Showing posts with label Placebo Effect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Placebo Effect. Show all posts

Saturday 15 October 2016

Shamanism And The Coming Of AI/Robot Culture

There is an honest question to be asked whether shamanism, as it is presented to us in the West as ideology or world view, actually exists today. What does exist are a number of shamanic practices that differ from place to culture, from culture to culture. In Europe at least, shamanic practice was destroyed as an identifiable set of techniques by the rise of monotheism amongst the elite and then, through witch-hunting, amongst the folk. Wherever the Catholic Church placed its heavy foot, shamanism was marginalised with its general categorisation of shamans as ‘devil-worshippers’ - whether in early medieval Poland or seventeenth century Peru. Puritans and missionary Buddhists were no better in their fanaticism.

We have a more tolerant view now but it is easy to go too far in the other direction and try to believe what is not any longer truly believable – that there are actual spirits (things that have life beyond the quiverings of quantum mechanics) in stones, plants and animals, things inside these things that would give them equal status to us. Perhaps we might be generous towards animals and even plants as evolutionarily capable of our level of sentience and self awareness but no one can seriously compare a cabbage or a dog with even the most intellectually weak of our own kind.

The cultural depredations of modern memetic engineers have created a dislocation between the past and the tribal shamanisms of today. Can any claimed shaman who is not a member of a tribe insulated from Western technologies and anthropological tourism possibly belong to an authentic tradition? Any contact with the Other changes the person making the contact and this cuts all ways - we are all contactees. Neo-shamanism and shamanic re-constructionisms that ape traditional forms are, however, the most deeply suspect. The record shows us no unified global shamanic culture and we can make no presumption that this is some sort of ur or noble savage state to which we can return.

Lived experience of shamanic thinking and behaviour is probably no more recoverable than the dinosaurs for Western observers. Many neo-shamanic practitioners may be sincere in their beliefs but they represent nothing but an aspiration to be something they can never be – authentically embedded in a living tradition. The desert origin soul-murderers of indigenous tribes who arrived in the backwoods of every continent on the back of empire have, probably and finally, won in that respect. There is unlikely to be a revenger from the ranks that matter - that of the indigenous peoples themselves who struggle to preserve what can be preserved but know in their hearts that even their most hallowed traditions must be made politically correct and acceptable to liberal modernity and have had to be adapted to being a mode of resistance rather than an expression of local hegemony.

This is not to deny that shamanism exists in the world. Chased out of Europe, shamanism still exists authentically, if under threat, in Russian Siberia and, with more difficulty and complexity, amongst the Inuit peoples. There are survivals in Taiwanese and Kazakh practice. The Chinese seem less sympathetic today to their own origins.  There is shamanism in Korea, in the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa), in corners of Japan itself and in a more debased form in India. Tantric Buddhism is a historic compromise between Buddhism and shamanistic Bo and Shinto represents an attempt at the institutionalisation of shamanism. There have been attempts, not always successful, to associate shamanic practice and African religions though there are certainly parallels amongst the San. There are also analogues amongst the peoples of Papua New Guinea and the indigenous peoples of Australia.

To call all Amerindians shamanistic without qualification all too often insults them. The differences are as significant as the similarities. There are shamanistic elements in the religions of the Chipewyan, the Cree and the Navaho and amongst those who use Ayahuasca. The Maya peoples and many of the peoples of the Amazon Basin and further South can also surely be called shamanistic. There are, in short, many remaining, if small in relative numbers, reservoirs of shamanic experience and behaviour. Unfortunately, these are now as much under threat from well-meaning New Age dim-wits as from Christian missionaries, scientific materialism and late capitalism.

