My new novel, out now. A tale of a dystopian Scotland set in 2050. Link here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1739657004/ref=sr_1_3?crid=L8CDGPD87982&keywords=Gulag+Caledonia&qid=1649767254&s=books&sprefix=gulag+caledonia%2Cstripbooks%2C92&sr=1-3

Mental health’ is a phrase everybody uses without thinking. Yet when we subject it to critical analysis, we can see just how slippery a term it really is. It is a term that reduces and reifies human experience to simple categories of good and ill health.

Today, political activists from all political persuasions often campaign for more or improved mental-health services. It is simply seen as a good thing. There is almost no interrogation of the concept of mental health from a critical psychoanalytical or philosophical perspective, or even rarer, a spiritual perspective. The uncritical acceptance of the idea of mental health has damaging consequences.

Chiefly, the mental-health agenda forces people to think of the problems they experience as purely psychological problems-a psycho-pathologisation of ordinary life. This is compounded and perpetuated by the discipline of psychology itself, which purports to be a neutral science. As Svetlana Boym argues in Another Freedom, psychology, rather than contesting the states of alienation and confusion, exacerbates these states, and celebrates them in a positivist ‘carnival of inauthenticity’. Indeed, alienation from ourselves is positively encouraged through psycho-biological frameworks (including genetic theories), which permeate the discipline of psychology and dispute and destabilise ideas of free will and responsibility, and which negates the idea that the wide range human emotions and experience is perfectly normal.

The crucial problem with psychology and its contemporary underpinning, the idea of mental health, is that it views human beings as, essentially, machines. And machines, as everyone knows, become faulty and need fixing. By reducing human beings to machines in this way, so that discontent, estrangement and so on are seen as forms of mental ill-health, the institutions of psychology shore up the status quo. They present the acceptance of the status quo as good mental health.

It needs to be understood that there is no good evidence to suggest that there are any biological deficits, genetic abnormalities, or chemical imbalances related to mental ill-health or mental disorders. The evidence base for mental illness is very poor by scientific standards. There are no medical tests a physician can give you to test for a mental illness.

The happiness demanded by the so-called radicals of mental-health campaigns buys into the secular postmodern imperative of the well-adjusted, adapted individual, alienated by the modern metaphysics of the self. Our modern state of being, of becoming increasingly unhappy and distressed (not mentally ill), is no doubt created by economic conditions. But it is also a result of the pathological inability to enjoy the myriad satisfactions offered to purchase, or life statuses we are encouraged and tempted to acquire in contemporary society. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was very cognisant of the fact that the modern demand for happiness, and the existence of the happiness/mental-health industry, implies the ultimately unsatisfying nature of customer satisfaction.

Mental healthism was also used in the development of the Named person scheme which morphed into the Adverse Childhood movement. I think people, parents and professionals need to be aware of this creeping totalitarianism in Scotland, seeping into the lives of families and their children. The tentacles of the state do not just turn up overnight; they grow via faux compassion and fake evidence – ‘The ACEs movement is about love and hugs’, some have been seen to tweet on social media. Indeed, presently in Scotland (and England too), primary school children are subjected to ‘resilience’ training or promoting health and emotional well-being, which derives from ACE ideology and focuses on well-being, psycho-social health and relationships.

These lessons are in effect psycho-social educational interventions based upon a narrow and reductive idea of ‘mental health’. Children as young as a five are asked to reflect upon relationships, emotions and their families. Psychological projection tools are used which encourage such reflection and yield much information (i.e., qualitative data) on children’s families, lifestyles, struggles, problems and difficulties.

Anecdotal reports are suggesting that younger children are becoming confused and distressed with this aspect of the school curriculum (an ACE in itself?). And these ‘lessons’ are conducted without informed consent or consultation with parents. There have been reports of parents asking teachers if any data is being taken or recorded from these lessons. They have been told that no data is being taken or recorded, yet posters designed by children, guided by teachers, adorn the walls of schools (worryingly non-anonymised) describing the emotional states, worries, trials and traumas of children and their parents. It seems that the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) mean little in this ACE inspired world. Data is everything in a totalitarian surveillance inspired world. Data leads to control.

Anyhow the ACE inspired school is an instance of the school being turned into a ‘mental health’ centre. These curricular developments are wholly inappropriate; the school is not a place where you meddle with the ‘mental health’ of a child, or extract information from them on issues pertaining to ‘mental health’ and well-being. There are specialist services and professionals to work with children if they need help. They are called Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). But CAMHS and NHS psychological services are overstretched and some are at breaking point. What exactly do ACE advocates want to do once they have identified all the ACE ‘victims’? Where will ACE advocates send children and what treatments will they receive when at present there are limited resources on offer?

I think Aldous Huxley’s thoughts on the issue of mental healthism are very helpful. This is from his “Brave New World Revisited”, where he quotes the psychotherapist Eric Fromm:

“But ‘let us beware’ says Dr Fromm, ‘of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting’. The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be the most normal. ‘Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does’.

