The West (the globalist totalitarian project) is Not "Marxist"

It embarrasses me when anti-Left bloggers use the word "Marxist" to describe modern Western governments and society. 

There are no Marxists in The West now, at least not in politics or public life; and have not been for several decades. 

Indeed; there are in practice no Marxists even among those who proudly embrace the term for themselves! This is evident from what they actually say and actually do: what they make their priorities, and it does not matter to what they merely pay occasional lip-service. 

(Leftism is in its essence incoherent, because oppositional in nature - therefore, in a rhetorical sense, any of its old manifestations may be re-activated at any time, in order to neutralize opposition or garner support for the dominant agenda. Leftists are quite happy to pretend that they still care about the proletariat and will do something effective to help native working men... So long as this does not interfere in any way with their current project - which may be directly opposed to the well-being of the Proletariat; whether this be antiracism, feminism, the Birdemic/ Peck, or currently "AI". Words and promises mean nothing to the ruling Establishment - except as means to manipulate.) 

Marxism was a form of Leftism that had the Economy as its focus; especially economic ownership, and the "distribution" of wealth and/or salaries. 

Economic organization (i.e. nationalization, public ownership) was of great, often central, importance to Marxism. 

And Class was its primary unit of analysis. 

Thus although Marxism was one of the formative ideologies of modern Leftism - so were Abolition, Pacifism, Trades Unionism, Womens' suffrage, and Nonconformist activism (including prohibition). 

However, ancestral influences are not present realities. Long-term incremental evolution eventually makes a qualitative difference.  

In fact: Marxism is long-since dead in The West.

The prevalent and hegemonic Leftism is a post-1960s New Leftism that includes but is not restricted to various mixtures of: antiracism; feminism (i.e. firstly pandering to women, however later favouring some other sexual identities); the sexual revolution (originally advocating promiscuity and divorce, but since continually developing); and CO2-climate-"environmentalism". 

The modern dominant Left is almost entirely uninterested by social class; except where class attitudes are, in practice, inverted: with the "native male proletariat" becoming probably the major demonized group in The West; and globalist finance-billionaires probably the most-influential and admired social grouping - whose strategy conceptualizations statements (especially United Nations Agenda 2030) are fundamental to all Western Establishment strategy. 

The New Left is profoundly uninterested by Nationalization, and indeed the Nation and the people. Indeed- quite the reverse; since international-money vampirizes and discards nations in pursuit of global strategies. 

Accusations of "Marxism" may be evidence of confusion or ignorance on the part of the user; or apparently may be an attempt to discredit a point-of-view,  or sow confusion and weaken opposition. 

But using the word does harm in clouding our understanding of the nature and scope of the Left-themed ideology of dominating globalist totalitarianism.  

Which is why the Marxism-accusation has (much like its inverse "Capitalism") become a hallmark of malign PSYOPS. 

Analyzing "what women do" is... what *women* do: Hospital Society signs of maladaptive mutation accumulation?

In the weird online world, the masculine reaction against feminism and feminization, has often taken the form of men analyzing what women do (in order, supposedly, for men to be able better to understand and manipulate women). 

So, men who purport to desire to re-establish patriarchy, are expending their time and efforts in discussing the opposite sex.

And yet... this kind of thing is exactly what women do!

Back in the day "when men were men", men would never dream of getting together to analyze women - they were just not interested in such gossip. 

Men, instead, wanted to talk about things that interested them - work, sports, politics, theology... 

That was even the case just 20-plus years ago, when Robin Dunbar was researching his book "Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language". In his studies, eavesdropping on single sex groups chatting; men talked about their interests; while women talked about social stuff: mostly about... men*.

There was, indeed, a whole evolutionary rationale for this difference in subject matter (to which I made a small contribution). 

Indirectly, the biological evidence was that such different interests were broadly adaptive. That is: such differences led to enhanced reproductive success throughout past evolutionary history. 

In traditional societies, it was a better reproductive strategy (overall, on average) for men to focus their social interactions on 'the world', and women to focus on people - especially men. 

Therefore, I would regard men analyzing women as a Hospital Society phenomenon, consistent with de-differentiation (loss of sexual differentiation) and maladaptation (loss of social and sexual adaptations) - which are plausibly caused by mutation accumulation. 

Of course, this does not mean that it is wrong for groups of men to want to analyze women in their online gossip (or IRL), esepcially considering that The West 2023 is not our "environment of evolutionary adaptedness"...

Just that such behaviour is rather... effeminate!

Thus paradoxically; the modern pro-masculine reaction is in this, as in other respects, un-masculine. 

*Briefly to summarize and caricature: men spontaneously talk about men, and so do women.

Why is The Superman considered necessary? From Nietzsche to Shaw to Transhumanism

No, not that Superman...

ANA. Tell me where can I find the Superman? 

THE DEVIL. He is not yet created, Senora. 

THE STATUE. And never will be, probably. Let us proceed: the red fire will make me sneeze. 

[They descend]. 

ANA. Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. 

[Crossing herself devoutly] I believe in the Life to Come. 

[Crying to the universe] A father—a father for the Superman!

From Man and Superman by Bernard Shaw

As a late teen, I was deeply influenced by the work of Bernard Shaw; and followed the trajectory of the man himself by beginning as someone who sought nothing more than gradual improvement in living conditions (by means, I assumed, of Fabian socialism); to a recognition that - even if wholly successful - this would leave the fundamental problems, the fundamental unsatisfactoriness, of life unaddressed. 

In other words, no amount of tinkering with The System could overcome the inadequacy of Men. 

(And indeed, how the The System ever really be improved when Men - even the best of Men - were so profoundly and ineradicably flawed?)

In other words, a better world is not enough. Our heart's desire is for a qualitatively different and greater mode of living. 

As a typical leftist radical; Shaw's thinking was built-upon the rejection of Christianity - what I have called the attitude of "anything but Christianity". 

This attitude (which I shared for most of my life) is prepared to search the world, and consider almost any metaphysics, ideology or philosophy - except Christianity. 

Such radicalism (which is nowadays mainstream, normal, almost universal in The West); is thus rooted in a negative and oppositional motivation; which is what makes radicalism able to tolerate almost infinite incoherence, and which makes it always tend towards destruction. (As we may see all around us.)  

Shaw, therefore, sought the greater life in the context of this mortal world. The idea behind the play Man and Superman is loosely derived from Nietzsche, who invented and popularized the concept of The Superman as a qualitatively superior Man - and the best/ only hope for the future. 

In other words; Shaw assumes that there is only this world (and that Jesus Christ's promises of resurrection and Heaven are untrue); therefore our only grounds for hope (or only honest way of staving off despair) lies in improving this world.

Shaw recognizes that this world cannot be sufficiently improved because of Men: Men are Just Not Good Enough to make or inhabit the kind of world that would justify life. On the contrary. 

Since Men are the limiting factor; it is Men that must positively be transformed. 

Hence The Superman: he is what Man must become if life is to be worthwhile.

This is why The Superman is considered as necessary. 

Indeed, if The Superman does arise, then he will be that which transforms society for the better; because Men-as-they-are cannot really know what changes to make, nor are current Men properly motivated actually to make good societal changes.

And attempt to make a better society without The Superman will therefore be undermined by corruption of comprehension, motivation and conduct; and 'reform' will merely become what it always (covertly) was: a mask for new forms of exploitation. 

So, it seems to be the case that The Superman must come first.   

So The Superman seems to be necessary - but what exactly The Superman might be, and how he might arise, has always been contested among those who propose the idea.

Shaw was apparently never able to make up his mind. Sometimes he thought that The Superman might be evolved, from the right kind of 'breeding' - as with the above excerpt from Man and Superman. 

In that play, and its supplementary 'preface' and 'appendices'; the idea recurs that if the best women and the best men are able to reproduce - then the right combinations may lead to The Superman - either gradually or in a single vast evolutionary leap. 

Shaw's socialism is put forward as a means to this end. By eliminating all barriers of class, wealth, education etc; Shaw envisages that the best men and women can find each other, and that they will have the best children - and they will not be troubled by the raising of these children because that also will be done by a socialist society. 

In other words (at least when this mood was upon him), Shaw apparently regards The Superman as a quasi-genetic problem, and the solution as a matter of 'selective breeding'.

And yet, when he states this materialist perspective; he tends swiftly to contradict it as both inadequate and wrong-headed; because Shaw had a strong and almost 'spiritual' aspiration, and also a pessimistic understanding of Man's limits and possibilities.

This came-through in Back to Methuselah - in which higher forms of human consciousness emerge due to 'creative evolution'; which is envisaged in deistic terms; as a property of reality. 

The idea is that it is part of the nature of things that the universe strives first for life, then for consciousness, and then self-consciousness. 

Part of this is that life-span is extended, until it becomes immortality at the point when bodies are discarded and ex-Men become pure spirits of consciousness.

This is another vision of The Superman. 

And this is driven by the Life Force; which is mentioned several times in Man and Superman in (implicit) contradiction to the 'selective breeding' idea - as if Shaw cannot decide between them, or wants to cover all bases. 

Whereas selective breeding as conceived by Men, and organized (mad possible) by strategy; the Life Force uses Men in its blind gropings and experiments to attain The Superman - which is the abolition (or transcendence) of Man. 

It uses Men impersonally; and when each experiment is finished, casts them aside onto the 'scrap heap' (implied to be annihilation of the self, along with the body). 

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

(From the preface to Man and Superman - Shaw speaking as himself.)

The morality that Shaw proposes is one in which Men willingly serve the Life Force, and willingly sacrifice themselves in the quest for The Superman.

What has happened to The Superman in the 21st century? Has he disappeared from culture? 

