Corruption, Coercion and Poverty

For British readers, it's been two centuries since the slave trade was abolished. American readers won't see that anniversary for two generations yet, but read on. Even within British jurisdiction (throughout the world), it was a generation after the trade was abolished, that slavery itself finally went, when the Baptist Missionary Society finally drove a stake through the heart of the monster, which was first assailed by Adam Smith and the economists, then waylaid by Quakers, who went a lot of the way towards total abolition, but then found other fish to fry. When correctly targeted, single-mindedness is the defining virtue of Baptists. At no stage in the struggle did the Roman Catholic Church actually help, preaching slavery as an evil only once it was a thing of the past and not a present reality of the global power structure. The Anglican Church eventually went in the right direction shortly before the last minute, as it often does, when Baptists and Quakers effectively grabbed an ear each and marched.

It will seem very odd to some that Medawar commences an article about the present and future economy of the Western world with a reference to non-conformist Christians of centuries past. But read it again: the Neremiah of the generation before Josiah Wedgewood, was Adam Smith, the Scottish economist. Who wanted to break the chains more than a century before the idea commended itself to Abraham Lincoln. As we try and shelter from the fallout of what some see as the collapse of Western Capitalism, there is no concept harder for us to grasp than that of economics as a moral science and capitalism as a mechanism for improvement of the human condition. But an educated man from Adam Smith's generation, would see naught but madness in an age where an "ethical" investment fund can shun all investment in aerospace companies because of a mere association with the arms trade -and quite happily put its client's money into a wind-turbine company that lies to its investors about its long-term viability, lies to taxpayers about the benefits (or electricity) they will get for the subsidies they are being asked for, and lies to regulators about the harm being done by the wind-turbines to the environment.

Flying isn't "ethical", lying, apparently, is.

In Adam Smith's time, capitalism meant a probity-based economic model. The word "capitalism"wasn't around in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War, but the thing was. It was created, not by idle and evil rich men, but by Baptists and Quakers dealing with a corrupt world as they wanted it to be, not as it was. They changed it thereby. In Tony Blair's time, the same word is applied to a corruption-based economic model that is causing us serious problems. Not just because the bottom has fallen out of the banking system, but because corruption cannot exist apart from coercion.

No-one of their own free will, puts their savings into a company that lies to them and is patently not going to deliver what it promises. But government can take their money and put it into the dodgy company on their behalf, extremists can set fire to their homes in "protest" at their putting their money into some other company, on whatever revolving pretext presents itself. Banks can hire "advisors" to harry account holders to put their money into schemes: coercion is applied.

Corruption destroys wealth: the dishonest shilling triumphs over the honest pound. For a few individuals to become rich under a corruption-based economic model, everybody else has to become ever poorer, one way or another. If the same individuals became as rich under a probity-based economic model, everybody else might become more prosperous in their wake. Sounds like a fantasy? Well, yes: to one conditioned by currently-accepted thinking, it does. But for three centuries, that was how the British economy did work. There were ups and downs, but the economic trend was upwards, the social trend was towards improvement -and the political trend was towards ever greater freedom, and ever more accountability. If the civil war era had been a nadir, where something had to start getting better, the centuries afterwards were a slow climb up from the pit -and probity supplied guidance when the way towards "better" could not be defined any other way.

The ultimate expression of the corruption-based economic model and the coercion-based social model, is chiseled onto the many faces of the "Georgia Guidestones" and runs throughout the genocidal dogmas of the animal rights movement. That is, for people to live better, nine-tenths of them have to stop living. Just as for a few Blairite and Putinista Olgliarchs to become and remain billionaires, millions must be sold into mortgage slavery in a price bubble and literally billions in developing countries must be betrayed to a worse fate still.

Communism is just as much a corruption-based economic model as Blairite/Brownite Capitalism; indeed, it's hard to define a difference between the two. There is no rescue for us there, and the green extremists will save us by killing of nine out of ten of us, to make more space for rats and locusts. (No, don't try to imagine, just look: at Zimbabwe. Mugabe said, years ago, that he had been advised to reduce the population!)