Therefore, the rise of a therapeutic/mental hygienist totalitarianism or despotism is as Huxley alerts us to, is I believe alive in well in our times-in Sturgeon’s SNP dystopian vision. One just has to think of the failed “Named Person Scheme” in Scotland which has morphed into the Adverse Childhood Experiences movement. Essentially an ideology of the going in at birth/infancy if the child, to target “at risk” mothers and families, where state knowledge/state intervention is necessary to guide a child into and towards a standardised unity where diversity is extinguished; targeting a “pre-crime” ideologically speaking.  I have written about these issues in the Scottish Review . But essentially if we ignore the warnings from the likes of Huxley and no heed the lessons from totalitarian pasts and current totalitarian states (e.g., China), we are heading into a dark place. This is especially so in light of the drive of the ACE ideology (with its whiff of eugenics), transhumanism and the desire to link artificial intelligence with biological systems. I think personally human civilisation in on a precipice mirroring some dark dystopian science fiction movie, except it is not a movie any more. This is all the more real when you consider the trans or queer theory inspired educational system, critical race theory infiltration in all walks of life (anecdote-cis white male privilege-school council).

Anyhow, from a document of Brainwashing and mental healthism ex-head of the KGB Anatoly Beria states in regard getting mental healthism integrated into a country culture; and before I quote him, think of LGBT clubs in schools, human rights indoctrination, values etc etc as Richard has eloquently discussed.

“Psychopolitical operatives should at all times be alert to the opportunity to organise, “for the betterment of the community” mental health clubs or groups. By thus inviting the co-operation of the population as a whole in mental health programmes, the terrors of mental aberration can be disseminated throughout the populace. Furthermore, each one of these mental health groups, properly guided, can bring, at last, legislative pressure against the government to secure adequately the position of the psychopolitical operative, and to obtain for him government grants and facilities, thus bringing a government to finance its own downfall.”

The standardisation of human behaviour, from a Soviet communist perspective, leading to a mental healthism (or the mental health of the population dependent upon the state) is backed up from the testimony of Dr Boris Sokoloff in his “White Nights: pages from a Russian Doctor’s Notebook . Here is shows why the neo-liberal goal of a cultural hegemony of mental health and a leftist/communist mental healthism archives the same outcome; servitude or slavery to a mono-system:

“Russian communism is generally considered to be fighting capitalism— whose defeat is its prime goal. Actually, of course the Soviet regime, being an extreme form of state capitalism, is fighting not capitalism as such but private industry and commerce. But much more important is the fact that neocommunism is a movement directed against individualization and toward the standardizing of all Man’s activities. It is the farthest-reaching attempt ever made in this direction. Steadily and persistently, the Soviet regime is driving toward its ultimate goal: control of human behaviour. It states officially that man can transcend his heredity and transform his environment and so achieve full uniformity of behaviour. In this gigantic social and biological experiment, carried out largely through the [mis-]education of children and youth, the Soviets are using the [Pavlovian] conditioned-reflex mechanism on a large scale. They openly declare that this is essential to their purpose, that through such standardization a complete hold over their subjugated peoples can be attained.” Page 293.

Hannah Arendt, described totalitarianism as the attempted transformation of human nature itself. However, this attempted transformation only results turning sound minds into sick minds. Arendt’s fear is exemplified by the attack on our children and the traditional family via interrogating heteronormativity and gender, deconstructing via postmodernist ideology, the pursuit of truth via the god of science and the godless narcissistic pursuit of the ideal self which is played out in the cultural hegemony of mental health or mental healthism where the self is made into a God. 

Considering what Arendt warns and in our age of anti-religion, anti-family, queer theory etc I think I will end here with a quote from Martin Lloyd-Jones from his book The Christian Warfare: An exposition of Ephesians 6:10-13.

“Our age is one that has largely ceased to believe in the supernatural at all. This is partly due to the advance of science in its various branches. Man is regarded as the master of his own fate and the determiner of everything……It is my belief, as I have tried to show in my exposition of the Apostles warnings, that the modern world, and especially the history of the present century, can only be understood in terms of the unusual activity of the devil and the ‘principalities and powers’ of darkness.”

Text of conference presentation (05/08/21) given at Natural and Artistic Beauty in Process Metaphysics: 6th European Summer School in Process Thought, Warsaw, Poland (August 2nd-6th 2021)

6th European Summer School in Process Thought

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he writes:

“6.522: There are things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” (Wittgenstein, 1961, p. 73)

Wittgenstein’s wisdom reflects the importance of human experience are beyond ideals of representation; it is a call to the ethical, to justice, to freedom away from the dominant Western psycho-scientistic research and philosophical basis of greedy desire for the understanding of beings or entities; of intelligibility.