No. Instead he has been down-graded into Transhumanism. 

Instead of a qualitatively superior man, perhaps a Man of higher and more spiritual consciousness; one who will discern and lead us to a better society; Transhumanism has reduced The Superman's capabilities to the level of emotions. 

Transhumanism starts with the feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances; and takes seriously his complaints that the world will not devote itself to making him happy - and Transhumanism envisages exactly a world that is genuinely devoted to making the 'selfish little clod' perfectly happy!

Transhumanism envisages a world without suffering, and consisting entirely of varieties of gratification; and this is to be attained by material means such as drug usage and other therapies; and genetic engineering (which replaces Shaw's hope for selective breeding). 

Transhumanism dispenses with all residues of the spiritual, all deistic concepts of a universe tending towards higher consciousness; and instead aims at an eternal life attained by the abolition of sickness and ageing - aiming at the defeat of entropy by correcting random error and outpacing degeneration with repair. 

The Superman of Transhumanism is at the opposite pole from Nietzsche's hero of action and self-expression, or from Shaw's Man of higher morality who embraces his own destruction in pursuit of abstract perfection of contemplation - instead there is envisaged a passive 'consumer of emotions' (implicitly being protected and sustained by an uncorrupt and well-motivated, all powerful ruling elite).

What matters to Transhumanism is how the world seems, not how the world is.  

**

Well, such are the terminal destinations of reflection on the Human Condition, when "anything but Christianity" is the baseline assumption. 

The pity of it, is that great creative intelligences such as Nietzsche and Shaw did not turn their abilities and motivations onto Christianity itself. 

Such thinkers deployed a double standard against Christianity. About anything except Christianity they would expend great effort, over long periods, to wrestle with concepts and ideologies in pursuit of the Good Life. 

They would think and debate endlessly over what 'socialism' really was, what was its essence - and what it ought to be; but the reality of Christianity was accepted secondhand, as a pre-packaged parcel - with barely a second thought. 

When it came to Christianity; Shaw and many others simply accepted that the proper and necessary definition and conceptualization was... pretty-much whatever stories they were told in their childhood; or whatever the worst of pseudo-Christian hypocrites did rather than said. 

So whereas other ideas were understood in terms of their potential, or ideal attributes; Christianity was judged by the worst of its worldly corruptions. 

Whereas everything-except-Christianity was approached as a core creative project; Christianity was regarded as something fixed and already-defined. 

This tendency was reinforced by the fact that defenders of Christianity - such as Shaw's great friend GK Chesterton - regarded Christianity in the same way; that is, the understood Christianity as something eternally unchangeable in its nature. 

Something beyond human creativity. 

Something, moreover, about which the creative genius had to defer to history, tradition and (above all) The Church (whichever church that might be, for present purposes).

The genius grappling with Christianity could therefore go so-far - and no further. Only in Christianity was the genius trammeled. 

Thus Christianity was - and remained - what it was and untouchable; and creative geniuses should look elsewhere when they strove to understand and re-describe reality. 

  

This meant that very few of the great geniuses-of-ideas in modern times were Christians. There was no scope for them in Christianity. 

They were confronted with a "take it or leave it" attitude about Church-Christianity - one that implied Men of the past had got-it-right in all essentials, and any dissent was necessarily error and Not Christianity. 

Yet genius is predicated on the assumption that achievement is not constrained by what is; and that no matter what the quality and eminence of past Men was or may have been; there is always the possibility of creative breakthrough for one whose motivations are true, and to the extent that these motivations are true.  

If Nietzsche, Shaw, and the modern Transhumanists would have expended a tithe of their efforts on grappling fundamentally with Christianity, in understanding What It Is experientially (each for himself and from himself); in the deepest and most sustained way of which they are capable...

Well, the history of the world would have been very different - and probably much better. 

Folk song, dance and music - and participation (Romanticism)

Folk song, dance and music are a product of Romanticism, including the Romantic Nationalism which swept Europe in the 19th century. That is, Folk is a modern concept for something that was not previously a distinct category. 

(It being, presumably, whatever ordinary people, however defined; would do, in whatever time and place; in terms of singing, dancing and playing music.) 

But it was of great potency because - by means of Folk - a modern person could (for a while, to some extent) feel and experience that deep and Original Participation by which we were vertically rooted-in a spirit of people, and horizontally connected directly with other people. 

This was (originally) spontaneous and unconscious. What was once just a 'part of life' became for modern people something consciously chosen, learned, 'performed'. It still 'worked' (for a while) but must be sought and worked-on.  

But for people like me it was potent; because from adolescence the modern Man feels himself being crushed by the The System - and all meaning, purpose and participation being squeezed out of life. Folk represents a way of re-introducing some of these. 

As such, Folk had great importance to me in the mid teens of my life. It was a dream, but it could be a living-dream. 

Some of my best memories of those days are myself playing and singing folk music (often for myself, also performing a little), attending folk clubs and concerts, and especially dancing in Barn Dances/ Ceilidhs. Actually doing these dances could create a feeling of being a part of something bigger and more deeply rooted than normal life. 

These gave me a taste of participation - I felt (for a while, to some extent) a part of the world, a part of 'a people'. 

Yet I get a distinct impression that such feelings are both weaker and less common since the millennium transition (which seems to have been a further stage in the evolution of consciousness away-from the possibility of spontaneous and unconscious participation). 

Folk is now both less widespread, and more professional - hence more Ahrimanic and more a part of The System. 

Folk music always had politically-motivated nationalists and communists who tried to politicize it by equating 'the folk' with (for example) the Irish 'struggle' for 'freedom' or the Marxist 'proletariat'. As with all institutions; this surface and social aspect spread with the New Left victimology of women, races, sexuality etc. 

The consequent politics of resentment goes exactly counter to the Romantic participation which was originally sought from this music; it reduces the magic to the mundane. 

But what were we, what was I, supposed to do with Romantic Folk experiences? 

What actually happened was either that people tried and failed to return 'society' (as a whole) to the Folk-type, to an 'organic community', to Medieval-style villages or idealistic self-sufficient communes... To a neo-pagan inspired (intended to be) unconscious and spontaneous 'original' participation in living nature. 

This was the failed aspect of the post-war counter-culture - the deepest aspirations of both 'beats' and 'hippies' which got left-behind as all their agenda items were stripped of Romance, filleted into bureaucratic bullet-points, and embodied into managed systems.  

I think what we were supposed to do is to bring the Romantic Folk experience into conscious spiritual thinking; that is, retaining its Romantic power (based on the assumption that all of nature (including human society) is alive and a makes a continuum of direct knowing from-which we gradually separated-out, but to which we may return in our thinking. 

Nowadays this may not involve current experience of Folk singing, music or dancing - because such phenomena have been dwindling in power and popularity - even before in 2020 they were all suppressed and forbidden (for lying, 'healthist' fake-reasons).

Any (legal) future for such Folk activity seems to be one in which these activities are all closely-monitored and tightly-regulated as fully-assimilated System manifestations. 

So, what is required is that we each do for our-selves what we previously relied-upon live and communal singing, music and dance to do for us. 

The Romantic moves from the public and social realm to the private and conscious realm - and Folk (as part of the Romantic) likewise.

We are called-upon to be actively-creative in our own thinking - getting what assistance where and how we may; but ultimately engaging in a direct participation with creation. Any memories of past Folk experiences (or the Romantic essence thereof) can seamlessly be integrated into this spiritual activity.  

Instead of aiming to embody these Folk ideals into this mortal and transitory world, we should refocus on preparing our-selves for the immortal and permanent inclusion of the essence of Folk into the post-mortal and Heavenly world. 

A clarifying fact: Male and female humans are approximately as dimorphic in muscle and strength as gorillas

Subtract subcutaneous fat; and the human male-female difference in muscle size and strength is about the same as for gorillas 

Emphasis added: 

Despite claims of reduced levels of sexual dimorphism in the genus Homo (e.g., compared to Australopithecus) (McHenry, 1994, Plavcan, 2001), muscle mass and resulting muscular strength are very sexually dimorphic traits in contemporary humans. On average, men have approximately 61% more total muscle mass than women (Illner et al., 2000, Kim et al., 2004, Phillips, 1995, Shen et al., 2004, Wetter & Economos, 2004). 

Relatively more of this muscle mass is allocated to the upper body, with men having about 75% more arm muscle mass than women (Abe et al., 2003, Fuller et al., 1992, Gallagher et al., 1997, Nindl et al., 2002). Not surprisingly, this latter difference translates into approximately 90% greater upper body strength in men (Bohannon, 1997, Murray et al., 1985, Stoll, 2000). 

The mean effect size for these sex differences in total and upper body muscle mass and strength is about 3, which indicates less than 10% overlap between the male and female distributions, with 99.9% of females falling below the male mean. An effect size of this magnitude also means that sex—a single dichotomous variable—explains roughly 70% of the variance in muscle mass and upper body strength in humans. 

The sex difference in upper-body muscle mass in humans is similar in magnitude to the sex difference in lean body mass in gorillas, the most sexually dimorphic primate (Zihlman & McFarland, 2000).

Sex differences in lower-body muscularity are nearly as large. In the legs, men's muscle mass is about 50% greater than that of women with a mean effect size of approximately 2 (Fuller et al., 1992, Lawler et al., 1998, Shih et al., 2000), and lower body strength is about 65% greater with an effect size of about 3 (Bishop et al., 1987, Falkel et al., 1985, Wilmore, 1978).