Looking at this range of experiences, the idea of a fixed shamanic culture looks less and less tenable, a product of a Western obsession with categorisation and, in its current forms, no more ancient than Wicca. The appropriation of shamanism by New Age figures to solve their personal problems and dilemmas (much like the appropriation of Tantra as NeoTantra) increasingly appears like a piece of cruel or at least unthinking cultural imperialism. However, if we take away the attempt to mimic the forms of shamanism, there still remains an essence of what shamanic thought is and what it can do for our society once it is shorn of alien traditionalism and the egoistic appropriation of New Age narcissists. Let us look at what this essence may be and what it can do for us once all the mumbo-jumbo is removed and we allow indigenous peoples the dignity of the re-appropriation of their own traditions. There are four pre-conditions for a ‘shamanism’ for our times.

  1. The Shaman - The first pre-condition lies in the shaman figure himself or herself. Such a person has to be ‘fit’, mentally and physically robust enough to be an ‘exemplar’, of high intelligence (or at least animal cunning) and in the prime of life. They will undoubtedly have internally generated disciplines designed to sustain fitness, including care of the body, a mode of conducting themselves in society and a care for their own nutrition. Such a person is likely to be surprisingly ‘normal’, operating in society perfectly well if only because no ‘shaman’ is likely to be able to earn a full living from his or her skills. 
  2. Difference - By contrast, such a person is also likely to be ‘different’ and psychologically alone. There may be others like him or her but this is not a clubbable state. Shamanic status arises from some inward crisis, possibly from an inherited disposition to sensitivity or crisis. Shamans generally suffer a paradigm shift in themselves involving physical illness or a psychological crisis quite early in life. A shaman may also try to effect ‘difference’ from normal sexual roles as well, perhaps by taking on some of the attributes of the opposite gender, certainly being sexually ‘fluid'.
  3. Social Need - To afford a ‘shaman’ in society, there is going to have to be some sort of pent-up demand. The community must have no other ready means of solving questions surrounding bodily and mental health. This will also have to be a culture respectful (‘trusting’) of the shaman’s abilities as a representation of a form of ‘knowledge’, a culture of people seeking mediators between their own sorrow or pain and a world they imperfectly understand. A rational individualistic society will not want such mediation but this presupposes that such a society does not suffer from psychosomatic illness, is uninterested in ecstasy or believes that the answers to questions that lie in the subconscious are of no consequence. There is no such society under the sun. 
  4. The Need For A 'Mythos'- The shaman and his culture require a ‘mythos’, one that can hold all these abilities together as a coherent whole expressed in a wide range of semiotics – behaviour, language, imagery and ritual (a ‘grammar of mind’, after Pentikainen). The shaman will have greater knowledge of social and cultural memes than the rest of society and will have an intensity of engagement in altered states of consciousness in a way that is fully accepted by the rest of society.  This is knowledge that is not known by scientific means (or is not yet proven to be fully known by scientific means) but which ‘works’. Such knowledge is beyond good and evil and the shaman figure may risk mental illness and even death by going into this unknown territory. It is also a difficult knowledge for a society that wants moral order.

On the surface, there is no place in our society for the natural shaman. Shamanism seems doomed to be degraded, like Yantra, into another form of personal development for the worried well of the West. But such people still exist in our midst at a time when the welfare state and scientific rationalism are not dealing with many of the psychological and health issues of our society - or are dealing with them expensively and ineffectively through pharmaceuticals even where the conditions are not obviously organic or limiting them through 'political correctness', risk aversion and liberal totalitarianism. The shaman is probably there because he is a type of person and a relationship to the world rather than as representative of a culture or an ideology. The need is there.

What is not there is a post-rationalist ‘mythos’ that manages to fit the liberal culture of  contemporary democracy given that there is no traditionalist solution to the use of shamanic technique that is not inauthentic. Any new ‘mythos’ must work in a direct relationship to the actual state of our society and economy – just as the ‘shamanic’ cultures of indigenous peoples are embedded in their economies, environments and traditions.  The idea that the environmental skills of a South American ‘shaman’ have anything to teach us in an advanced Western society except at a level of abstraction far removed from the day-to-day concerns of most people is absurd. What is not absurd is to consider that a world of mass leisure without completely adequate resources under conditions of radical technology change (primarily caused by the convergence of robotics and AI) is going to create new environmental conditions requiring new ways of thinking about culture.