Specifically, in relation to psychotherapy, perhaps we have to take heed from the likes of Wittgenstein.

We have had well over 100 years of psychotherapy and echoing James Hillman, the world is not getting any better. How many kinds of psychotherapy are there? 300, 400? Some might say that the rise of therapeutic culture, the cultural hegemony of mental health, the fetishization and fashion for mental health has made things a lot worse. As cultural theorists E. Michael Jones and Christian writers like Seraphim Rose have pointed out, the effects of the Renaissance and the enlightenment in the Western World, whilst undoubtably adding to Western Civilization, has added to the domination, especially in recent decades, the ideological creep of a humanistic modus operandi-that is a world where God is dead, or at least been killed or is less and less present. This leads the psychic geography towards a place where man is God, the Superman in the Nietzschean sense-but this situation comes with a price, whether one is religious or not.

Our present situation is very complicated. The sexual revolution, advocating for an “anything goes” approach towards the erotic and different permutations of sexual relationships and reproduction, e.g., sex as a risk-free hobby to pursue, has, surprisingly, instead of adding to increased contentment has ushered in a new age of discontent. This for me at least has realised itself in the consulting room; as a symptom, or an elusive symptom that hides or disguises itself, sometimes being addressed as a demand or plea, e.g., for more sex, better sex, or a demand for an answer why unlimited sex has not resulted in the utopia that was promised by society, TV, social media inherent in our hyper-sexualised culture.

These problems of our present era, is a view of human Being (or being human) on a technological level-For example, the psyche as an entity to be manipulated like any object; ones emotions, cognitions, moods, life project etc are now the focus of medico-technological therapies, where the self is idolised, and where we think we can be master of our own house and have complete mastery over our world and domain. This is in fact demanded via the guise of medicalised evidence-based practice informed psychology or psychotherapy. In effect like Nietzsche argued in This Spake Zarathustra, this cultural development has killed God. Is this a good or bad thing? According to the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the Soviet Gulag, the answer is no.

From his Templeton Prize Lecture in London in 1983, “Godlessness: The First Step to the Gulag”. He says:

“Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

And from his address to Harvard in 1973, a veritable warning to the West Solzhenitsyn said:

“However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century.

As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say that “communism is naturalized humanism.”

This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorships; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach.”

Essentially, Solzhenitsyn wrote in his warnings to the west that it had forgotten God and all the goodness which faith endowed; the importance of family, tradition, community, and also the hermeneutics of how we conceive of our human lives, a sense of the transcendent, a sense of soul, a sense of God; this had been replaced by a technocratic approach to human life. To a large extent, psychotherapy in the West has now become a soulless and Godless spectre which tinkers with peoples’ personal problems in a technical and calculative manner; it treats appetites of a person as something to be indulged, thoughtlessly, like offering no resistance to a small child wanting sugary sweets; the therapist just gives in and feeds the passions, not realising the harm that occurs. One has to remember, and it crucial to understanding the importance of our present predicament, that Solzhenitsyn, experienced the horrors of Nazism and the horrors of totalitarian communism. Lest we forget the horrors of such regimes and their effects on people, because as Solzhenitsyn indicates, if we do forget, we will repeat the mistakes of the past. It seems under COVID19 totalitarianism, many people are in a state of forgetfulness.

 Therefore, Solzhenitsyn’s warnings were prophetic. Frightening and sinister things are occurring in the West today. The United Kingdom and Scottish Governments are intruding into the lives and families via “mental health” and inappropriate (especially for 5-year-old children) psycho-social and sexual/” gender” education instruction programs inspired by the dubious academic discipline of “queer theory”. Demands are being put forward by lobbyists to be able to abort viable children in the third trimester, right up until the moment of birth. Campaigners are suggesting that people of 70 years or over should not receive expensive life-saving medical procedures. Freedom of speech is being suppressed by Governments and the police; social media accounts are being monitored for people writing politically incorrect sentiments and the same people are subsequently arrested. Christian preachers are arrested for speaking the words from the Bible. The state (in the UK) are continually making attempts to regulate psychotherapy out of existence-or rather reduce it to a series of techniques, processes and “outcomes” where psychotherapy is hollowed out and purged of any authenticity, intensity, risk, spontaneity and soul. And now under the COVID-19 totalitarianism, we have the UK and Scottish Governments are using applied behavioural psychology, breaking the ethical guidelines for psychologists, to deliberately ramp up fear in the population.

In many respects, not just with the lockstep multi-Governmental response to Covid19, but with education, healthcare, and mental health care, specifically psychotherapy, totalitarian medical-technocracy is now very prominent in many aspects of out lives.

Bearing in mind our historical antecedents, e.g., totalitarian communist and fascist regimes, and our increasing technocratic era (technology, which aforementioned totalitarian communist and fascist regimes used), my argument is that it is important to keep in mind the Docta Ignorantia or the spirit of wise unknowing, especially in relation to psychotherapy.