These substantial sex differences in muscle mass and strength suggest that there has been strong disruptive selection favoring greater male muscularity in the human lineage. In overall body weight comparisons, a female advantage in fat mass largely counterbalances a male advantage in muscle mass, making the sexes appear quite similar. But this gross similarity masks very different tissue investment strategies by males and females, which, in turn, suggests divergent selective histories, thus undermining conclusions about the human mating system based on overall body-weight dimorphism (e.g., Plavcan, 2001).

From William D. Lassek & Steven J.C. Gaulin. Costs and benefits of fat-free muscle mass in men: relationship to mating success, dietary requirements, and native immunity. Evolution and Human Behavior 2009; 30: 322-328. 

NOTE: Perhaps the key statistic here is that 99.9% of females fall below the male mean for upper body strength. What this means is that only about one woman in a thousand is as strong as even the average man. 

When talking about much above-averagely strong men - as in elite sports and the military - essentially zero women are that strong. 

This is a clarifying fact with respect to many policy discussions; or it would be, if facts carried any weight in the modern world - which they do not. 

What evidence for the evolutionary-development of consciousness in Western Man?

On the face of it, there seems little evidence for anything like a divinely destined evolution of consciousness in Western Man. Looking around in the public realm, or even in direct and personal experience; there seems little to suggest anything of the kind. Nothing that looks like 'progress'.

This is because of two things: 1. Materialism and 2. Negativity.

The materialism which absolutely monopolises modern public life means that consciousness appears only in an indirect way. We only see the indirect effect, the consequences, of consciousness change - and we see only its material - this worldly - manifestations.

Abstraction - including the reduction of qualities to the pseudo-materialism of number - is a major aspect of materialism.Indeed, it is more extreme: qualities are denied reality (because qualities are material) yet simultaneously these non-existent qualities are given numbers and used for calculation of decisions. This is the basis of such managerial technologies of quality managements, racial and sexual monitoring etc. 

The negativity means that the change is expressed by criticism, and not by positive assertion. We get some (materialist) version of what people do Not want; but don't get an expression of their goals.

So, the evolution of consciousness can be seen in the dominant aspects of the dominant ideology of Leftism - but reduced and one-sidely.


Take feminism. The positive spiritual ideals of feminism are related to the positive aspiration of a permanent, literally-divine spiritual and creative marriage relation between a man and woman after death and in the life everlasting as Children of God.

But modern feminism has reject the ideal along with the eternal; and the true spiritual impulse has been concretised to this-worldly economics and power differences. The imperfections of mortal marriage means that marriage itself is rejected as oppressive. What remains is only the negative side of anti-Man aggression- and this is implemented materially in laws and regulations. The deterioration in relationships between men and women is then celebrated.


Another aspect of the evolution of consciousness is an awareness of the uniqueness of each individual, and the knowledge that we have a divine seed within each of us - so that we may grow to become a distinct creative deity - each contributing to God's work of creation.

But of this modern culture expresses only the material aspect: we take into account only that which is measurable and mortal - even while refusing to allow the validity of any measure.

There is a negative refusal at accept any rationale for any economic differences - but without any positive desire for actual equality. We reject actual equality, because we demand that differences in individual circumstances be taken into account; but reject any actual method of doing this.

There is a rejection of legal and cultural impartiality, as a sham and a mask for prejudice; but reject individual judgement as also obviously prejudiced.


More generally; modern Leftism generally regards any reference to to the ideals of post-mortal life as merely an excuse for injustices during mortal life ('pie in the sky', 'jam tomorrow').

Another instance: Leftism celebrates racial and ethnic differences, yet refuses to tolerate racial inequalities; and (negatively) there is no acceptable, objective categorisation of race, ethnicity, culture or economics... Race is simultaneously deconstructed and its reality denied - because race is not material; and abstracted into numbers, so as to be implemented in the material processes of modern government.

The same applies to sex and sexual ientity. Modern negativism denies the reality of these categories because they are not material and do not have hard edges; modern materialism simultaneously creates abstract and hard-edged sexual categories for monitoring and control purposes.


In sum; the ideology of Leftism is implicitly trying, but of course failing, to build a positive system from a host of negative rejections. It is always appealing to morality while its materialism erodes the validity of all moral systems.

So Modern Man does indeed show evidence of the development of underlying positive impulses; but because of (covert, denied) metaphysical assumptions these are systematically distorted such that there is not even the possibility of good outcomes, and we get that moral inversion by which bad consequences are regarded as evidence of virtuous motives.

This is why anti-spiritual, mortal-life-focused Leftism has been the main tool of the dark forces; since a system of inevitable, irreconcilable, competing negativities is the perfect seedbed for evil. 

In inducing modern Western Man to accept materialism and reject all spiritual things as impossible; and in making these beliefs a matter of deep, metaphysical assumption - woven invisibly into the enitre realm of public discourse; the demonic powers have created a machine by which even good and necessary impulses can only be manifested as evil.

Bernard Shaw and Creative Evolution

After Tolkien; George Bernard Shaw was the first grown-up author I read - and I read a great deal of his work, much of it several times. But my favourite was the play Man and Superman (1901-3) - which combined a scintillating comedy with an underlying seriousness about 'life'.

In the 'preface' to M&S,  Shaw described his deepest belief in what he termed Creative Evolution; which was a blind, impersonal Life Force struggling (by trial and error) towards greater self-awareness of Life, higher consciousness... the Superman of the title (from Nietzche's Ubermensch) is the future Man who has evolved-developed to a higher state of consciousness. This theme structures but is hardly visible in the play as it is performed; but may be found in a long interpolated, Platonic dialogue-type, dream sequence sometimes called Don Juan in Hell.


For many years, I would probably have described myself as a believer in Creative Evolution - so it is interesting to look back now and see what it was that appealed to me about the idea; and in what ways it failed. And Creative Evolution eventually did fail for me, comprehensively and wholly; as did the Fabian (gradualist, rationalist, egalitarian) socialism that I also absorbed from Shaw.

It appealed because it started-from the assumption that there was no God, that the whole idea was ridiculous - and that was my own assumption. But then it tries to generate personal meaning and purpose in Life despite there being no God - and this is its failure.

Perceiving the need for a purpose in reality is a good thing, compared with the arbitrary world of deterministic science. But having that purpose as an impersonal one that merely 'uses' individual human lives then casts them aside on the 'scrapheap', means that there is no reason for the Life purpose to be one that would engage my personal efforts. If ultimate reality is abstract, then there is no place for humans, and no place for me personally.

Why should I care about what the Life Force is aiming-at - any more than I care about what gravity or magnetism are aiming-at? I don't dedicate my best creative efforts towards hastening the work of gravity - why then an equally 'physical' and mechanistic Life Force?

Therefore to try and use Creative Evolution as a justification or reason for anything I might do, or not do, is incoherent - hence in practice CE has near zero effect on a person's life.

Insofar as it does have an effect this is due to an implicit but denied theism, the idea that the Life Force is really a god, and that the god is one who care about us and to whom we may choose to show allegiance in pursuing that god's aim. But the CE idea is set up specifically to deny such theism, so one gets stuck in a useless half-way house between theism and atheism.


Shaw's rejection of Christianity was, as is usual, rooted in a lazy and ignorant rejection of the simplifications and distortions of his childhood religion; without making any attempt to modify those simplifications and distortions - but instead throwing it out wholesale.

So, the fact that the religion of Shaw's childhood had at its centre an anthropomorphised god of (mostly) cruelty and the demand for blind obedience led Shaw to reject Christianity - instead of discovering the real nature of God for himself; and discovering that there is no error in personalising God (after all God is, for Christians, a person) - but only in wrongly personalising God - imputing to God characteristics that are covertly designed to serve social expedience.

(Shaw actually favoured inventing a God/ religion to serve social, specifically socialist, expedience; but he denied the real-reality of such a God/ Religion: it was merely a fiction designed by wiser and more intelligent rulers to control the young, ignorant or imbecilic 'little people' for their own - material - benefit.) 

This type of Christianity-rejection is very common, and reveals a pretty deep sin - because people don't behave that way about the many other false or oversimplified things they are taught in childhood. We don't reject science or history wholesale just because the primary teacher told us wrong things about them. We don't become anarchists just because the methods of discipline ('stand in the corner', 'sit on the naughty step') experienced as a child strike us as ridiculously childish. We don't stop eating food because we have have grown to dislike the mashed rusks we were fed as a baby.

Instead, we set out to develop an adult understanding of these things. How few do this with Christianity! (I didn't.) Instead, people take the crudest distortions of Christianity, the greatest abuses; and insist that these are the essence and reality of it.


It is as if people are looking-for-excuses to stop being Christian - and that is indeed the case. Usually, the reason is not far to seek, and it is sexual - as it seems to have been with Shaw himself.

His deletion of God and substitution of Creative Evolution rationalised his preaching against marriage and families - and advocating a kind of eugenic fantasy of unconstrained sex between the most intelligent men (such as himself, and the hero of Man and Superman) and the most beautiful women - on the basis that this may lead to the best hereditary outcomes, and a step toward The Superman. The state would look after the resulting children, to leave the parents unconstrained. The unfit would be allowed to breed, but their children would not be supported, and be allowed to die-out. And so on...

There is thus a horrible clash in M&S between the idealism of the preface and play, and the reductionist materialism of the 'Revolutionist's Handbook' published as an appendix, which is supposed to have been written by the hero of the play. It reveals the essential vacuity of Creative Evolution, because - lacking any idea of God - the socialistic 'rational plan' to encourage The Superman is merely a set of legal and political regulations that might serve to breed stronger and more attractive farm and factory animals; but which can have nothing to do with encouraging a higher form, or species, of Man.