The situation in the world today is dire. But it is no worse, and perhaps a bit better, than in England after a Civil War that transferred power without responsibility from the King, to a Parliament that then suffered no meaningful elections or accountability.

We can start making progress upwards again. We can fix the system. But we cannot consign poverty to the same unconsecrated grave as slavery, unless we slay corruption and its partner, coercion.

We must be intolerant of corruption, but that means we must stamp out bullying, whether by individuals, gangs or institutions. We cannot put up with an ever-tightening noose of state control, not because it simply makes us less free, but because it makes us poor -and that means that some of us are squeezed out of life altogether.
We cannot make a stand against corruption and do nothing about bullying, intimidation, gang-stalking and the spread of official coercion into even banal areas of public policy, because these evils are the same thing, just as reason and justice are, at one primal moment, the same particle.

Probity and freedom are the same thing, too. The greatest and most effective lie of all the lies that have driven this generation astray, is that probity is somehow a restriction, a fuddy-duddy lack of freedom. The truth it that without probity, nobody is free, in business or anywhere else. Freedom is the freedom to follow our most basic survival instinct: to test whether things are good or bad by applying reason to them. Corruption and coercion means that we do things for reasons other than that they are best. It is inevitable that corruption and coercion will make us do the wrong thing, therefore.

So, we mustn't be deflected by those who say that this global problem, or another, is so dire and serious that reason and persuasion must be laid aside, in favour of coercion. The more important the matter is, the more dangerous coercion becomes, because it is a guarantee of society doing the wrong thing.

The small Avro airliner in the photograph is a very direct descendant of the one visible in the background to all the photographs of Neville Chamberlain waving his bit of paper and proclaiming that there would be "peace in our time". This is known as "appeasement" to those of the generation that fought the inevitable subsequent world war, but even they forget that Chamberlain didn't only appease Hitler and the Nazis, because Hitler was in alliance with Joseph Stalin at the time -and he enjoyed considerable support in the United States of America from the likes of Henry Ford and many (but not all) members of the Kennedy Clan. Chamberlain wasn't just appeasing Hitler, he was trying to appease the collected forces of corruption and coercion as they appeared in the world at the time. Within a year, he had to fight anyway, within three, the United States had to fight against something which so many of its most powerful citizens actually supported.

Tonight, Medawar learns that "European Leaders," including Tony Blair, who, incidently, holds no elected post or constitutional position in any country, want to build a new global order out of the current economic crisis, which they did so much to create. This will be a global order of the corruption-based economic model and its attendant coercive social model. We will fight this because we have no choice: there is no route to human survival if we do not.

The Milk of Human Sadism

On the 23rd of September, it was reported that the animal rights group "PETA" had sent a message to the management of Ben and Gerry's Homemade Inc (an American icecream company) to the effect that they must abandon the use of cow's milk in their products and, instead, use human breast milk to make ice cream for sale on a commercial basis. Any suggestion of PETA's (a law-abiding institution, so it says) is habitually backed up by the threats and violence of the Animal Liberation Front, the Animal Rights Militia, "Earth First!" and the Earth Liberation Front, all of which make a virtue of breaking laws in what they deem to be a good cause.

Medawar's previous post "Science is a Freedom" stated that the cruelest thing you can do to someone, is force them to accept something that their reason wishes to reject.

PETA have previously campaigned for children to drink beer instead of milk, now, ice-cream makers are supposed to accept the theory that it's "healthier" for commercial icecream to be made from "donated" human breast milk.

They also strive to make people believe that cows milk makes people unhealthy (despite the historical evidence to the contrary, see especially "The Englishman's Food" by J.C Drummond and Anne Wilbraham (Jonathan Cape Ltd) which shows how many diseases were banished by the improved availability of fresh dairy products in English towns from the 18th century onwards.) Cows are now also to be blamed for global warming, with the idea that pastures can be converted into croplands.