As French Psychoanalyst Clotilde Leguil-Badal (2006, p241-256 ) describes, one of the major paradoxes of our times concerns the status of the subject. A result of the progress of science and how it currently stands today is that a new definition of the subject and subjectivity has been imposed; this is a subject that is composed of a material, organic substrate, or cognitive machine which is observable; i.e., the brain’s neurochemicals or the results of cognitions expressed in a psychometric questionnaire. Leguil-Badal describes how from a political standpoint how subjectivity is being wiped out, paradoxically because we supposedly live in an age where freedom, democracy, and the rights of the individual are held up as values. On the one hand we have “freedom” and the “human rights to freedom and be what we want when we want” or in other words subjectivity, yet on the other hand we have the neurosciences, computer-like/information processing discourse of Cognitive behavioural therapy. These discourses of power banish subjectivity as the brain and the science of mental health rules and guides subjectivity. This creates a landscape or symbolic with no landmarks; science is the big authority of how we feel, think, experience; subjectivity is written out of the picture as we are pre-determined, yet we are supposed to be free. If people get unhappy they blame it on their neurons or cognitions. In turn they demand happiness assuming it is a human right and that such a thing from an imaginary ideal of mental healthiness is possible; this is a big double-bind, a vicious circle. The human spirit (or holy spirit) is never seen in an MRI scan or in the results of a cognitive psychology laboratory experiment measuring reactions time to depressive or negative stimuli (i.e., negative words paired with self-referent words). What gets missed in these discourses in that the subject exists by his speech, his silence, and his actions, not by scientific knowledge or discourse. The subject existing in the here and nowis being forgotten about; science comes first and we are increasingly defining ourselves by an abstract fictitious scientistic posturing to become free, but by defining ourselves by science we paradoxically give up our liberty and subjectivity.

The rise of brain science and cognitive science is in many ways actively denouncing the creativity of the subject. The subject (or psyche) is being drawn into the working of the brain and cognitive theories of inner schematic representations with the result that activities such as psychoanalysis and psychotherapy which adopt the approach of the Docta Ignorantia (wise unknowing or recognising the limits to reason), are being made out to be redundant and useless. Cognitivism and the neurosciences have taken away the unity of the individual or the possibility to know oneself as an impossible unity; in other words, to know that we cannot know everything about how to live a human life; i.e., that the self is an illusory construction). In other words, one is invited to conceive of oneself as a machine, as a processor of information and receiver of stimuli and a network of neuronal interactions.

The technological stance in our contemporary society is fraught with misleading psychologisms, and this brings us to what Heidegger described beautifully in the introduction of his book ‘Being and Time’ referring to the necessity of restating the question of being:

“This question has today been forgotten…..Not only that. On the basis of the Greeks’ initial contributions towards and Interpretation of Being, a dogma has been developed which not only declares the question about the meaning of Being to be superfluous, but sanctions its complete neglect. It is said that ‘Being’ is the most universal and the easiest of concepts. As such it resists every attempt at definition…….In this way, that which the ancient philosophers found continually disturbing and self-evident such that if anyone continues to ask about it he is charged with an error of method……the ‘universality’ of ‘Being’ is not that of a class or genus….Thus we cannot apply to being the concept of ‘definition’ as presented in traditional logic, which itself has its foundations in ancient ontology and which, within certain limits, provides a quite justifiable way of defining ‘entities’. The indefinability of Being does not eliminate the question of its meaning; it demands that we look that question in the face.” (Heidegger, 1962, p2-4). 

What the wisdom of Heidegger teaches us, especially in relation to this present study, is that ‘inventing’ psychologisms, psyche entities, conceptual ideas of being, and the trustworthiness of our signs (language) is quite phantomic and that these strategies do not lend themselves toward a truly ‘scientific’ theory of Being. This presents problems for process and product-orientated teleological psycho-scientific-researchers. The most obvious one is, if one cannot define an ‘entity’ of the psyche for example, one cannot measure it, account for it, or trace its development from one time point to another. Further, one cannot make meaningful comparisons of such entities from one person to another, yet alone at the end of the research process formulate a theory for replication based upon such ‘entities. Such entities are not static in time or lend themselves to scientific or mathematical conceptual nature; there will always be ‘slippage’ or something will be missed when applying scientific and mathematical criteria to people. If this is the case, we are left in a very precarious position, or are we?

It should be quite clear at this point that the standard psycho-scientific methodological approaches which most psycho-technicians take for granted, whether they are quantitative or qualitative, are not value free, objective, and might well be applying unnecessary and misleading totalisations to people under the guise of scientific research. Of course, I am not saying that all scientific research is negative,^[i] but when it comes to the issue of mental distress, psychotherapy, and how people live their lives, such methodological tools are not as sharp as one might like to think. This is where philosophical reflection plays it part or to put it more succinctly as Heidegger (2001) advocates, we should look at this question in the face. This does not imply that we cannot attain meaning or insight by not adopting such scientific methodology. It also does not mean that we should think more; we should perhaps again take Heidegger at his word and actually think less, or at least only think in the methodological sense when we actually need to, instead of blindly going down a research path without really considering what we are doing.