On the other hand, and to give Shaw his due; he did not ever fully succumb to the mainstream materialism of his age; and his best plays (i.e. most of those written up-to and including Major Barbara - before he was fifty years old) have both vitality and also intimations of awareness that there are higher strivings and something better. And the most-idealistic/ least-materialist, the most spiritually striving, characters often are given 'the last word' in the Shavian debates.

The later Shaw (and he lived nearly another fifty productive years) suffered a relative decline of spontaneity and heart; and seemed (with a relatively brief exceptions, and never again at the pre-1905 level of quality) almost to cease genuine engagement with Life - often merely to be seeking public attention and spouting words in colossal quantities.

(Several of his later plays are indeed very good, by normal standards for plays, and have held their place in the repertoire - Doctor's Dilemma, Heartbreak House, Androcles, St Joan, Pygmalion, Apple Cart for instance; but they are none are as good as the best earlier ones - e.g. Arms and the Man, Candida, Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra and - outstanding in its power - John Bull's Other Island.)

But like many of the greatest imaginative writers (such as JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis), Shaw's 'fiction' (i.e. his plays) are deeper and more complete than his prose essays. Indeed, his plays reveal the defects of his explicit beliefs. For example Shaw's plays reveal the deficiencies of Shaw's own person - since he often included characters who were - essentially - himself': such as Trefusis in Unsocial Socialist (a novel), Charteris in Philanderer, Caesar, Dick Dudgeon in Devil's Disciple - and John Tanner in Man and Superman. Tanner's limitations, his incoherence, his hypocrisy, his blindness to human nature and motivation... all this is starkly revealed; even as he is also presented as cool, fluent, witty; and dominant over all other stage characters (excepting one).

In sum: Read Man and Superman. It is one of the best plays in English, and - I should say - the best comedy outside of Shakespeare; and far more perfectly-made and continuously-enjoyable than anything by Shakespeare.

In writing the play Shaw was trying for a Mozartian atmosphere - explicitly that of Don Giovanni. Shaw succeeds in being Mozartian, albeit much more like the glittering, exhilarating, supreme-fluency with hints of poignancy of The Marriage of Figaro.

My sleeve notes to a newly-issued CD: The Music of William Arkle, performed by The Enid

Sleeve notes to The Music of William Arkle - written by Bruce Charlton 

(Slightly corrected by using information I have since obtained from discussions with his son Nick Arkle.)

William Arkle – who was called Bill by his friends - was born in 1924, and died in 2000. As well as composing music; Arkle was a spiritual philosopher, painter, poet, teacher and visionary.

Bill Arkle was a friend of the writer Colin Wilson and attracted a small group of dedicated students. During the nineteen seventies he published two books, was the subject of a local television documentary and collaborated with the progressive rock band The Enid. However, despite this modest celebrity; Arkle was never famous and he remains an obscure figure. (The figure whom Arkle most brings to my mind is that other visionary English ‘William’ – Blake; who died in almost equal obscurity but is now recognised as one of the greatest lyric poets and also an influential illustrator).

I know about Bill Arkle mainly because I lived nearby as a child: my sister knew his wife and daughter via ‘ponies’; and his next-door neighbours were my good friends. I also met him once, briefly, when visiting his son. I had dipped into the work from nearly forty years ago; however, it was only after a series of ‘synchronicities’ and having become a Christian in late life that I eventually made the effort to engage with Arkle’s work in a serious fashion – and discovered that he was one of the most inspiring spiritual philosophers of the twentieth century.

Arkle’s life was spent mostly in-and-around the city of Bristol. He served in the Royal Navy during the 1939-45 war, and trained as an Engineer – an unusually scientific and practical background for a visionary, but one which had a lasting effect on the way he expressed his spiritual ideas, often using metaphors drawn from optics, atomic physics, computers, holograms etc.. After the war Arkle became an art student in Bristol and married Julia Rae Hubbard in 1947. This marriage was short lived, and Bill married Elizabeth (Liz) in 1954. They later had two children called Nick and Rose.

Throughout the fifties and sixties, Bill participated in spiritual and Christian discussion groups in Bristol and produced a lot of paintings on mystical themes. He typically used ordinary household acrylic paints on hardboard, deployed luminous pastel colours, and his characteristic theme was of ordinary and everyday scenes transfigured by light to show-forth their inner reality.

At first the family lived in Clifton, then Alveston, in Bristol, making money by renovating and re-selling houses - apparently Liz was the business brain and Bill put his craft skills to good use. They later moved to Backwell Hill House, about 7 miles south west of Bristol – a dilapidated ‘mansion’ that had previously been a monastery (with a large chapel) and stood in large grounds. They had horses and various other animals.

Through the 1970s and into the 1980s the household was large and included people visiting to work on spiritual matters with Bill, and also people who helped with the horses and running the household. Bill made money from selling his paintings from a shop in the Whiteladies Road in Bristol, and from picture restoration – including pictures of horses.

In 1974 Arkle published A Geography of Consciousness, which had an introduction by Colin Wilson. The Great Gift, a book of his pictures with commentary and some essays, was published in 1977. In the same year BBC West broadcast a location-filmed TV program called William Arkle in the series Life Story.

In the mid-1980s the Arkle’s moved to the Cotswolds, then after some years moved back to Somerset in a house called Pigotts in Chelvey Batch (very near to Backwell Hill House). In 2000, Liz Arkle died, and Bill followed a few months later.

Right up until his death at the age of 76, Arkle remained active, creative, optimistic and spiritually aware. His final writings are, indeed, his happiest and most positive statements concerning the human condition. If a man’s abstract philosophy is to be judged by its practical effect on his own life, then William Arkle’s ideas must be counted a success.

I will attempt briefly to summarise Bill Arkle’s ideas. He regards the universe as created by Heavenly Parents (i.e. ‘God’) and inhabited by their children (men, women and angels). The divine children are free individuals each of whom is offered the gift of developing to full divinity in their own unique fashion. Thus, our mortal lives on earth are a mixture of joy and horror, encouragement and hazard, love and fear and so on – each person’s life with its own pattern. Life is set-up to provide each of us with those experiences that we most need to achieve the fullest, all-round, knowledge – and such that eventually we can work towards fully-divine status; to become friends of God on a level footing and participate in the work of creation in a spirit of family love. (Jesus has a vital role in this work – which is why Arkle must count as a Christina; albeit of an unorthodox type.)

Arkle’s understanding can be encapsulated as based-on the fact that we each have a spark of divinity; by means of which we can all potentially (if we are able to attain the necessary, undistracted and real form of consciousness) directly-know something of God’s true nature, mind and benign intentions. For Arkle; life is Good at its root and when correctly understood, because the world was made, and continues, for our ultimate benefit. What makes Arkle a mystic in that he personally had a vivid and immediate perception of God’s reality and activity in the world.

As many of his paintings depict; Arkle perceived life (ordinary, everyday; working, married and family life) as a communication from the divine and permeated by spiritual influences. Various paintings show a teapot and cups on a table by a window, a mountain landscape or a seascape, a bowler-hatted businessman, people doing holiday things – sitting, dancing, playing a flute… these typically illuminated by inner light; or with a mysterious glow or sparkle; or with large spiritual (and smiling) faces or enfolding hands invisibly present and waiting but unacknowledged.

(If this type of painting sounds simplistic, sentimental even saccharine; then this is indeed how they strike many modern people. But they arise from a base of tough resilience and immersion in practical life – and ought to be regarded as a higher, but true and realistic, vision of actual Heaven.)

In essence; Bill Arkle’s world is one of meaning and purpose, a world of experiences and learning (he often terms Life a ‘university’); and ultimately one underpinned by that unselfish loving affection we may know from our glimpses of ideal family living in which parents nurture and sustain the individuality, growth and freedom of each of their children. Each child is encouraged to grow-up, if and when ready to do so; and despite that the process necessarily entails suffering and loneliness; because the objective is an adult, autonomous child who voluntarily chooses to becomes a friend, colleague and collaborator in the endlessly creative work of reality. This is a partial-microcosm of Arkle’s Heaven – a dynamic world of evolution of absolutely-unique individuals, cohering by pure love.

Arkle’s friends have told me that the most characteristic and complete expression of his vision was to be found in semi-improvised multi-media presentations of visual, verbal and musical material. I have been studying Arkle’s writings and pictures intensely for the past five years; and find them an inexhaustible source of insight and encouragement. But until now, I have not heard any of his music.

This reissue of The Music of William Arkle, from the era of his collaboration with The Enid, is therefore very welcome to me; as rounding-out a more complete picture of this multi-faceted and inspiring man.

Sacrifice and reward: The Prodigal Son versus The Angels

I have edited the following italicised section from William Arkle’s A Geography of Consciousness pp. 123-4:

Mortal Man’s right to, and experience of, autonomy is a very destructive and dangerous process in that it is paved with ugly and inharmonious desires and ideas. If the Angelic stage of evolution was also open to this reactive phase, the result would be total destruction and collapse of the necessary field of earthly experience.

So, while we Humans make the great sacrifice of suffering and pain to achieve an autonomous and individual divine nature, so the Angels make the great sacrifice which is to create and maintain the necessary ground for our Human experience; and they clean up the mess we make in the course of this experience. This work requires them to remain always in harmony with the divine purpose and aspiration, and consequently does not properly allow them the experience of objective valuation which ultimate understanding requires.

Such is the interpretation given to the parable of the Prodigal Son. The Prodigal is the Human who is bound to sin for a reason he does not understand, but which – in the end – gives him knowledge of very great value.