Those with indigenous skills are only fitted for a particular society at particular times. We need new skills and new myths for our place and our time. What can be learned from shamanic experience that might be developed along Western European lines without the idiocies and fakeries of reconstructionism, fake traditionalism and narcissistic self development? I suggest five areas of exploration ...

  • How to treat some psychosomatic sickness through the placebo effect - perhaps through dream interpretation, sympathetic shamanic travelling or other means as much as through handing over fake tablets (the British cup of tea in the 1950s was probably the most perfect placebo medecine in human history)
  • How to trigger visionary ecstasy through trance (Eliade’s ‘technique of ecstasy’, perhaps initiated through drumming or other sound patterns) or drugs. Why do this? Why, for the simple fun of it, of course - as distraction from having no meaningful function in life in the age of the robot.
  • How to use trance, divination and metaphor (even animal or spirit guides) to find answers to questions lying in the sub-conscious. Such a need emerges when basic wants are met but there are no resources to offer satisfaction for all desires and needs - to travel and network, own expensive things and consume exquisite food and drink, have status in society. A person turns inward to construct self-meaning lest they go mad with boredom and despair.
  • How to tap into the unconscious through divination techniques to tell the probable future and open up the ‘true will’ to self-scrutiny.  No, this does not mean you can actually know what it is going to happen in the future (no one does) but it might clear away the cobwebs of group think and increase the chances of making the right decisions for you rather to please everyone else, allowing unconscious knowledge to manage and control the dead zone of reasoning in a world of flux and poor information.
  • How to create an attitude of mind that can use a sustained narrative (a ‘mythos’) to ensure social, economic and environmental sustainability in the conditions in which we actually find ourselves in the West today. Again, this is not to be construed as support for the fashionable Gaian magical thinking of planetary consciousness but quite the opposite - how to find values that work with the total environment in which we find ourselves of which 'nature' is just a part and not necessarily the most important one.

A modicum of creative irrationalism does not mean that that we abandon scientific method or technology. On the contrary, 'shamanic' technique is merely supplemental at the macro-cultural level. At the micro-cultural level, however, where society meets individual psychic needs (the zone of the alleged ‘spirit'), there is a place for the person who can mediate between the individual and the world through metaphor, performance and even entheogens ensuring their safety and ther resolution of their problems. The psychotherapeutic tradition that emerged out of Freud's work may be a mere half way house here, simply adapting the individual to social reality instead of transforming society through transforming the individual. The tradition's success rate has not honestly been much better than that of the shaman to date.

Perhaps, one day, a culturally enlightened Government will place social management of drugs and the troubled part of the population in the hands of creative shamans (even if the psychotherapists will want first dibs at the gravy train). Mind you, the determination to professionalise and 'train' the shamans will almost certainly make them useless - managerialism is the social disease of the bourgeoisie, based on a perpetual and perpetuating risk averse fear of failure, or rather of being seen by others to fail. No doubt shamans without a Royal Institute of Shamanic Sciences Certificate Part IIA would have to be bailed out of jail every now and then but their street skills, assuming they are not completely regulated into meaninglessness, might help give meaning to the lost and save the taxpayer a fortune in sick benefit and healthcare costs.

Conventional religious communities, the psychotherapists, risk averse nervous ninnies and the scientific positivists will find common cause against such a radical idea but none has yet found a solution to the central problem of our time – that the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ needs resolution of its psychic problems within a matrix of belief that is their own and not that of their elites and that this crooked timber is about to be faced with some very straight-laced hyper-rational machinery that will govern their existence before too long.  Blowing up the machines is not going to be the way forward. By-passing both them and the technocrats with some creative irrationality may be.


