Maybe a point arrives when the inner work no longer requires or insists upon reading, writing, or speaking very much. It's part of the web of everyday life: you just get on with it.
But there was another angle. What I have termed 'the inner life' shouts out for qualities such as honesty, integrity, clarity, - freedom of expression! - for its own fulfilment. In 2019 the bullshit detector seemed to become more finely attuned. It would less readily tolerate apparent lies and deception, either within or in the outside world. So it began to push me more firmly along the path of seeking out truth and deception in the big wide world out there.
What had long been a subject of query now became visceral: what is honest and sincerely in the interests of human civilisation, and what is a veil, a mask, for programmes far less noble in intent. When is this really my own mind feeling and thinking, and when has it been hijacked by somebody else for other purposes? It became a forensic inquiry into situations where, as Don Juan says to Carlos Castaneda in 'The Active Side of Infinity', "The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind."
I need a lot of persuading. It doesn't come easily to my anarchistic/small government individualistic heart and mind to believe that there exist people who purposely set out to control others, are prepared to manipulate and lie in order to get what they want, or feel so certain of their rightness that they see fit to impose their will on entire populations. So I set out on my quest....
I wrote in April 2019 about the BBC. For over a decade I had been aware that the BBC was not an impartial relayer of information; it was a voice for a particular way of looking at the world, for an agenda. I read a considerable tome, 'BBC: Brainwashing Britain?' to find out if it was as bad as I feared. It was worse, far worse. And the propaganda aspect to the BBC became clearer as 2019 progressed, with its anti-Brexit bias increasingly transparent.
It stood to reason that, given the bias of mainstream media, exemplified by the BBC in particularly toxic fashion, persons were being misrepresented. Mainstream media thrives on simplistic good guy/bad guy narratives. Obviously, the way to discover how far this misrepresentation went, was to research somebody with a bad press. And there was no doubt who the most despised, reviled person in the UK was: Tommy Robinson.
I watched his address to the Oxford Union, complete with clamouring hordes outside baying for his blood. And, more importantly, I read his autobiography, 'Enemy of the State'.
Something marginally interesting has occurred. The Wikipedia entry on Tommy Robinson, at the time of my reading the book, included the words 'racist' and 'thug' in their headline description of the guy. When I checked again the other day, maybe ten months afterwards, these words had disappeared, and 'British far-right and anti-Islam activist' had turned up in their place. At first sight, it looks like the long slow road to respectability for Tommy. However, read further, and you see that, according to Wikipedia, Tommy Robinson remains roughly the most criminal person on the planet.
Shock horror spoiler alert: the impression gained from actually reading Tommy's book was a far cry from what the mainstream was attempting to convey to Joe Public. A real far cry. It is difficult to imagine a more complete misrepresentation. One thing is that Tommy Robinson does not seem racist at all. He has friends - and supporters - of all manner of ethnic origin. Phrases like 'far right extremist', 'white supremacist', 'fascist' have been bandied about freely. Again, totally erroneous, and viciously so. Even in his English Defence League days, neo-Nazis, who did have a problem with people of different ethnic backgrounds and skin colour, were given short shrift. Very short shrift.
The reason the mainstream has turned so viciously against Tommy Robinson is that he sees problems with Islam, and the problems which accompany it in parts of Britain. He has criticised a sacred cow, and asked serious questions about how a problem is being treated - or, rather, ignored - in our modern western society. That's all. Most salutary of all is the terrible way that he has been treated by social media, the courts, the police, the legal system. Hounded mercilessly, as they try to silence him. Charged for offences that hardly anybody else would be charged with, silly things. He is a bit of a hothead, I can see that, but the way he has been 'dealt with' cannot be justified. Terrible.
I was on a roll. I wanted to try and get to the bottom of what 'political correctness' really is, and why. Along with climate denial, being politically incorrect is the most unacceptable thing to the mainstream way of looking at things. It gets you banned, hounded, losing your job, thrown off Facebook, Twitter and the rest. You must be silenced - no debate or discussion required. Once more, the obvious thing was to go for more despised and hated humanity. Milo Yiannopoulos, of course. Who else?
Milo was a big problem. He had to go. He was hated by 'the left' and by a lot of 'the right'. Despite that, he had a big following, especially among young people. He was a big problem because he was pro-Trump, and expert at ridiculing trendy but silly and harmful political ideas. He took his pro-Trump tour around U.S. campuses, and arguably was a factor in Trump's election victory. He was also infuriating, because he couldn't be pigeon-holed. Right-wing but gay, flamboyantly so, with a black boyfriend who became his husband. Undefinable, uncontainable. He had to go.
The opportunity arose when something Yiannopoulos said was misconstrued, twisted and distorted into 'Milo says pedophilia is OK'. Completely untrue, but there we go. It doesn't matter whether or not anything is accurate, provided it has the desired result. Which it did. Bye bye Twitter, Facebook, financial supporters, etc.
'Dangerous', Milo's best-seller, is a book that I devoured in no time. I don't find everything Milo has done and said clever, right, or funny. But this book is exceptional, as an outrageous and sometimes hilarious critique of political correctness, and how free speech is anathema to this way of thinking. Milo takes the revulsion towards him and turns it to his advantage. Chapter titles: 'Why the progressive left hates me'; 'Why Twitter hates me'; 'Why feminists hate me'; 'Why establishment Republicans hate me'. You get the drift.
For an expose of the toxicity of much of what drives today's right-on agendas, you'll be hard put to better Milo's incisive, intelligent, barbed writing. But for good measure, I followed it up.
In rather more sober vein is 'The Genesis of Political Correctness' by Michael William. I was interested in this genesis: where did this authoritarian madness come from?; how did we get to this strange place? To a degree, I found some answers.
There are long, dense chapters on the three founding tomes of political correctness, according to William. I was vaguely familiar with one of them, 'Repressive Tolerance' (the title says it all) by Herbert Marcuse. You can cheat on these three chapters by just reading the summaries at chapter's end. And the book ends with an extraordinary and deflating catalogue of repressive events that have occurred in the UK in the name of repressive tolerance.
Together, these two books provided a far better understanding of what political correctness is: its aims and its toxicity, its threat to freedom of speech (which eventually leads to loss of freedom of thought) and a 'free civilised world'.
There were other books, but these will do for now. And, just to show that nobody is safe from the frenzied fanatics, watch this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEkosBa_qGk
And if you don't get the references to Count Dankula/Markus Meechan and Buddha the Nazi pug that got him a criminal record, watch this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rdWlVyN9es
Images: Nag Hammadi texts; Father Ted