But his Brother, who does not sin and who does not venture off into the wilds of poverty and hunger, does not experience the pain and misery of this hunger; and therefore does not value that which is hungered-for in quite the same way. The Brother [like the Angels] is never lost and never has cause to be rejoiced-over; for he never returns of his own accord with this priceless treasure, and his Father in Heaven never has anxiety about him.


The Prodigal Son represents us - represents mortal Men; the Brother represents the Angels.

Such Angels I conceive to be pre-mortal spirit Children of God (i.e. men and women such as ourselves, but before we were incarnated) – whose ‘job’ includes vital assistance in making and maintaining the earth and creation for incarnate mortal Men to inhabit.

Our world is where we may experience the consequences of our agency and sin; such that we may ultimately repent, return, and bring-home the precious treasures won from our sufferings and death.

That is the sacrifice of mortals.

The premortal Men/ Angels vital role is to help mortal Men, and to ‘clean-up the mess’ created by mortal Men so that mortal life does not rapidly self-destroy and collapse.

Such a job entails absolute concordance with the divine will and purpose; therefore the Angels must have limited agency and, consequently, delayed spiritual progression. They must patiently wait their turn for incarnation.

And that is the sacrifice of the Angels.

How is our will related to our purpose? (William Arkle)

The consciousness of our real self is largely beyond the understanding of our more familiar 'personality self'. 

At its most fundamental level, the real will is divine; and at this level the purpose of the real will mixes perfectly with the purposes of other divine beings. 

The real will is the manifesting of this already-harmonised divine purpose throughout the lower levels of creation, and eventually right down to the physical level. 

Thus our real self witnesses itself as it becomes more fully mature and at the same time helps to perfect the purposes of others. The real self has this power in it as a part of our divine heritage. 

All nature responds to the proper command of the real will of the real self. But the will does not command 'willfully' - it achieves command by being more fully what it is. Thus the 'sound' of the quality of its individual being mingles more loudly with the creative sound of God. 

What we usually call 'will' is actually more like 'desire power' and 'idea power', through which our lower self focuses on things it feels it wants or needs. 

But what we feel as a need in the deepest sense is not something we can 'make a decision about', we just pretend that it is a decision. Our real will has already-decided, and is something we can only be either true-to, or untrue-to: the real will is not something we are in a position to use.

Edited - for clarity, punctuation, emphasis and language - from the Summary of chapter sixteen - The Will; from A Geography of Consciousness, by William Arkle, 1974.

Notes:

1. The true individual nature of each person is divine - that is, it belongs to the nature and function of the absolute - as a consequence of all men and women being God's children.

2. Therefore, we are, each of us, directly in touch with the power and purpose of the absolute, with the divine nature - at least potentially; simply because some of the divine nature is within us.

3. However, although the divine is active within us; we are initially (personally and culturally - in childhood and in early tribal societies) unconscious of the divine within ourselves. It affects us - but we are not aware of the fact.

4. As human consciousness evolves towards higher (ie. including more self-aware) levels - we get to a 'dead centre' of total self-consciousness cut off fro awareness of the divine. This state has been called the 'dead centre' of consciousness, or the consciousness soul - it is the adolescence of human personal and cultural evolution - a necessary transition phase. This position must be moved-through before we can become actively aware of the divine within us; that is the actual experience of the divine within us (not merely the abstract fact of their being a divine element in us). 

5. But, even before we are actively aware of the divine within-us; it may be at work in an unconscious way - expressing itself (or at least trying to express itself) as may be evident implicitly. For example, our behaviours may be shaped against our conscious will - our superficial and intellectually- or socially-moulded plans and schemes may be self-sabotaged; or synchronicities may channel us in certain directions.

6. The real self - that is, the divine self, is attuned-with the divine level of action. Each person is, in this way, an essential part of the divine plan of creation. However, to participate; he or she must freely opt-in to this plan, on the basis of love and awareness of the divine plan (made possible by the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ).

7. At the highest and deepest level our Life is a destiny - and indeed an unique destiny - yet that destiny is a gift, and as-such it may be declined.

8. At the deepest and highest level the true 'will'  of our true self is not chosen by us - because only at this divine level - in which the wills of many beings are harmonised.

9. Thus, because of this high-level harmonisation; the will of any one individual cannot 'sabotage' the divine plan of creation by any act or will at a lower level of consciousness. Each individual can either join in the work of creation, bringing his or her unique nature to the open-ended task; or he or she may decline to participate - leaving a gap in the original divine plan, and causing a change in the unfolding of creation.

10. The divine plan cannot be sabotaged in its character and aim (the specific plan is optional, non-mandatory, freely chosen); but it can be changed in its specifics (the plan is not a blueprint but evolutionary, pluralist, endlessly creative).  

Implications of Mormonism for Romantic Religion

The Mormon Restoration, from 1830 onwards, can be seen as a move towards the state that Barfield terms Final Participation – which is one where Man carries-through self-consciousness into an understanding of spiritual progression towards divinity.

Final Participation is, indeed, qualitatively the same state as full-divinity – which is why it is ‘final’ – because God is both agent (self-conscious) and also fully-participating in all of creation. It is the state in which there is no limit to knowledge, and all knowledge is potentially explicit.

Mormonism – conceptualised in terms of its theology – can be seen as a very conscious process of spiritual progression; in which – layer-by-layer – cumulative prophetic and personal revelations will clarify and make explicit much that was previously an incomprehensible ‘mystery’ in Christianity.

The first step came with the additional scriptures and revealed doctrines provided by Joseph Smith; but there was a built-in expectation that the process would continue with an unfolding of implications and more specific details.

This has been concisely stated in the LDS church’s summaries of God’s Plan of Salvation (or of Happiness) – with (as examples) greater knowledge of the nature of God; the insight that men and women are metaphysically distinct, and existed as primordial ‘intelligences’ in pre-mortal life before becoming (literal) children of Heavenly Father and Mother; the description of pre-mortal, mortal incarnate, and post-mortal resurrected states – with spiritual progression towards divinity possible in all phases; the doctrine of celestial marriage and a permanent dyadic, creative and fertile relationship of a deified man and woman as necessary for ultimate divine status – and so on.

Implicit in Joseph Smith’s revelations was a completely new metaphysics underpinning the theology – a pluralist, evolutionary, open-ended metaphysics – that has gradually become more evident (for those interested by it) with each generation.


More of this article can be found at:
http://www.jrganymede.com/2017/03/23/impact-of-the-restoration-on-the-evolution-of-human-consciousness-from-a-bafieldian-perspective

 

Why is Lord of the Rings more real than real life? How JRR Tolkien and Owen Barfield together might have explained it (but didn't - so I did)

Excerpted from: http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/mythopoeia-by-jrr-tolkien-1932-or-1933.html

From Fantasy we come to appreciate the realities of our (primary, 'real life') world, but refreshed because we have come across familiar basics such as men and women, bread, stone, trees... in the magical and coherent context of a Secondary world.

The key to the value of Fantasy – here and now – is its contrast with the modern world.

Modern ‘reality’ is most deficient in the most important aspects of Life. We are alienated from the world - our Self is cut-off from experienced relationships with anything else: nihilistic solipsism is a constant threat.

And this is ever more so, because modern reality is, mostly and ever-increasingly, a mass media-generated ‘virtual’ kind of reality.

Thus modern ‘Primary’ reality is deficient in terms of lacking destiny, meaning and purpose for Life; in its ignorance, denial, or blind terror of ageing and death; in terms of regarding the Human Condition as a mixture of mechanical determinism and random chaos; in its regarding of the major virtues of Love and Courage as mere products of social-conditioning and evolution; and its understanding that Tolkien’s joyful ‘eucatastrophe’ – the unexpected ‘turn’ of events in a Fairy Story that snatches the Happy Ending from apparently-inevitable defeat – as merely statistical coincidence…

Fantasy may indeed be our only sustained experience in which these real-realities are encountered. But how is it that Fantasy may be able to supply what the Primary word so horribly lacks?

Our imaginative participation in an internally consistent world of wonders, provides us with stimuli, with perceptions, that do not automatically get plugged-into the subversive and inverting theories of modernism.

The magic and wonders of Fantasy quite naturally and spontaneously attach themselves to our built-in, universal concepts – those mythic understandings and interpretations of the ‘collective unconscious’, or our shared divine-endowments. And it is these universal concepts which enable us to apprehend and share reality.

More at: http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/mythopoeia-by-jrr-tolkien-1932-or-1933.html

Why are They trying so hard to terrify us? Manipulation of modern populations through extreme fear: strategic induction of appeasement and tonic immobility

If I am reading the current situation correctly; They (that is The Establishment; that is the global conspiracy led by demonic forced of evil, and those humans possessed by them, and their enslaved or servile helpers) are responding to the current potential awakening of Men with a strategy of terrifying, terrorising, Western populations.

Q: What do they hope to achieve? A: Such an extremity of daily fear that the mass of the population switch to appeasement of that which is feared; or become psychologically-frozen with overwhelming anxiety.

These states of appeasement and 'tonic immobility' are described in an important overview of the evolutionary aspects of anxiety from a New Zealand psychiatrist called Chris Cantor - which I excerpt below.

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The take home message, is that when anxiety becomes overwhelming and is perceived to be inescapable, then behaviours result which seem superficially paradoxical. An example of appeasement is when a kidnap, or torture, victim gives up hope and befriends, defends, worships the person or group who are tormenting them (e.g. Stockholm Syndrome). An example of tonic immobility is when rabbits confronted by a predator almost upon-them will freeze instead of fleeing and accepts the will of the predator - this may be part of a 'dissociation' state in which animals become insensitive to pain - because the body expects agony, the 'mind' becomes detached from the body.