The last time pastures were systematically converted into arable lands as a matter of public policy on any great scale, was in the Mid-Western United States in the early years of the 20th century. By the nineteen-twenties, this had caused the greatest ecological disaster in American history: the "Dustbowl". Because permanent pasture has a deeper root system even than most forests, it can withstand cyclical droughts in a way that arable land and even forestry plantations, cannot. Nearly all of the pasture lands which PETA would like to see converted (to growing soyabeans, presumably) in the USA, Canada and Argentina, are subject to cyclical droughts every twenty or thirty years. So, you can get away with arable farming for a decade, maybe two, and then you have a disaster and a sterile moonscape that won't grow anything in a hurry, even when the rains return.

Reason tells me that getting children to drink beer instead of milk, is very bad for them.
Reason tells me that dairy products, far from being dangerous to human health, are actually essential to avoid problems such as rickets and many opthalmic ailments.
Reason tells me that the commercial exploitation of human breast milk for ice-cream, is a deliberate lunacy which is being put forward for the following reasons:

Pathological liars are not compelled to tell plausible lies: they are compelled to force people to accept things which are not plausible, things which their reason wants to reject. Pathological lying is a species of sadism: they do it because the irrational lies which they force people to accept destroy the core of the victim's being. It is a way of stealing someone's sanity by force. Your reason wants to reject the idea of women being bullied into "donating" breast milk to icecream makers, so that pastures can be ploughed for soya production? Well, tough: PETA wants to make you accept the idea, precisely because it makes your reason scream with pain.

Then the whole concept deliberately reverses the position of woman and beast: women are, if anything less than beasts in PETA's eyes. And not only that, they want to force humanity to accept that status. Like the Cathars of Medievil Europe, successfully brainwashing people to sign over their wealth to the Cathars and then starve themselves to death. That, too, was an institution based on pathological lying.

It is ludicrous, but it is deliberately ludicrous. They cannot express their contempt and hatred for humanity in reasoned concepts, so they put forward ludicrous ones, instead, and then set about making people "believe" the most ludicrous of lies. Pathological lying of this order, is linked to the deepest and darkest forms of sadism.

Be very afraid of the sort of mind that can put this sort of idea forward, not quite in a spirit of seriousness, but in a spirit of mocking contempt for the human race. Here is something a thousand times more dangerous than any Islamist's hymn of hate, because it is born of hatred, not for any regional, ethnic or ideological grouping, but of hatred for the human form itself.

You might want to laugh out loud, but it's a statement of intent: when the people behind PETA rule, we will all have to publicly affirm our acceptance of this kind of madness, or we will suffer very violent consequences indeed. They laughed at Hitler, in 1923. By 1933, they were all shouting seig Heil! like the best of them, in case they got singled out. So, laugh at them for now, but get ready for the fight.

Science is a Freedom

These days, many people have been taught to fear that scientists are "destroying the world" or are engaged in a conspiracy (with a variety of faceless entities, such as "big Pharma") to enslave ordinary people and make them serfs, of whatever it is out there.

There are two points here:
Some of them are confusing "scientists" with "psychiatrists" and these have been two divergent species ever since the latter profession chose to follow Freud. A scientist either tests his own conclusions or allows someone else to test them, a psychiatrist only ever tests or questions someone else's assumptions, never his own. Even making that statement has caused all the psychiatrists reading this to assume...

Science is not an anti-nature thing, nor an anti-human thing. It is simply a formalized expression of something very fundamental to our natures, and at the deepest level, it is allied to what we call "justice".

Science comes from the very beginning of Humanity's emergence, not as a species (because there was more than one "species" that we'd recognize as being as human as we are) but as something slightly more than that. It isn't even what distinguishes us from other primates, because there's an echo of the scientist in what many wild primates, not to mention ravens, do in order to survive.

Consider a hunter-gather, traditionally called "Og" or perhaps, nowadays: "Ray Mears".
When he gathers fruit and berries in order to survive, how does he differ from a bear?
The bear stands upright (when required) and systematically gathers as much as he can, from that which he recognizes, by instinct or experience, to be good. From a distance, it is difficult to distinguish him, by his actions, from Mr Mears.

Well, the bear gathers as much of the good stuff as he can and eats as much as his stomach will stand (which tends to be a great deal.)

