Bruce Charlton's Notions

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http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-lay-of-aotrou-and-itroun-tolkiens.html

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There are some really foolish people around. I mean those who look-forward with a positive relish to the collapse of the West sometime soon (timescale years or a few decades - unless we repent) as a time when the Left will get their just punishments.

Such people either have a limited imagination - or maybe they are young, strong, healthy, unmarried and without anybody they care about in the world - and look forward to engaging in some some untrammelled selfish exploitation.

But even more foolish are those who argue that the West will not collapse anytime soon (timescale many decades or centuries to go), and that those who anticipate collapse are engaged in wishful thinking! 

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I find it hard to comprehend the foolishness of any decent person who looks forward to the collapse of Western civilization. While it is inevitable that a self-hating,  self-destroying, anti-religious and pro-nihilistic society that organizes against The Good - will rapidly weaken itself until it begins to fall apart and can be overcome by its enemies; and while the destruction of organized, coercive purposive evil may be necessary; the this-worldly consequences of such a collapse would very probably be horrific beyond anything even the twentieth century witnessed.

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So, on present trends, the West will begin to collapse sooner rather than later - indeed the process has already begun but is disguised by the credulousness and ignorance of our media-addicted population who successfully re-label destruction and chaos as creation and progress.

What state the West will collapse-into, I do not know with any specificity, nor does anyone else - because there is no precedent.

And the degree of collapse is not pre-determined - because humans have free will and may repent and do something to combat, rather than aid, collapse. The sooner and more fully this happens, the less-bad the outcome would be (probably).

At present I see no sign whatsoever of societal repentance, indeed the opposite - but it is not ruled-out at any point.

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However, the concern about the possibility of imminent collapse beginning to be undeniably obvious on a timescale of years (or days) is perfectly reasonable, sensible, prudent.

Just because the (external and internal) enemies of the West have not yet seriously mounted a take-over, for whatever reason, is no cause for complacency when they are getting-stronger; while The West's understanding, honesty, will power, resolve and courage (and wealth, capability, efficiency) are all getting weaker.

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http://the-doosra.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/saeed-ajmal-is-as-good-or-better-than.html

http://the-doosra.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/what-would-be-maximum-speed-of-fast.html

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Probably not much - because we are not in any reversible pendulum swing such as has happened before in history, but off the chart.

There has never before in the history of the world been a society which has experienced 200 years in which economic growth has outstripped population rise, in which almost all the children born in the world are expected to live to adulthood (and where this has been the situation for up to eight generations in some places), in which the total world population was so many-fold larger than ever before, in which the average age is so very old in some countries and so very young in others, in which geographical economic inter-dependence is so extreme, in which population movements are so massive, in which all the wealthiest and most powerful countries have massively sub-replacement fertility, in which all the wealthiest and most powerful countries have abandoned religion wholesale in public discourse and among the ruling classes ... and so on.

And we also live in a world where in public discourse these subjects are either taboo or communication has been hemmed-about with such tight restrictions and punishments as to make clarity and honesty impossible.

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As I say, the world is in uncharted territory; we are far beyond any extreme of any previous pendulum swing, and indeed it looks as if the pendulum is still swinging, ever further away from any previous equilibrium point.

We can, perhaps, learn some causal principles from history, but causal principles interact - so in a complex system we cannot predict without precedent; and there is no precedent for the current situation.

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http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/was-jrr-tolkien-pessimist-no-not-really.html

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/review-of-paul-kochers-master-of-middle.html

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The modern mass media is not in its essence propaganda: it is participation.

It is engagement with the mass media that is pernicious; and engagement is primarily what the modern mass media does.

Engagement leads to dependence; dependence confers authority; and it is being subject to the authority of the mass media which is the prime evil.

Propaganda is secondary - and all forms of effective mass media propaganda ultimately depend on dependence.

Especially nowadays, when the propaganda is so objectively absurd, trivial, false - so obviously contrived; yet this crude and incoherent mass media propaganda is more effective than ever propaganda was before, for the simple reason that dependence on the mass media is greater than ever before.

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To show that the mass media is evil is therefore not so much a matter of pointing at the specific content - although indeed most of that content is objectively evil in that it attacks truth, beauty and virtue; propagates lies, ugliness and vice - but that the modern media is primarily evil in terms of its vast capacity to engage and enforce cognitive participation.

The psychology of the mass media is such that consumption is perceived as participation; consumption feels like engagement, and if it is perceived and and feels like engagement, then it is therefore engagement.

(The reality of the individual consumer having negligible impact - which is a necessary predicate and consequence of media being 'mass' - is therefore psychologically irrelevant.)