The reason I believe that modern Western populations are being systematically 'groomed' for appeasement and immobility is that on the one hand the Establishment is working (mostly behind the scenes, and deniably) to encourage ever-more acts of terror all over the place - and of implementing 'responses' which both fail to stop the terror (and punishing those who might stop the terror) while themselves increasing awareness of terror; and also lyingly refusing ever to join-the-dots (that is Conspiract Theory Wingnuttery!) and thereby claiming that atrocities are 'random' - inexplicable, unmotivated, by 'normal people' same as you and me - and therefore dishonestly implying that terror atrocities could (and will) be done by anybody, happen to anybody, at any time or place.

Fear is thereby channelled into being pervasive, extreme and inescapable; and the response to such fear is usually appeasement of that which is feared; or an anaesthetic state of passive acceptance of the worst.

Perfect! Job done! Self-chosen damnation en masse!

*

The answer?

No matter what happens: Do Not Fear.

Rise above it. Take the eternal perspective, proper to an immortal soul.

Know that you are ultimately untouchable by any evil the world can throw at you - unless you choose to invite it into your soul and accept it at its own evaluation.

Recall that the creator of everything is your loving Father, and no matter what you have done up to now, you will be washed clean and given a fresh start merely by acknowledging the goodness, truth and beauty of his plan for our salvation and raising to be Sons and Daughter of divinity.

Each individual who refuses to fear, but trusts in eternal hope, will sabotage to a significant extent the demonic plan - enough such people will defeat the terror plan altogether by irresistible yet unseen causes.  

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Abstract from - Chris Cantor. Post-traumatic stress disorder: evolutionary perspectives. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. 2009; 43: 1038-1048 http://anp.sagepub.com/content/43/11/1038.full 

Fear is the key emotion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Fear's evolved function is motivating survival via defensive behaviours. Defensive behaviours have been highly conserved throughout mammalian species; hence much may be learned from ethology. Predation pressure drove the early evolution of defences, laying foundations in the more ancient brain structures. Conspecific (same species) pressure has been a more recent evolutionary influence, but along with environmental threats it has dominated PTSD research. Anti-predator responses involve both avoiding a predator's sensory field and avoiding detection if within it, as well as escape behaviours. More effective avoidance results in less need for escape behaviours, suggesting that avoidance is biologically distinct from flight. Recognizing the predation, environmental and conspecific origins of defence may result in clearer definition of PTSD phenomena. Defence can also be viewed in the stages of no threat, potential threat, encounter and circa strike. Specific defences are used sequentially and according to contexts, loosely in the order: avoidance, attentive immobility, withdrawal, aggressive defence, appeasement and tonic immobility. The DSM-IV criteria and PTSD research show substantial congruence with the model proposed: that PTSD is a disorder of heightened defence involving six key defences used in conjunction with vigilance and risk assessment according to contexts. Human research is reviewed in this respect with reference to laboratory and wild animal observations providing new insights. Understanding individual perceptual issues (e.g. predictability and controllability) relevant to these phenomena, combined with defence strategy recalibration and neuronal plasticity research goes some way to explaining why some traumatized individuals develop PTSD when others do not. 

Excerpts:

Appeasement 

Cantor and Price recently published in this Journal a detailed review of appeasement reactions, providing animal and human observations suggesting that appeasement is the foundation of complex PTSD [13], and so I only make brief mention of it here. Appeasement's association with conspecifics suggests a more recent triune brain heritage than defences evolving from predation. De-escalation is one of appeasement's core functions [45]. Defeated primates have been observed to retreat, only to return to the dominant conspecific and protest until signals of acceptance are elicited, a phenomenon known as ‘reverted escape’ [46]. It involves flight to the source of the threat. The dominant may engage in further coercion, with the subordinate responding with more appeasement, reinforcing their social bond with due recognition of status. This is commonly observed with abused spouses and children [13]. From an evolutionary perspective subordinates often have to maintain group membership for survival, and dominants need to maintain group cohesion. A specific traumatic context, traumatic defeat plus an inescapable relationship with a dominant oppressor, resulting in specific PTSD symptoms, suggests that PTSD research may benefit from greater consideration of contexts: predator, conspecific and environmental, combined with other contextual characteristics. This might lead to greater understandability and predictability of treatment responses. It contrasts with a general malfunctioning disease-based approach. ‘PTSD’ may be better viewed as the ‘PTSDs’ (plural).

Tonic immobility

Tonic immobility is the final defence in the chain of anti-predator responses: nature has one last desperate measure [47]. It is widely represented throughout the animal world in insects, crustaceans, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds [27,31]. It arises in situations of immediate ‘predatory imminence’ (and its conspecific or environmental counterparts). It is an involuntary state of profound motor inhibition despite fully preserved consciousness, activated by extreme fear, perceived inescapable circumstances, usually involving an obviously more powerful predator or conspecific [3,48]. In animals it usually involves restraint. On termination of tonic immobility sudden recovery and flight may occur but this is neither as precipitous nor as reliable as that following attentive immobility [10]. Tonic immobility may persist beyond release [27] and in chickens has been observed to last up to 5¾ h [49]. It may promote survival through inhibition of predator killing reflexes, confusion of predators, deterrence through raising the possibility of diseased dead meat and lowering of blood pressure, which reduces blood loss from injuries [3,31]. With conspecifics its submissive aspects may serve also as appeasement to deter more serious assault. During tonic immobility animals remain largely unresponsive to external stimuli. The immobility involves either muscular hypo- or hyper-tonicity, waxy flexibility, suppression of vocal behaviour, intermittent eye closure, parkinsonian-like tremors with changes in heart rate, decreased temperature, increased respiratory rate and electrocardiogram changes [27,49,50]. Experimental pre-induction shocks stimulating fear and/or adrenalin injections can greatly extend tonic immobility, whereas increasing familiarity with the threat decreases it. Waxy flexibility in combat victims presenting with tonic immobility may be misdiagnosed as psychotic catatonia [51]. There are many similarities and differences between tonic immobility and catatonia [52]. Tonic immobility evolved as a fear response for present threats. With humans such responses may be activated by fear but maintained by a cognitive focus on potential (i.e. future) threats, with those threats remaining undetected, resulting in a protracted state of immobility commonly described as catatonic stupor. The linkage of catatonia with defence against ill-defined threats is further supported by catatonic excitement being associated with undirected assaultativeness. Some conversion reactions may reflect animal defence behaviours [12,53]. Accounts of the immobility involved in World War I shell shock are often difficult to differentiate between catatonia, conversion or tonic immobility. Some support for this arises from neurophysiological findings of hyperactive monitoring during motor-initiating decisions in subjects with conversion paresis of one arm [54]. In contemporary humans tonic immobility is commonly experienced with conspecific encounters in rape-induced paralysis [27,30,55]. A total of 37% of 35 rape victims were found to have experienced tonic immobility [56]. It also has been found in victims of other sexual abuse and some non-sexual violence. Heidt et al. found that 52% of women with histories of childhood sexual abuse reported tonic immobility in response to the abuse [57]. Older perpetrators and greater age differentials (suggesting perceived inescapability) between the abusers and children were both associated with greater tonic immobility, which was associated with greater distress, peritraumatic dissociation, depression, anxiety and PTSD. Similarly, 41.7% of survivors of adult sexual assault reported significant immobility during their most recent assault, and 10.4% reported extreme immobility [58]. Rape victims may be insensitive to pain during tonic immobility [27]. Tonic immobility may be a key determinant of PTSD outcome following sexual assault. Tonic immobility was found to partially mediate the relationship between fear and both overall PTSD symptom severity and PTSD avoidance/numbing [49]. Further, the relationship between perceived inescapability and PTSD symptom severity and avoidance/numbing was fully mediated by tonic immobility. No relationship was found between tonic immobility and hyperarousal symptoms, suggesting that, like appeasement, tonic immobility may generate specific PTSD symptomatology and that tonic immobility-driven PTSD may be less responsive to arousal-lowering treatments. Non-sexual conspecific assaults have also involved tonic immobility, with 43% of victims of urban violence reporting peritraumatic tonic immobility, which emerged as a marker for poorer responses to psychotropics [59]. Tonic immobility, but not dissociation or panic, predicted PTSD symptom severity after controlling for potential confounders in urban violence victims [60]. The preservation of awareness with an inability to voluntarily respond implies dissociation [3]. Depersonalization (detachment from self) but not derealization (detachment from environment) was found to be associated with tonic immobility, but the reverse occurred with fear [58]. This fits with depersonalization having an internal focus on why one is not responding, whereas in derealization the focus is more external. Dissociative identity disorder patients often become immobile, enter trance-like states and report out-of-body experiences or dissociative amnesia [30]. While tonic immobility is not associated with all types of dissociation, might there be a subtype of dissociation specific to tonic immobility?

Inequality --- Difference (variations in the basic set-up of our lives on earth)

1. (In the real, inner, true. eternal self) Men and Women are essentially different (each a complementary 'half' of the complete human whole).

2. Premortal souls differ in terms of spiritual advancement - and their needs for further advancement.

3. General earthly conditions throughout history have changed - the evolution of consciousness. We have been placed in the best for our needs.

4. The micro-specific personal conditions of our births differ - time, place, parents. We have been placed in the best for our needs.

5. Our specific natures differ: personality, intelligence, special abilities, defects, diseases and disorders. We have been placed in the best for our needs.

THEN - we are subject to the primordial agencies (of many types and strengths) of others - of men, angels, demons and the environmental features of animals, plants, minerals... These may make conditions better or worse for our needs.

These are responsive to our own choices and attitudes - there is nothing that 'just happens' to us; and nothing is random.

Our basic situation: We are who and where we are for good reason - so we should not wish for any other.

