How We Live Now

It is one planet, one world, one humankind. Nevertheless nations need to control who and what comes through their borders. Diseases and other harms within goods being brought in and people with nefarious intents need to be excluded. But to claim that everyone who has entered a nation without a valid entry document is a criminal is just wrong. And when that person who makes that assertion holds a high office and has himself committed criminal acts, it looks like he only has regard for the law when it is other people who offend it. It is other people who find themselves in desperate situations in their own country, not because of anything that they have done. It is other people who are trying to survive and protect their families within a despotic or failed state. What are these other people supposed to do? Lie down and die of despair? Some 'illegal immigrants' may well be criminals. Most are not. They are people with the spirit and the will to try to save themselves and their fa...

In 1961 C. S. Lewis wrote a new preface to the paperback edition of The Screwtape Letters , first published in 1942. 'We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment. This, to begin with. For the rest, my own choice of symbols depended, I suppose, on temperament and on the age. I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to rais...

                                                      On Newsnight , BBC, last week Sir Alex Younger, the former chief of Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6, said that we have entered a new era in which international relations are not determined by rules and multilateral institutions, but by strongmen and deals, citing Donald Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping as having that mindset. That is a very bleak picture that he presents. A dystopian world disorder. Humankind with no voice, no freedom to create their own destiny, a joyless, stark, hopeless enslaved existence heading for mass extinction. The collapse of human civilisation. Let us yet see if people can rise and live out human advancement, advancement of the human spirit...

12 June 1987     This is how presidents worthy of the office make speeches. They stir the crowd with optimism and hope. Their personality expresses warmth and love. They seek to bring people together in recognition of aspirations in which we all share. They can be critical of their opponent but in a way that invites them into the room to talk about their differences. They are courageous in their statements and reach out to seek unity. They calm the beasts that live in the darkness within us. People with a lust for power for its own sake, speak very differently. They appeal to people who feel that they have been wronged in some way. They appeal to their destructive instincts.  'In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.' Gustave Le Bon, 1895, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind . They either fail to ...

A political nightmare has spilled out and we wake from sleep each day into the dark side of humanity getting about in daylight dressed up as reputable, and so bold. In 1996 in Australia, Pauline Hanson was disendorsed by the Liberal Party for advocating for the abolition of special government assistance to Aboriginal Australians. However it was too close to the election to change the ballot paper and she remained on it contesting as a Liberal. Pauline Hanson won the seat of Oxley and entered parliament as an Independent. Her maiden speech was not only critical of the benefits received by Aboriginals but targeted Asians specifically in her attacks upon immigration and multiculturalism. She advocated for a return to high-tariff protectionism. She claimed that she was only saying out loud what others were thinking to themselves. We all have our shadow self that has thoughts that are antisocial, but most of us realise that it is in nobody's best interest to put these ideas into action....

Like children who have developed spiteful personalities, they seek to demolish all that is civil, all that is just, all that is built from a sense of fairness and reason. They feel aggrieved and speak the language of the aggrieved, a bitter ranting hatred that throws nets and shadows over everything that shines light. It doesn't come from nothing. For too long the greedy and the corrupt have been able to ransack the common wealth and the common good. But these are not avengers for the broken and oppressed. Rather these are the ruthless, and intoxicated with power they seek to obliterate all who are not like them.  In rising up together to overcome them, a new vision that is life-affirming and freedom-loving will emerge. Humanity will come again to reverence the Earth and its abundant life, the miracle of our being here, and come again to love beauty and honour the simplicity of contentment.  A song from Auschwitz III, 1943 by Joseph Wulf from the film Zone of Interest written ...

Trumparama 'We do not know what our nature permits us to be.'  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education , 1762. Donald Trump was taught by his father that there are two kinds of people — winners and losers. Donald was encouraged to become a 'killer', his father's terminology for embodying ruthlessness and unscrupulousness. As a young man he acquired a second mentor, Roy Cohn, who, as expressed by the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm, ' made his legal and political career in a milieu where money and power override rules and law—indeed where the ability to get, and get away with, what lesser citizens cannot, is what proves membership of an elite.' Roy Cohn saw himself as an iconoclast but in reality he was deeply hypocritical. He died of AIDS, a disease that he denied he had, and while physically diminished he was unable to fight back when the IRS seized property and sued him for $7 million in back taxes. Before his death he was also disbarr...