is a product of a society that is equally sick. An unpalatable truth that is rarely encountered on the mind-wash of modern media.

 A cardinal ingredient to the qualification of insanity is a greater or lesser measure of delusion, of belief in that which a majority cannot see or recognise to be true. How many people actually realize that the 'self' on 'Fakebook' is not real? That the self in the suit heading to the office, or the professional self dispensing advice with confidence and self assurance, is not really the self?

How many of us know or are even willing to entertain the notion that the majority of us amount to little more than what Holden Caulfield referred to in Catcher in the Rye as..Phonies! Look about at your friends and family and ask yourself how many real people do you see, (do as Michael Jackson advises and start with 'the man in the mirror). For each and all of us (myself included) the space between our real and our portrayed self (our public and private Gar) is always trying to expand.  The greater the distance between the two, the greater is our unhappiness and our dissatisfaction with life.

That the world is crazy, that it is governed by a collection of governments driven by economic self interest and guided by a philosophy that is derived from the God of the markets, is self-evident. The state of our environment, the collapse of morality, the demise of those species who share the earth with us, global poverty and the squalor and depravity that defines the lives of the great majority of our race, all speak of an unsavoury 'real' that we are increasingly blind to.

The intellectuals, the thinkers and philosophers who might afford an antidote, are everywhere under siege, purged from society with an effectiveness as brutal as the Nazi purge of a Jewish Ghetto. The very capacity for freedom of thought, or intellectual analysis is threatened and brutalised by a mass media concerned with moronic-millionaires, Kardashians, supermodels, materialism, sex, and super-idiocy. Never before has mankind been in such desperate need of a revolution or a Superman.


President: What I do now, I do for the sake of the people of Earth. But there is one man on this planet who will NEVER kneel before you.
General Zod: Who is this imbecile? Where is he?
President: I wish I knew.
http://youtu.be/jUORL-bvwA0

Our Uberman must also go inside the crystal chamber and reverse the process so that all on the outside are stripped of the superpower of consumption and consequent destruction. To impoverish and enrich equally, or perhaps more realistically to attach our wealth and consumption to its consequence, and cultivate the intellect needed to spend and consume responsibly, that is the task for our Supermen, for Nietzsche's philosopher of the future.

We might ask (if we cared enough), and the future will certainly ask: Were we stupid? Or were we insane, that we should have sanctioned or remained oblivious to the real cost of our 'freedoms' our wealth and our consumption. That our priorities were up our arses, that the greater became our power, the greater our potential for good...... the greater is our desire for more and more. That we had the technology to do so much good and yet our legacy should be one of destruction and misery?

A plea of insanity would necessitate that we remained blissfully ignorant of the consequence of our consumption, ignorant of what we were making of the earth and of our fellow man? The mass media is doing its utmost to preserve this plea, in the ongoing promotion of mental retardation (Yes Lord Sugar) and the depression (or more correctly suppression) of the human intellect or our diminishing capacity for independent thought and analysis.

This subtle campaign has not yet been entirely successful. Here and there a few men and women retain the capacity for independent thought, beyond the reaches of globalisation and the relentless stupefaction of the masses. These lepers are called philosophers, they have yet to be rounded up and concentrated in a camp. They endure the worse fate of being ignored by the media and labelled as insane by the masses. In Ireland RTE (the national brainwashing agency) exercises an explicit ban on intellectual dialogue. Its presenters representative of the worst and most intellectually redundant elements of mass psychology, each groundhog day they contaminate and erode our fading capacity for reason. Ironically through the imposition of the Television Licence Fee upon every household, we are in the privileged position of paying for our abuse. Our academics and intellectuals are vilified, our educated youth are pushed to emigrate and our best universities close their arts and Philosophy departments and plummet in the International rankings.

The few who remain awake, who have not as yet succumbed to the doctrine of the markets that virus of idiocy that is sweeping through our species with the virulence of a pandemic; can find a place to hide and speak only within the infinite anonymity of the web and the Internet and on occasion through books and film or the Arts. In reality their continued existence is a threat to us all, to our consumptive philosophy. For as long as the capacity for independent thinking remains alive we may not have recourse to a plea of insanity, if ever we are called to account for the great mess we have made and continue to make of this world with each cent and each plastic bottle. We can tolerate the truth in small doses, like Chili on a Pizza, we want our philosophy in snippets on a Sunday, or in Pulp and comedy from a Zizek or a Chomsky.

Man's stupidity is a more realistic diagnosis than that of his insanity, yet it is one that we remain too stupid to recognise. Indeed that is the irony of stupidity in that it immediately deprives one of the ability to recognise it's presence, thus making it the most advanced and most dangerous of all of our pathologies.