The absolute necessity for a change of consciousness, a metaphysical metamorphosis: Further reflections on Rudolf Steiner's great 1918 prophecy

Continuing from:http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/understanding-rudolf-steiners.html
and the reference cited therein:Steiner's prophetic essay called (in English) 'The work of the angels in man's astral body': http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19181009p01.html
**
I have been pondering further the great prophetic utterance of Rudolf Steiner from 1918 - which has worked on me in the way that prophecies surely are intended to work in retrospect - the truth of the prophecy serving to validate the interpretations and reasoning which led to it.

My understanding is that it was during the 1960s that there was the decision time: men then knew what was required of them - but for this to happen it was necessary that there be a change in consciousness so that Man's 'destiny' was accepted at the highest level of alert, conscious awareness. What was needed was a metaphysical restructuring; a transformation in fundamental beliefs and assumptions underpinning daily, routine practice - such that Man began to work towards a situation in which the spiritual perspective (in this fully 'awake' sense) became the primary, daily, habitual mode of thinking to a greater extent for more and more people.

The point is that there was a choice presented - and a choice was required and unavoidable - Man (and individual men and women) could accept or reject this plan. It was decisively rejected.

The choice was made (by almost everyone) that the habitual mode of everyday thinking would be to sleep. And as a consequence, the new impulse would remain at the unconscious, instinctive, irrational level.

So our lives and our cultures divided - between a rational anti-spiritualism - which can be seen in the expansion and universal invasion of pseudo-scientific bureaucracy and the world of 'careers', work and 'official' discourse; and on the other hand an irrational, instinctive surge of animalism which is most evident in the mass media and leisure, daydreams or fantasy.

These two strands are both very powerful, uninegrated, and in opposition. The semi-awake rationality fences in life and drains all meaning; the hardly-awake instinctualism is almost wholly selfish and destructive and negates all purpose. We cannot behave rationally, not even with self-ineterst - because this is contradicted by the anarchic irrational impulses; we cannot behave according to our urges and hedonism because we our under increasingly-total survellance and encaged with laws, rules, regulations and managed-consensus.

The result has been - very exactly - the situation that Steiner prophesied. The situation is now one in which the reality of empathic identification between Men has been perverted into a political tool of self-hatred and suicide; in which the sexual impulse in pernicious forms has invaded and configured conscious social life, such that this is seen as a higher moral state; in which medical and therapeutic reasons are given for creating sickness - and such sickness is regarded as desirable; in which the interaction of human minds with physical technology is a pervasive daily reality. 

The only way out from this spiritual nightmare is by a fundamental change in the way we think, underpinned (necessarily) by a change in the basis of our thinking.

This necessity applies equally to Christians as to non-Christians - if your Christianity has been merely a change in the set of propositions which you believe - a change in the set of moral rules you endorse, a change in a checklist of propositions, then this is not enough.

What is required, is that we interpret our lives as the primarily a consequence and product of spiritual forces - by restructuring our primary beliefs (ie. metaphysical assumptions); and - building upon this and symbiotic with it - by incremental steps trasnforming our actual, moment-by-moment thinking to an alert, fully-consicous, fully-rational, awake and aware higher consciousness of these spiritual realities.

This means (among other things) rejecting political, economic, sociological, scientific explanations as (in essence) post-hoc ratioanalizations of the underlying spiritual warfare and evolutionary-change.

Steiner suggests that we start with our own life - in recognizing that the miraculous is everyday: that we could not get through a day without such occurrences. As often as not, the miraculous is what did not happen, rather than what did - the disaster that was prevented more than the reward which was given. That important things did not today - contrary to our expectations and perceived trends - get worse; but rather than that, they remained the same.

Above all we must not sleepwalk through life, must not dissipate our lives in unconsciousness (whether from addiction to media, causal time-killing or emotion-stimulating socialization, sexual or political fantasy, unthinking obedience or unthinking rebellion, intoxication or self-indulgence or whatever form of 'sleep' is most troublesome and pervasisve in our lives)...

We must instead strive to live for (and to increase in number and to extend) those moments of alertness, clarity and awareness of our agency that are the first fruits of evolution of cosnciousness, of metaphsyical metamorphosis.

And we must, by whatever means are possible to us, strive to elicit the same in others; whether Christian or not - everyone needs this.
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19181009p01.html
 

The science of sex - the most important recent book? Sexual selection under parental choice, by Menelaos Apostolou

Menelaos Apostolou. Sexual selection under parental choice: the evolution of human mating behaviour. Psychology Press: London, 2014. pp. xi, 175.
See also: http://www.menelaosapostolou.com/
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/parental-choice-determines-mating.html
**

The work of Menelaos Apostolou, a young Assistant Professor from Nicosia University in Cyprus - collected and explored in this recent book, turns-out to be the most significant 'paradigm shift' in the evolutionary psychology of sex since the modern field began in 1979 with Don Symons The evolution of human sexuality.

Apostolou's work means that this whole area of work - many thousands of papers and scores of best-selling books (not to mention the theoretical basis of the online Manosphere and PUA movement) - now need to be reframed within a new explanatory context.

In a nutshell, and with exhaustive documentation and rigorous argument, Apostolou establishes that parental choice is primary in human evolutionary history: for many hundreds of generations of our ancestors it was primarily parents who chose and controlled who their children would marry and reproduce-with; and the individual sexual preferences of both men and women were relegated to a secondary role.

This means that it was mainly parent choice that shaped human mating preferences - and personal choice would have been relegated to a subordinate role within and after marriage (e.g. infidelity choices; and the choice to end marriage - e.g. when to divorce).

Most of this book is taken up by the collection and discussion of a mass of empirical data - hundreds of references, and the detailed working-through of the implications; but the take home message is relatively simple and clear.

Apostolou shows that in most societies in human history, and continuing in most modern societies outside of The West, individual men and women had very little choice of their mates - and that this choice was nearly always made by their parents. In other words, marriages were arranged by the parents of the husband and wife - especially the daughter's marriage, and usually by their fathers more than their mothers.

Parents preferences for a marriage partner differ from those of their offspring. In general, parents (relatively to their children, especially daughter) prefer delaying sexual relationships until an early marriage with early onset of child-bearing and little or no extra-marital sex. And parents have been generally hostile to divorce.

The characteristics parents prefer (compared with individual preferences) include good character, ability to provide resources (especially men), coming from a 'good family' - with high status and wealth, and pre-marital chastity (especially in women).

The characteristics individuals prefer (compared with their parents) include beauty and good looks (hair, face, figure etc. in a woman; muscular physique in a man), a charming and entertaining personality, the ability to provide sexual excitement and so on.

The system of parental sexual choice seems to be unique to humans - which makes it a matter of exceptional biological interest: we may be the only species that has not evolved to choose our own mates.

More exactly, the ancestral system was probably (to simplify) that two sets of parents controlled who their children married - the individual preferences of the prospective husband and wife may or may not have been consulted. Individual choice was probably important mostly after marriage - since there was the possibility of extra-marital liaisons (although Apostolou documents that these were extremely risky, and generally very harshly punished, up to and including death - especially for women).

But all the ancestral societies permitted divorce (while strongly discouraging it - since this undermined parental decisions) - although mainly in a context where one of the spouses turned out to be unsatisfactory from the point of view of providing grandchildren (eg. men who did not provide sufficient resources - due to their behaviour or from illness or injury, or women who were barren). Probably since women are more controlled in arranging marriage, it is mainly women who initiate divorces.

Apostolou summarises this as: Parents decide who gets married, children decide whether they stay married.

Another way of describing this is that parents screen or filter prospective spouses - and individual preferences only work within this pre-screened and filtered population. Consequently, modern men and women are not adapted to select a partner from an unscreened population - and not equipped with the proper instincts to assist their choice; so they are vulnerable to deception and exploitation.

Therefore human evolutionary history has left modern individuals, in a world where parental choice and control has been all-but eliminated from mainstream life, woefully ill-equipped to manage their sexual lives.

This affects both men and women adversely - but in partly different ways. men and women share a common problem of not being worried-enough about the problem of finding suitable long-term mates, marrying and having children - precisely because this whole business was managed for them by parents through hundreds of preceding human generations.

Women delay and delay marriage and child-bearing, and seem unconcerned about their genetic extinction - because their deep inbuilt expectation is that these matters will be arranged for-them. men worry too much about attaining high status among men, and becoming a good provider - when these were selected for in a world where prospective in-laws wanted these attributes from men; but in the modern world they are an ineffectual strategy for getting a mate.
In sum (and in terms of their biological fitness) modern men are too worried about working hard, and not worried enough about meeting and impressing individual women.

So men and women who are apparently, in biological and historical terms, extremely well-qualified as potential husbands and wives, remain unmarried and childless in large and increasing numbers.

Modern single people therefore are much too happy about their living in a state of unattached childlessness, than is good for their reproductive success. And this (biologically) foolish happiness is at least partly a consequence of evolutionary history: people are behaving as if mating and marriage will be sorted-out by parents - but it isn't.

However, as is usual in works of evolutionary psychology - in a subject where the professionals are almost 100 percent atheists (and militant atheists at that!), in this book there is a too brief and conceptually inadequate consideration of the role of religion.

The subject gets about three pages, and religion is treated as merely a trumped-up rationalisation for enforcing biological imperatives. However, it is not mentioned that in modern societies it is only among the religious that we can find biologically viable patterns of mating, marriage and family - and indeed only among some particular religions that are traditionalist in ethics and patriarchal in structure: which fits exactly with the evolutionary predictions.