On a similar note, Montaigne from his essay, ‘The Art of Conversation’, describes how conversation is a dialectic, an art (much like psychoanalysis and psychotherapy) where thoughtless reasoning and cogitation, slavishness to doctrine and dogma, and deferring to the wisdom of the other, or as Lacan (2006) would say, to the one supposed to know, leading to universal judgements, is a lax and dangerous path to take. Montaigne appeals to the ordinary in living a good life; an ordinariness that is beyond truisms of the academy dictated to the masses or a force-fed dogma of how we should live and which leads us into absurdity. Montaigne describes:

          “Take an arts don; converse with him. Why is he incapable of making us feel the excellence of his “arts” and of throwing the women, and us ignoramuses, into ecstasies of admiration at the solidity of his arguments and the beauty of his ordained rhetoric! Why cannot he overmaster us and sway us at his will? Why does a man with his superior mastery of matter and style intermingle his sharp thrusts with insults, indiscriminate arguments and rage? Let him remove his academic hood, his gown and his Latin; let him stop battering our ears with raw chunks of pure Aristotle; why, you would take him for one of us –or worse. The involved linguistic convolutions with which they confound us remind me of conjuring tricks; their sleight-of-hand has compelling force over our senses but in no wise shakes our convictions. Apart from such jugglery they achieve nothing but what is base and ordinary. They may be more learned but they are no less absurd…..In my part of the country and during my own lifetime school learning has brought amendment of purse but rarely amendment of soul.” (Montaigne, 1991, p1050).

Later on in the chapter ‘On the Art of Conversation’ Montaigne outlines why Socrates debates not for the sake of debating, but for the sake of the debater; to show the debater that ultimate truisms are ungraspable in how to go about living a good life. Montaigne, like Socrates (Plato, 1997), Ibn ‘Arabi (Chittick, 1989), and Lacan (2007), espouse the Docta Ignorantia; the doctrine of wise or learned ignorance. These thinkers’ ideas relating to Docta Ignorantia are very important in relation to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis; the position of an effective analyst or therapist is to be in the position, not of the one who knows, but of the one who can be formative for the subject; for the analyst to accept that he does not know any anything about the analysand except for what the latter’s own words, or signifiers reveal. This position of wise ignorance is important to hold because, as Montaigne points out in his essay on experience, being dictated to in how to live one’s life (i.e., to gain happiness or health) furthers one from oneself, or replaces one set or schemata of information or dogma to live slavishly by, for another.

This state of affairs according to Montaigne is foolish and he describes why this is in his lengthy essay, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’ (Montaigne, 1991), an essay in honour of the Docta Ignorantia. He describes how a person who abides by learned ignorance is somebody who is content to realise that all human knowledge is as nothing, compared to that of infinity who is God; learned ignorance never claims to know, or aspire to know beyond what one can know. In essence, learned ignorance is a way or a path away from cogitation or reasoning to gain health; reasoning and cogitation towards unrealistic goals, i.e., certainty. I am certainly not saying that reasoning and cogitation are bad per se; reasoning and cogitation performed used to find out what we do not know is essential to reach or practice the Docta Ignorantia. This position is unlike cognitive behavioural therapy or a medico-technical psychotherapy whose techniques focus on cogitation and reasoning about things (e.g., happiness) that cannot ever be truly known; reasoning about happiness cannot ever lead one to know happiness like one knows the length of a table top (Wittgenstein, 1980; Heaton, 2010). One can say ‘I am happy’ and explain why one is happy, but such reasoning ultimately fails to translate into a technical procedure where one can re-produce happiness by such a reasoning procedure. Ultimately happiness is not an object that can be manipulated via calculative or technological thought (Heidegger, 1977).

So, we are coming to the end now. We are back to what Solzhenitsyn said, “We have forgotten God”, or perhaps the cultural sensibility which provided a grounded groundlessness to the existence of being alive, as an answer to suffering, as route away from the narcissism of the self, of humans as the “Superman”.  

I will end with a little discussion of one of my favourite psychologist/philosopher/therapists who espoused brilliantly the Docta Ignorantia, who we can all learn from, not only the practice of psychotherapy, but in the art of living: Soren Kierkegaard

For Kierkegaard, in agreement with Pascal, “that only rarely and for few does God step forth from his concealment in nature’s secrecy”. And in his book “The lily of the field and the bird of the air”, the naïve reader might hope that that their difficulties are answered in some kind of formulaic way. They will be sadly disappointed-similarly to how patients might feel after encountering psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. But like the analyst, Kierkegaard is not giving in to such a demand. For Kierkegaard, Christianity is a moral and spiritual exercise that has the ultimate purpose of teaching human beings their imperfection, their weakness and selfishness, in the face of the transcendent; Kierkegaard’s therapeutic theology is a refusal of the demand from, God as man, the master of technology, leading to Docta Ignorantia, just like in psychoanalysis, as Jacques Lacan argued.