Saturday 14 March 2015

Experimental Approaches to Contemporary Gnosis


Contemporary 'new spirituality' presents us with a number of problems: it employs patently false narratives in closed communities; it presumes to have access to a world beyond the more sophisticated materialism of contemporary science (or it appropriates a fake 'quantum' version of materialism); and it holds to a primitive essentialism in a time of existentialist insights.

Keeping Hold of the Esoteric Baby

But there is a danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water in rejecting simplistic belief in universal consciousness, demanding a cogent materialist explanation for everything under conditions where the material world is imperfectly understood and failing to understand the social and individual function of this no-thing called spirituality.

The very term 'spirituality' is slippery and rightfully presented by the analytical philosophers as virtually meaningless. What we are talking about is 'belief that gives meaning', an inward state that need have no connection with any objective reality but which can be constructed as 'shared' in order for it to be built into the edifice of a practice, a cult or a religion.

How can we recapture 'belief that has meaning' as a legitimate aspiration in a post-modern culture but in a way that still takes account of science and stops scientific materialists from claiming that they know far more than they do. They may know that Creationism is foolish but they do not know 'for a fact' that many other things that others believe that they know are decisively and provenly false.

The plethora of new religions provides a pathway of possibilities once we have removed the bad history in most of their mythic narratives, once we have stood back from the anthropological and sociological aspects of cultish-ness and once we have critiqued guides and leaders who are often half-educated at worst and naive at best. But what is then left?

What is left is, first, a series of techniques for accessing the very material but untestable or definable elements of the mind that amount to what most people mean by spirit or soul and, second, a competing set of analogical narratives for describing what is otherwise not describable, certainly not in positivistic scientific terms.

We might see a gnostic mentality (rather than gnostic dogma) as useful in being able to tap into the language of such mythic and artistic narratives. The primary narrative is one of spiritual alchemy to ensure that we, and not society or our pasts, are in control not only of our conscious minds but of a great deal of our unconscious (aka spiritual) minds as well.

Many of these techniques might conceivably be derived from the further reaches of the New Age Movements and from Neo-Paganism but they are much more likely to derive from a dynamic and critical appreciation of the occult and esoteric movements, shorn of its mumbo-jumbo and seen as sets of practice defined as successful by its material effects or transformative illusions.

New Age Insights

Let us get the New Age and New Pagan communities out of the way. Much of theosophy may be arrant nonsense but there are, no doubt, great insights in Krishnamurti's rebellion and in Ouspensky as interpreter of Gurdjieff - two men who took flawed models and used them as the basis for further thought.

There may be important value to be acquired in the 'technologies' of Steiner and Subud but also in the whole school of positive thinking and 'placebo effects', of 'attunement', of aura and colour effects, of an attitude of mind towards personal development and even, with caution as to its actual use, the insights of NLP.

The Emissaries of Light and the Template Network may actually have discovered techniques that deserve further investigation and a great deal could be learned from Raelian sexual and social philosophies (if you can detach them from their mildly demented but amusing and harmless foundation myth). So let's put these on the list for critical investigation.

Neo-Pagan Insights

Neo-Paganism can teach a sense of place as placebo and the creation of imaginative mythic narratives (such as the Matter of Britain) that permit the creative construction of art, literature, sacred places, and the revitalisation of local myth, folklore and the 'faery' tale. Such a place may be a City or suburb or garden or corner of a room as much as a field.

It can also inspire us to the logic of sustainability without requiring the absurd reification of Nature into some benign essence which it is not - let alone the meaningless New Age version that builds a brutal cold Goddess out of Gaia, the planet. The divine feminine may even be interpreted a divisive invention to buttress ego-problems in a flawed society so let's throw that one out of the window.

The planet is certainly a system that we should understand but it adapts blind to our existence and is no divinity. Nature is de facto cruel and wasteful. Sustainability has to be functionally related to what it is to be human amongst other humans, a personal and social as well as formally environmental sustainability.