My point is that religion needs to be regarded as a cause, not merely a consequence, of sexual behaviour and selection pressure; in sum, religion (more exactly, some specific religions) is the only known antidote to the pattern of maladaptive modern sexuality which is trending towards extinction.

Another omission is the role of intoxication by alcohol and drugs. Much of modern sexual behaviour is initiated in parties, bars and nightclubs; and occurs more-or-less under the influence of intoxicants - and this in itself deranges delicate brain functioning and destroys the benefits of behavioural adaptations that may have taken centuries or millennia to evolve.

An intoxicated person is maladaptive.

So, from a biological perspective, I would contend that there is no reason to suppose we can solve the biological problems of modernity outwith religion (especially since the social system of religion has in practice been replaced by... the mass media - see my book Addicted to Distraction). Biological knowledge can diagnose the problem - but science cannot provide a solution nor the motivation to implement it; since humans are not evolved to structure their sexuality according to biological principles.

We are 'set-up' to seek our own gratification and try to avoid suffering with reproductive success as a by-product - we do not seek directly to achieve optimal personal/ or tribal/ or national/ or species-level reproductive fitness.

Such omissions and other imperfections do not detract from the exceptional originality and importance of this book and the empirical research and theoretical discussion which it summarises.

In a world where actual scientific achievement was the primary determinant of professional success; Menelaos Apostolou would be among the most prestigious, most cited, and most intellectually influential people in evolutionary psychology.

I hope that this deserved outcome will, sooner or later, come to pass.

Why is it that so many modern women have become attention junkies?

Because they can - is the short answer.


That modern Western women are often attention junkies seems clear by their chosen behaviour - their clothes, hair, self-mutilations - the whole way they 'present themselves'... which shows that they strive to get attention; especially from men.

And this attention is sexual.


The 'attention' sought is mostly short-term, causal, superficial... the admiring glance, the second glance, the mild flirtation. Harmless, just fun, one might suppose? This is the affirmation of individuality in the mass context of the anonymous city. Attention is tangible evidence that you 'stand out' from the crowd, are an individual, are desirable to 'men'.

And when women seek more attention, they usually succeed - which is why the process is addictive.


Modern Western women mostly succeed in getting sexual attention because - so long as they are healthy - it is easy when they are young. This for straightforward biological and reproductive reasons: young and healthy-looking women are all desirable, all attention-grabbing. Some more than others, of course - but all young healthy women will attract attention.

So most women start with a baseline of un-earned attention simply by virtue of what they are when young: to men they are potential mates to be evaluated, to other women they are potential rivals. Thus the appraising glance, the second look, the atmosphere of flirtation.

And if young women want it they can get more, simply by sending out cues of 'sexual availability' which men are hard-wired to respond to - hence the use of revealing clothing, or signals such as tattoos and piercings, and the bold glance and confident self-presentation -  which are interpreted by men as signals indicating a higher probability of low cost, no strings sex.

(Sluts always get attention; and a lot of modern women have noticed and taken this lesson to heart; and apply it to varying degrees.)


Of course, women may not be doing this consciously, they may deny that this is their intention, and they may be honest in this denial; but this is the reason for the extra attention.

And when more and more women are doing this, it creates an escalation of signalling, an 'arms race' among young women - to be 'the one' who grabs and holds most attention in a crowd. Anyone who opts out of the arms race becomes almost invisible in the crowds of modern life.

(In early human life, in small groups, every young healthy women was like a goddess due to sheer rarity value - she did not need to do anything at all: but simply be. Indeed it was her transcendent role to 'be'. As the poet Robert Graves put it: Man does, Woman is.)


So even young and beautiful women compete for attention nowadays, and because sexual advertisment is very effective at getting attention (attention from men, and also from other women who intuitively perceive a rival) then unless it is prevented by some internal restraint or external prohibition there is an innate tendency for women increasingly to sexualize their self-presentation - because if attention is the goal, then more sexualization works.


As women age into middle age - through their thirties - they progressively lose this unearned attention which is bestowed by evolution, and such women may start to complain they are 'being ignored'.

In reality, this 'being ignored' is merely a loss of biological privilege. (Welcome to the real world!) But in a secular and nihilistic world where community is broken down, and stable familes are increasingly rare; the loss of the daily thousand self-affirmations of casual attention is experienced as an existential crisis.

So middle aged women dye their hair to make it look younger - or maybe 'go blond', escalate the use of makeup, and start to dress more carefully to maximize their sexual assets.


And it works! They do indeed get more attention.

Perhaps for a while they get more attention because they accurately simulate the appearance of a younger women; but after a while they get more attention because they are giving-off signals of sexual availability - because the way men are 'wired' by evolution is that a middle aged (or elderly) women who is presented herself to enhance or simulate her sexuality, may be offering the chance of low cost, no strings sex.

Such signals are hard, perhaps impossible, to ignore - even when they are ignored or deplored. Hence the extra attention. For women; if you don't want to be ignored - and if that is your main objective, then the easiest and most effective actions is to make yourself look (more or less) like a slut - a woman of 'easy virtue' as they used to say.

(The woman need not deliver on what her appearance seems to promise - the advertisement of sexual availability may not be honest - but meanwhile she will get the attention she craves.)


In the end, women find themselves in an addictive cycle. In order to retain the unearned attention of their youth - or, as they may put it to themselves, in order not to 'be ignored'; from their thirties and continuing for longer and longer into the fifties, sixties, maybe even beyond - many modern women engage in escalating and un-discriminating levels of sexual signalling.


This is most obvious among single women and the divorced and those married women looking for affairs or new husband - but the addiction has infected even happily married women; who hate to 'be ignored' (as they perceive it) in the prevailing highly-sexualized social environment - and feel compelled to present themselves in a sexualized way.

This is experienced as 'empowering', revitalizing. It is socially admired. Instead of accepting their mature role as a 'mousy', ignored, middle aged housewife - faithfully devoted to family and community; middle aged women may suddenly dye their hair, or 'get a tattoo' - and experience a sudden increase in attention - especially from men - and all too often they misinterpret the real, underlying nature of and motivation for this attention. And other women will praise them (at least to their faces).


In the past, this arm race of sexual signalling was prevented by strong social norms - mostly enforced by the peer group of women - against even young women's behaviour. But especially middle aged women were sanctioned for presenting themselves in a sexualized way, or trying to simulate youth (the English expression for such behaviour was 'mutton dressed as lamb).

But typical modern women, and the mass media culture, do not enforce modesty and restraint. Instead our corrupt and morally-inverted society celebrates showing-off, attention-seeking: mere celebrity is celebrated.

To be unnoticed is to be despicable and despised

(I have heard middle aged women express real anger and resentment against those who do not join-in the attention arms race - who 'let themselves go' and accept the withdrawal of unearned privilege.)


This attention addiction is, I believe, the main basis of the ever-increasing sexualization of Western society over the past 50 years; and it was a natural and inevitable consequence of secularization and the removal of social norms that limited public sexual displays among women.

The process of societal sexualization has little or nothing to do with actual sex - the environment is highly sexualized, women are displaying, men are responding to these displays; marriages are delayed and broken, families are not had or abandoned under the pervasive pressure of 24/7 bombardment with sexual signals, of social life experienced as swimming through a sea of sexualization...

Meanwhile there is not much actual sex for most people most of the time - and never enough of it to build a life around (that being intrinsically impossible, a chimera) - and fewer and fewer children are born.

Western society spirals towards self-chosen extinction.


The sexuality of women is indeed a powerful social force - and any society which does not recognize that as a fact, and control this force, is doomed; as we are doomed.

At present each women is 'liberated' - i.e. allowed, encouraged, to manage this nuclear force of female sexuality entirely for herself. It is like giving a machine gun to a kid!

The problem is that the weapon of female sexuality will be used if it can be used without cost. Even with majority restraint, a minority can cause immense problems, and set-off an arms race.

Liberation is socially toxic: obviously so.

Female modesty just is a matter of general societal concern - and must in some way be externally regulated for the good of everyone.

There is no arguing with 'must' - but there are a wide range of possible means, some far preferable to others (some ways of controlling female sexuality are relatively benign, others are loathsome - the current Western secular attempts are both loathsome and ineffectual); and how best to regulate female sexuality is the proper topic.    


Note added: It is my conviction, presented many times elsewhere on this blog; that problems such as the one described above can only constructively be solved on the other side of a mass Christian revival. Any attempt to solve such problems in a secular context, starting from where we are now, will almost certainly do more harm than good overall - because (here, now) our motivations are corrupted, and this corruption will out in attempts to address structural social problems. 

The thing to bear in mind is that when there is a problem (such as modern sexuality in general) which is obvious, and which contravenes basic common sense and traditional wisdom - there must be very powerful forces maintaining that problem. 

This means that attempts at reform must overcome strong resistance, which means that reform must be powerfully motivated - ie. reform must tap-into strong, widespread and fundamental human emotions.

In the modern and secular context, such strong, widespread and powerful emotions are almost entirely negative and selfish - for example: pride, envy, resentment, hatred, Schadenfreude. This seems obvious among the secular right wingers who advocate 'reform' in the sexual arena - either their motivations are too weak for them to succeed, or else their motivations are bad. 

Only religion is capable of being both a sufficiently powerful and also good motivation as the basis for the tough work of reform. And of religions, only some few. 

So, as in most things here and now, the first choice is to choose your religion. (And the choice of adequate religions, known to be sufficiently powerful, is in fact very limited indeed - indeed for the West the choice is practically limited to two broad and obvious categories.)

And if you cannot choose a religion, then (no matter how severe the problem - and indeed the more severe, obvious and simple-to-solve is the problem) it is probably best to do nothing: because no matter how bad things are - they can always get worse.