Kierkegaard writes:

“From the lily and the bird as teachers, let us learn silence, or learn to keep silent. For surely it is speech that places the human being above the animal, and if you like, far above the lily. But because the ability to speak is an advantage, it does not follow that there is no art in the ability to keep silent, or that it would be an inferior art. On the contrary, precisely because a human being has the ability to speak, for this very reason the ability to keep silent is an art; and precisely because this advantage tempts him so easily, the ability to keep silent is a great art. But this he can learn from the silent teachers, the lily and the bird.”

And he goes on, highlighting beautifully the praxis (or paradox) of analysis or psychotherapy, the pass from the discourses of knowledge as Lacan discussed, the discourses of the University, the master, the hysteric, to the discourse of the analyst, where one’s own truth at the seat of the Docta Ignorantia is reached.

He writes:

“True enough, it is a marvellous feat, but that why you must pay attention all the more closely to the lily and the bird. It is a marvellous feat and, like “the feat of meekness, it contains a contradiction, or is it a feat that resolves a contradiction?”

And on that note of a paradox and contradiction, like a true psychotherapy, I will end there.

[i] Medical research into curing certain degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis is invaluable.

Speech delivered outside the Scottish Parliament 17th July 2021, Holyrood, Edinburgh. Text of speech.

I am on the bill to speak about health. This is a difficult challenge as we are living through one of the unhealthiest times (psychologically speaking) through no fault of out own, but by the deliberate hand of government. I have spoken at several of these anti-lockdown events over the past 12 months. At these events I have discussed the unethical and illegal psychological operations by the UK and Scottish Governments. The testimony from the SPI-B psychologists of SAGE in Laura Dodsworth’s recent book, “A State of Fear”, are unfortunately not credible. Some of the psychologists of SPI-B of SAGE supposedly slowly came to the realisation that what they were doing was maybe unethical or totalitarian. This is not possible. They knew from day 1 that the tactics of inducing the population into fear and drowning us in chaotic, confusing and contradictory propaganda is nothing more than menticide and schizogenesis; in other words, brainwashing and via waves of alternate hope and fear, to break us down mentally, into psychosis and madness. This is beyond putting us into a state of fear; it is far more pernicious than many people give these issues credit. The narrative on both sides of the fence is conciliatory to the narrative, i.e., both the pro vaccine, pro lockdown folk and the people who are cautious and against the lockdown and political over reach. Crying for an “inquiry into the use of psychological methods by the government” and “what lessons need to be learned for the future” is frankly, depending on how you look at it, crisis management, capitulation, or just plain naivety. It is also insulting to peoples’ intelligence. Knowing psychologists as I do very well, and the ethical structures that govern research and practice of psychologists, it is blatantly clear that the psychologists know the ethical red lines which not to cross. The current narrative of “lessons need to be learned” is just an excuse to get them off the hook. Those who help to perpetrate this narrative are helping them get off the hook.

Like totalitarian states, democratic states are also subject to the insidious influences of menticide on a political and a non-political level. This becomes, for supposedly democratic states, just as dangerous to freedoms and liberties of life as overtly totalitarian states themselves. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Joost Meerloo in 1956 argued that peoples of supposed democratic countries like overtly totalitarian countries, must guard against the creeping intrusion into their minds by technology, bureaucracy, prejudice, and mass delusion.

Priming a population for the crime of menticide or brain washing begins with the sowing of fear. People then are very susceptible to progress to delusions of madness. Meerloo describes how threats real, imagined, or fabricated can be used to disseminate and create fear. Moreover, a particularly effective technique of menticide is to use waves of terror. This technique involves the sowing of fear interspersed with periods of calm, but each of these periods of calm is followed by the creation or invention of an even more intense dissemination of fear, which can be repeated indefinably. Does this sound familiar? E.g., 3 weeks to flatten the curve, the vaccine is the route to freedom, freedom day is cancelled, cases rising we need another lockdown.

Joost Meerloo writes:

“Each wave of terrorizing . . . creates its effects more easily – after a breathing spell – than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morality becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effects of each new propaganda campaign become stronger; it reaches a public already softened up.” Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, 1956, p.110.

Anyhow, words, words, words. I often feel I am shouting into the wind and just preaching to the converted. Let us get down to brass tacks, slow things down and get down to the future and how we deal with this. Because fighting this in relation to questioning government dictates with words, theories, logic and reasons, is falling on deaf ears. We need to prepare ourselves and really feel what we are in. Recognition is key.