Finally, there is shamanic technique - inauthentic perhaps against surviving indigenous traditions but recoverable in urban settings or linked perhaps to place and past without racialist or ethnicist overtones. When the British adopt Voodoo, they adopt this technique as their own.

We might then 'play' with Raymond Buckland's Seax-Wica, with Robert Cochrane or with Heathenry but we should set our hearts against accepting forgeries and false histories which merely repeat the Christian tradition of propagandistic lying and re-interpretation of history to 'win souls'. We can be better than this.

Occult Insights

And what of the Occult and Esoteric? There is ancient mining to be done in the Kaballah and in the Tarot as psychic ordering mechanisms, without any necessity for the Gematria (which strikes me as a somewhat autistic technique but one which may add value to some).

There is certainly no further benefit to be had in mystic lineages and traditions, in hidden masters or in ancient pre-Husserlian dogma. The esoteric also gives access to sex magick, possibly over-rated as a tool but, nevertheless, one that taps directly into who we are and how we relate to others. Perhaps an honest sexual magic that is more sophisticated, shorn of fetishistic ritual and reconstructed as a mutually guided vitalism, might be more useful to most of us than our current culture of ‘naughtiness’ and fear.

Without falling into the trap of traditionalism, a core knowledge of neo-Platonic, Judaeo-Christian, Egyptian, Persian, Sufi, Hindu, Chinese and other East Asian traditions does not require that we accept their essentialisms but merely that we understand our own existentialism better through the prism of the choices of the past.

The study of correspondences, of sympathetic magic, of visualised ritual (arguably, the best sexual magical ritual of all) and of transgression within a self-constructed ethical framework is not irrationalism but hyper-rationalism if the study is directed at questioning not merely the reality of the phenomena with an open mind but the meaning of the experience of the reality as reality.

Within the occult tradition, Thelema is a religion of sorts with insights if fundamentally flawed as a counter-intuitive derivative of Christianity, over-elaborated by the successors to Crowley, especially the retrograde Typhonian and subsequent 'dark' traditions. 'Love is the Law' begs the question of what Love is but it is a sound starting point that is glossed on the right hand by the Wiccan 'an harm no-one'. What is not required is some wise inner circle speaking as if the masses were scum. What is required is an egalitarian and libertarian (as captured by Jack Parsons) approach that brooks no formal or restrictive religious structures.

There is practical psychology hidden away in this territory as well. The early Dion Fortune was reacting to a fundamental issue for most of us in mentalising responses to bullying. She also offers a bridge to that sense of place (Britishness in her case) in neo-paganism that we discussed earlier.

There are the insights of Chaos Magick (Carroll, Hine, Anton Wilson, Spare, even the eclectic acquisition of Dick and Lovecraft) which offer ultimate opportunities to detach ourselves from belief in order to test technique scientically before returning to belief when we are ready.

And, finally, there is the Left Hand Path of Vama Marga Tantra as tool for personal empowerment. Transgression and aggression, even violence, are active forces in the world and we must command them, lest they command us.

Conclusion

We have here quite a menu of techniques that do not need us to believe in the absurd and can enable anyone to find the meaning that will mean most to them. I have not even started to address the world of the hyper-real - meaning derived from films, fantasy novels and comic books. There is certainly no need to fall into the error of the desert religions in requiring some divine entity or that of the East (in assuming a mythic universal consciousness) or descending into a countervailing nihilism.

The technique as technique is a path way to more than simple New Age personal development and fluffy well meaning or untenable mythic narratives amongst small cults or a perpetual adolescent belief in actual dark demons. It is the pathway to personal choice about how to construct oneself out of the raw material of oneself - the most advanced type of materialism.

Personal development techniques and a critical review of past traditions, a sense of place and a commitment to a new definition of sustainability and an active exploration of transgressive and irrational operations within an existentialist ethic may construct more meaning that works for us than all the loss of self into some predetermined religious framework.