Mr Mears gathers as much as he thinks he can deal with, either by eating, or by processing the fruit and berries so that they might be transported, stored, or serve some function other than simple nutrition. He knows all sorts of ways of doing these things. Not simply because he has learned them from older generations of Mears, but because he himself, like all his ancestors, has been curious all his life, and that curiosity, guided by the facility of reason, has allowed him to invent and experiment with, new ways of using things that he can gather. This helps Mr Mears to survive and prosper, because he can find ways of processing food that is not good to eat immediately it is gathered, and which the bear must leave alone. It allows him to take food with him when he travels, or to store it by means other than eating it and growing fat.
That is all science is: a combination of curiosity and reason that is so important to our survival, since so unimaginably long ago, that it is part of our natures, perhaps the very core.

If our curiosity and reason are suppressed, we do not feel happy, we do not even feel well. Even the psychiatrists (or at least the forensic psychologists) will admit that sadists and pathological liars are often only millimetres apart. The cruelest thing you can do to someone, is to force them to accept something, which their reason wishes to reject. The pathological liar does not seek to tell plausible lies: he delights to manipulate, or coerce, people into accepting things which no reasonable person, a safer distance from the liar, would accept. That does not mean that the victim, who is forced to acknowledge the lie as truth, is not a reasonable person. It means that great violence is being done to their power of reason -and that power of reason has become, over millenia of human struggle, more important to their identity than their lives.

Being commanded by a liar to believe something that our reason rejects, is the greatest violence we can suffer. This is the primeval point where justice and science are the same thing. Like primitive atomic particles and forces just after the big bang, they grow apart and into very complex and distinct things, but in their origins, justice and science are the same: the core of our being.

Freedom is the freedom to look at things, to wonder about them, to imagine how they can change, to try it and see. That is science, but it is also how we tell good from evil, guilt from innocence, wisdom from folly.

If we regain our power of reason, and reject those who are telling us what we ought to think, we are already free in the sense that matters most.

The photograph is of a Westland Lysander. Designed to observe battlefields, it was also used to take secret agents to and from Nazi-occpied France during world war two. Nazism was a system of lies and coercion: pathological lying, formalised and inherently sadistic. On numerous occasions, agents fleeing the Gestapo, would have to run after a Lysander as it briefly touched down and taxied into position for an immediate take-off; grabbing the bottom rung of the fixed ladder, which you can just see in the photograph, below the RAF roundel, meant the difference, not just between physical safety and danger, but also between being able to keep their own power of reason and being forced to surrender it, under interrogation, to the Nazis.

Medawar doesn't seek to make a casual comparison between the Nazis and the modern anti-science movements, such as the Animal Liberation Front. There is a direct and real equivalence, suggested by all of his experience of the past thirty-odd years and tested, time and again, by his curiosity and power of reason. Gentle Reader, it isn't scientists who threaten your freedom, happiness and well-being, it's the liars.

Introduction

This blog is intended to deal with issues involving both science and human freedom.
"Medawar's" central belief is that freedom of inquiry is as important to the human condition as the freedom to protest or state political beliefs.
Indeed, most of our current concepts of political freedom stem from two roots:
the work of religious innovators and dissidents; for example, John Bunyan, who had to fight for the right to preach and pray as their conscience and intellect demanded -and those scientists who had to fight for the fight to study and theorize as their intellect demanded.

The modern world is full of forces which seek to suppress not simply our "political freedoms", "civil rights" or even "human rights", but the very basic right of curiosity and the use of reason which led to all of these.

Enemies of the basic right to curiousity and reason range from neo-nazi groups, such as the "November the Ninth Society" via the Animal Liberation Front, to Organised Crime and other entities which appear vague and shapeless, not to say nameless, to the majority of people, but which have a real and negative impact on some people's lives.

The Orange Dahlia, above, has been chosen because it's intensely beautiful, but it's the product, not solely of nature, but of nature and man's curiousity and reason working together. That makes it a symbol of everything which many extremists and little Hitlers are trying to suppress.

More posts will follow, but this sets out the stall!