Think of our own experience. Of going to the shops, on the bus or train, going to the doctors, of being the only unmasked person in a supermarket, seeing everyone else masked, of having to follow anti-social distancing markers on the floor. Of hearing the constant drone of public announcements warning us of danger, of hand sanitizer on every corner, of having to sign in to a pub or restaurant. Our heart beat is raised, our cortisol levels are raised, we are scared of breaking the rules and of being approached for not following the rules. Every minutia of daily living is turned into a psychological torture session. Drip, drip, drip, for months, now going into years. It is meant to break us down. It is deliberate. We know the rules have no rhyme or reason and know the alternate waves of hope and fear are not based in reality or real science. But yet we have to exist in this insanity of a world.

Our task now.

1. Reject the therapeutic totalitarianism, or the monopoly on the science which Nicola Sturgeon proclaims she has; she has no authority over our health. As John Knox said to Mary Queen of Scots just a few yards from here, over 500 years ago, there is only one authority….God….and a Queen or a First Minister has no authority over a people with regards their health or bodily autonomy.
2. Our Covid totalitarianism is an ideology which seeks to displace all traditions and institutions with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. Its aim is to destroy the essence of man and our history. Therefore, like the Czech dissidents Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Benda, we must set up a parallel polis-an alternative set of social structures within which social, cultural and intellectual life can be lived outside the “New Normal”.
3. Be prepared to live a life apart from the crowd. Living in truth means we will have to limit ourselves in some ways; progress of our careers, give up on foreign travel, reject the COVID safe cafés, bars, restaurants, theatres, concerts and nightclubs….there will be other opportunities for socialising and entertainment. This is going to be difficult, but finding meaning with living in truth will be far more rewarding than giving up on our very essence and truth.
4. Do not get overly seduced by reason or logic as a tool to be used as an appeal to our oppressors. There is no reason to the government’s rules. We feed the beast when we appeal with reason and in any case, they can change the rules of reason or truth at the drop of a hat. Whatever they suggest, it will be couched via an abuse of language, science and reason, to confuse us and lead us further into menticide and breakdown.
5. Inhumane language can lull us to sleep, but humane language can awaken us. It can help us recognise that the “New normal” is constructed and fragile. A case in point, putting face masks on children. Only three kinds of people put a face mask on a child. A child abuser, a coward or somebody who is deluded or asleep.
6. Live not by lies. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his wonderful essay by the same title outlined how peaceful rejection of the narrative can be achieved by various means,, e.g., refusing to use the language of the oppressor, not participating in meetings or conversations where the “covid safe” ideology is taken for truth, and refusing to subscribe to any media which spouts the narrative of the science or entertains it.
7. Humour: Psychopathic dictators tend not to possess a sense a humour and are very unsettled when people direct humour at their expense. Use humour and make fun of their pseudo-science and incompetence when it comes to their incomprehensible dictates. They don’t want us to laugh. Laugh loud, laugh proud.

These are just some suggestions of how we move to the future-to our old-new normal in a parallel society. But let me end with some final thoughts. The face mask is the most visible pernicious symbol and device of this whole sad affair. The psycho-social ramifications of the mask, especially on children and how they observe adults in society wearing them is truly a crime against humanity. Not only that, it is a most effective way to harm people’s physical health over a long period of time and it is a most effective way to break us psychologically and spiritually. It is no mistake that our governments are attacking our breathing-it is deliberate; to break our spirit and the connection with our essence and the source of our existence. It is nothing but evil.

In Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, breath and spirit is the same word; Ruach. In ancient Greek, the language of the New Testament the word for spirt and breath is Pneuma.

This is from the Bible, Psalms Chapter 104, verses 29-30

(open quotes) “29 Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust.

30 Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.” (close quotes)

Let us breath, let us have spirit. Let us renew this earth for our future.

Thank you.

Six months ago, I stood here talking about the disgusting and unethical use of applied psychology by psychologists of the UK government. The government psychologists have shown no remorse about their applied psychological abuse. 

This psychological abuse has been normalised. We are being conditioned to think it is normal to accept such psychological abuse, just like Ivan Pavlov’s dogs. The infamous Ivan Pavlov whose ideas informed the psychological operations under totalitarian communism and now inform those of SPI-B and the UK government.  But I am not going to talk in detail about the psychological operations as such today-you can read my articles on these topics on the UK Column website-you certainly won’t read about the deliberate psychological abuse we are being subjected to in the mainstream media from the likes of Edinburgh Live, the Scotsman, The Herald, or the Daily record.

This is because what we are going through is a period of normalisation-a reminder: a domestic abuser normalises psychological abuse.

But we can learn from history. This has not come out of nowhere. To reiterate, these methods of normalisation are tried and tested tactics.

Vaclav Havel, and his wonderful book, The Power of the Powerless has a lot to teach us in our totalitarian COVID19 times. Havel as some may know was as Czech statesman, writer and former dissident contra totalitarian communism, who served as the last President of Czechoslovakia then as the first President of the Czech Republic.