In short, we do not need religion at all. We do not even need to be hung up on spirituality. All we need to do is take command of that bit of ourselves for which science has no current explanation and make it work for us.

Saturday 7 February 2015

A 'Sick' Society - What It Really Means ...

Managing the self as both body and mind, where both have an influence on each other, where both have significant unconscious aspects and where both are dependent on external inputs (such as nutritional on the one side or perceptual on the other) is an art and not a science. It takes place in real time with multiple changes in many components. If, as physicians have suggested, severe stress results in atrophy of the hippocampus and this reduces the memory resources available to allow the body to react appropriately to future stress, this has consequences.

It means that we must engineer our environment (which includes society) to avoid severe stress and we must seek means to engineer our bodies to recover from past severe stress so that they can deal with current and future stress. A degree of social engineering and a degree of corrective personal engineering may be necessary to enable us to live the good life and to make informed decisions about preserving it, but the choice of what constitutes the good life always remains an individual and not a social one.

Social or bodily engineering that creates stress or is non-consensual or is imposed from without (except under the most extreme of diseased or psychotic conditions) is counter-productive. There is a point of balance at which most people most of the time will have to accept their 'difference' from the normal as ‘just who they are’. Take the range of mental issues created by dysfunctionality of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis [HPA axis]: anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, insomnia, post-traumatic stress, borderline personality disorder, ADHD, deep depression, burnout, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel and addiction.

The decision on where these issues are dysfunctional is too often a social one and not an individual one. The social often imposes the very demands on the body that result in the mental problem and then the social, instead of changing its own practices, seeks its own solution to a problem that it created. As a result, and this applies across social policy to issues of social exploitation and abuse, instead of a serious problem of painful dysfunction being dealt with under conditions of personal care for a relatively few, large numbers of people divert skilled time into patching up so that people can go back into battle.

Much of modern psychological medicine has degenerated into a form of ‘normalisation’ and into a castigation by implication of 'difference'. This has happened, as in social policy, because a large class of persons can only get a living and meaning from acting as definers of others. We all see the absurdity of a doctor working through the night to save the life of a man who is to be executed next morning. At least the patching up of warriors and workers has the cynical social purpose of defending the system or keeping its economic wheels turning but, today, we are in a different condition again.

Mass health and social services provision has created a half-baked world where a vast class of persons exists to maintain people whose trauma and miseries are real enough but are as likely to be created by social circumstances, poor nutrition and crowded conditions as they are by something organic. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, our economic structures now depend on an industry of helpers and a vast mass of persons who must be helped. They do not rely on strong, willful, self-reliant individuals in a position to intevene directly to support the weakest members of the community - we drive the vulnerable into a 'system'.

The sheer scale of the resources required to maintain this system means that the socially isolated and the psycho-somatically ill are increasingly taking resources from the minority who badly need short term sustained intensive help. These last just fall into the mass - the helped - to add more customers for the growing class of helpers. The height of absurdity is reached when our entire culture becomes geared to helping those who appear to need to help by hiring them as helpers ('full employment'), a worthwhile palliative up to a point but one which, in effect, simply accepts that the way we conduct our social affairs should be 'normalised' as a shared 'lesser misery'.

The poverty of aspiration is staggering. The height of our aspiration is now that everyone has a 'job', a functioning role in a dysfunctional system. Nobody appears to be able to consider how the system might be made more functional - perhaps everyone just accepts that it cannot in a form of conservative pessimism that has merely been re-labeled ‘progressive’. Worse, this conservative pessimism on the 'official' Left (which is now the ruling order regardless of party) must bring everyone under the same health and welfare model. No matter that placebos, shamans and herbal medicines might actually reduce demand on the system. These must always be avoided in favour of more expensive interventions (although we re-assert here the absolute primacy of scientific medecine).

Herbal medicines almost certainly regulate the HPA system and, under experienced guidance, can be made to accord with individual body chemistries. The placebo effect may offend rationalists but works - and if it works, why not embrace it pragmatically? Our concern should only be that people do not use alternative self-medication in preference to scientific medication but only to supplement and self-treat in the grey area between serious dysfunction and apparent health. The truth is that a purely scientific approach to the body-mind continuum is not truly scientific when dealing with most needs most of the time - as opposed to serious need some of the time. It is an ideology of rational intervention that has reached its lowest point with the recent bureaucratic interference by the EU to ban the use of herbal substances as ‘untested’. If the fear is that people will believe the local witch can cure cancer, then the fear is justified but if the fear is that people will choose minor irrationalities that offend the sensibilities of rationalists, then the fear is neurotic - and, oddly, irrational.

This ideology of excessive mass scientific interventionism, as opposed to precautionary advice on nutrition, exercise and mental health based on treating people not as children but as autonomous adults, is the last gasp of an over-simplified scientific materialism and it deserves underground resistance at every level. The real reason why this ideology is dominant is because we are talking here about economics and power and not about any real concern for the self development and empowerment of those autonomous individuals.

Welfare systems arose out of real need - the sort of need that still exists in much of the emerging world. Unfortunately, like roads, the solution creates more demand. Because basic care and emergency intervention required taxation, the class interest of the public sector and the need to keep the taxpaying majority supportive came to meant that 'universalism' spread services widely instead of where they were needed most. Hence the anomaly of a massive, expensive and unnecessary child benefits system in place while over a 1,000 kids in a rotten English borough faced appalling sexual abuse because the resources of time and money were not there to protect them.

As demand and expense has increased, the subsequent and necessary 'cutting' process has meant that the same services are just more thinly spread. There is a failure to invest in the wider social infrastructure that caused the stress-related illnesses in the first place and neglect of those who most need expensive but decisive intervention. We now have a grossly inflated public sector whose politics are a deadweight on the economy and on our culture, enforced 'cuts' which harm those in most dire need for political reasons and a grossly dysfunctional social structure that drives psychological and psychosomatic illness.

And what is at the heart of this degraded system in which the 'official' Left is fully complicit? Scientists have found evidence to suggest that social subordination leads to chronic stress - the subordinated are less aggressive, less in control of themselves and constantly anxious about dominant others in our own species. Does this not sound familiar? We have a culture that is ostensibly free but one in which there is no connection between the mass and political decision-making, in which the economy is volatile and dependent on 'global factors' and where most wealth and power trickles down from a tiny group at the top of our tree. We may as well be apes.

And the consequences of this widespread social subordination is chronic stress, expressed as psychosomatic illness and neurosis but also as a lack of engagement in the local community or in enterprise, as addictive behaviour and impulsiveness (especially with bank credit before 2008) and as cynicism. Our politicians are obsessed with grandstanding overseas (apparently we are diminished in the eyes of some Parliamentarians because our Prime Minister is not grandstanding in Kiev instead of worrying about Rotherham), process and keeping the busted system ticking over but none of them understands the central problem of our time - how to return a sense of power and meaning to the people they clearly despise in their hearts or see just as fodder for their own drive to have the power to 'do good' at them or for them instead of with them.

Given our conditions, our problem is not that we are too aggressive as a population but that we are not aggressive enough. Every now and then, some extreme case of violence (such as Raoul Moat, the Ipswich serial killer or gun-killings in South London) creates a surge of anxiety about the psychopaths in our midst but these are tiny events in a country of over 60 million people. What is far more worrying is that the vast bulk of our huge population simply takes the unutterable amount of ordure heaped on them by incompetent governors and experts without protest - and then goes home, gets sick and thanks the system for treating them for the disease the system brought on them in the first place. We are back to the world of Milgram. The few who can capture the machine, the alpha apes, can command millions ... and that should really worry and depress us.