He believed that the wrong words and acts could normalise abnormal things. Think of the inhumane language and compelled acts in our time: (social distancing, self-isolating, test, track and trace, face masks, especially on children, coercion to get the jab etc…. all these inhumane words and acts lull us to sleep. But humane language and humane acts can awaken us and help us recognise that what we have accepted as normal (e.g., COVID19 rules), is constructed, pseudo-scientific, fragile, and actually an abuse of human beings and their God given sovereignty. The dissidents of Havel’s time in his group Charter 77 were mocked as addicted to drugs, mentally ill, and excluded from society.

 Havel exposed the abnormality of the normalisation by changing the semantics of the political drama so that the normalisation of the abnormal seemed absurd and that the dissidents were justified. In Havel’s analysis of a totalitarian system, the dissident, the villain is not a real person, but an artistic creation; forged through the lines of text and print from mainstream media and pseudo-scientific dogma from Government dictates and its advisors. Just like the vilification of people who question the dominant narrative of COVIID-19- we are called covidiots, science deniers, or anti-vaxxers; THIS IS FAKE NEWS.

This present period of Normalisation, of the idea of constantly living with Covid19, the New Normal and all the pseudo-scientific and illogical rules, has dubious credibility behind it, especially when it comes to legislating or controlling our lives. This normalization as Havel pointed out, speaks to sensibilities that feel personal (i.e., safety, the threat of death, infection, & disease), but it has a general aim: to supress all individuality and control huge masses of people. This is the communist totalitarian psy-op play book. Being played in Scotland, the UK and world today.

The system is totalitarian not because some individual has power, but because power is shared in conditions of total irresponsibility…. Conformity is implemented through fear and through the instinct of self-preservation. That is why the Mainstream media have been so lamestream, why there is such reticence in speaking out, and much cognitive dissonance. This situation, our current situation, was described by Czeslaw Milosz (Cheslav Meewash) in his book, The Captive Mind. He described the allure of blind conformity of Stalinism, especially by intellectuals. He described the deadening effect of totalitarianism upon the population and how humanity under these conditions leads to a dual personality or cognitive dissonance. And I would say as a psychoanalyst, this encapsulates the dangerous death instinct or destructive psyche driving the COVID19 narrative which is hell bent on destroying anything good, nurturing, beautiful, and wonderful. It truly is an evil force.

Think of the politicians and Government advisors like Professor Devi Shridhar or Professor Linda Bauld, advocating for putting face masks on children. People, the media, politicians, and even parents have accepted this destructive inhumane practice, which is based in pseudo-science and illogicality. The COVID19 science fiction of Sturgeon, Shridhar, or Bauld would not get near a PhD examination room, never mind an undergraduate thesis standard of work. The COVID19 rules certainly don’t meet the mark of scientific credibility to be mandated to the entire population. How embarrassing for Edinburgh University, who is the employer of Devi Shridhar and Linda Bauld. And the mainstream media have not challenged them. Shame on them. Meanwhile children have to wear masks in schools. We will remember this evil betrayal of youth, this blatant child abuse. There is such a thing as the Nuremberg code.

Freedom is not doing the things you are inclined to do. It is reflecting upon what you ought to do, of facing the risk…..as all our speakers here are doing today.  

Echoing what Vaclav Havel said of eastern Europe during totalitarian communism, a spectre is haunting Scotland, the UK, the world. It is called dissent. It has not appeared out of thin air, out of conspiracy theories, from anti-vaxxer sentiment, or the desire to ignore the safety of humanity. It has been born at a time when this system of COVID 19 regulations can no longer sustain itself on unadulterated, brutal and arbitrary application of power, based upon science fiction whilst ignoring the data, with the aim of eliminating all expressions of non-conformity and changing human living beyond all recognition.

This system, has become so ossified politically that at present there is no room for dissidents or non-conformity. But they cannot keep the light out forever. The death instinct or evil always trips up. Evil always leaves a trail, of bodies, of paper…..the evidence of malfeasance is getting to the point now where it is difficult to be denied.

Scotland, the UK, and the world is a beautiful place with many beautiful peoples. It can be beautiful again, on the side of good and love where this evil of normalisation, the Brave New COVID19 normal is banished.

Let me end with a poem. This is for the politicians, their advisors, the media, the police, for everybody here, and dissidents everywhere, because the message of the poem is applicable to everybody. The poem is called:

The wind one brilliant day by Antonio Machado.

The wind, one brilliant day, called

to my soul with an odour of jasmine.

(the wind said) ‘In return for the odour of my jasmine,

I’d like all the odour of your roses.’

(Machado said) ‘I have no roses; all the flowers

in my garden are dead.’

(The wind replied) ‘Well then, I’ll take the withered petals

and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.’

the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:

‘What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?’

Thank you.