In this respect, the mass media is like modern democracy - it is intrinsically manipulative since it creates fake engagement - a low reward, low cost, high volume (near-ubiquitous in the population) engagement.

The kind of dependence is harder to notice and just as difficult to cure as the kind of high reward, high cost, low volume (rare in the population) addiction characteristic of the major drugs.

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So, how do we resist? ...Or rather, the proper question is: what do we resist?

And the answer is engagement.

We need to cut-down on the volume and the participation of mass media consumption, to the point that we are so much less dependent upon it that we can begin to perceive it from the outside.  

Most people are inside the mass media, as a fish is inside the ocean - the typical citizen swims in the water of the mass media and cannot perceive it. The media has become his 'reality'. He prefers some parts of the water over others, of course, and therefore prefers to swim in some places rather than others - but that is the sum of his choices. His preferences have all become media preferences.

But he is unaware-of, forgets-in-practice; that it is all water he is now living-in; it is all the mass media - and that he has been spending so much time in the water that he has ceased to recognize or return to the dry land of real reality; or even to remember that it exists.

Perhaps only in his dreams does he do this; but then dreams may themselves become permeated by the mass media. 

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We need - we must - cut-down our participation in the mass media to at least that point where the dry land of real-not-media reality is again recognized as the primary reality - when we again become aware that in entering the mass media we are leaving real reality behind and taking a swim.

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I think Christianity is supposed to display both sweetness and strength, which combination is the consequence of love; as shown in human affairs by a good mother or father with respect to their children - but this is a difficult combination for an institution to sustain.

Few churches have succeeded steadily in achieving this combination; but temptation lies in both directions, and even the best churches oscillate around the optimum.

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Liberal Christians (as individuals, not the leadership) often display sweetness, warmth of heart, kindness and breadth of welcome - but they are weak, and easily and rapidly conform to secular world, cease being Christian, then switch to being anti-Christians, who feel good about themselves while serving the enemy.

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But hazards lie in the other directions too - in pursuit of strength Christians may become ultra-correct, hard-line; they fall into extreme narrowness, harshness, legalism, pedantry; they cease to be loving and starting enjoying hatred and punishment. Thereby they cease to be Christian but begin to work against it: they, too, have switched sides.

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There are those who are repelled by the unloving harshness of the hardliners who soften their Christianity down to nothing or its near-opposite; and there are those who are repelled by the sentimentality of Liberals who harden their Christian practice into something which will reject and/or persecute any real (that is, loving) Christian.

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In sum, there is no institutional formula for avoiding both weakness and harshness - and any formula designed to avoid the one will tend to encourage the other, and also provoke a backlash; and this is a fact of life because there is no formula for love.

But love is real - or at least potentially so.

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I don't think this is theoretical - I think it is a real problem.

In the modern West the churches, and the variation within churches, do generally seem to be too-far in one or the other direction: mostly sweet, broad and submissive; but with other parts of Christianity tending too much toward the harsh, narrow and bossy.

We need the discernment of the heart to find churches that are truly both sweet and strong: a combination only possible when motivated by love. 

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Of course slavery is certainly a bad thing in the narrow sense that nobody would want to be a slave all else being equal.

But in real life all else never is equal - and the question is what other considerations are in practice allowed to weigh in favour of tolerating slavery.

Modern Leftists pretend to be 100 percent under-all-circumstances against slavery; but in real life they always make an exception when to suppress slavery would entail going against those principles which Leftists hold to be more important - such as the privileged status of some social groups.

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Thus slavery has been re-introduced into Britain in the past few decades, to a significant but unmeasured extent (certainly some thousands of slaves, maybe tens of thousands depending on definitions) within protected and privileged ethnic groups; and this has happened unopposed, uninvestigated and almost-entirely unprosecuted by government agencies (although to keep Britain free from slavery would nowadays be very easy indeed; easier than at any time in history); because Leftists operate on the basis that the actual real life slave-holding groups happen to be those who Leftists believe should have privileged status with respect to law and regulations.

(Indeed, laws and regulations are nowadays really only intended to apply to the productive and well-behaved among the native population, and perhaps only fully applicable to the productive and well-behaved adult men among these.)

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So, given that Leftists are prepared to tolerate, conceal and protect actual slavery as it exists now in Britain, and of course much more widely and openly in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, why are Leftists pretending to be theoretically vehemently-opposed to slavery?

Quite simple: because to claim to be utterly opposed to slavery under and conceivable circumstance enables Leftists to claim absolute and qualitative moral superiority over all previous historical societies which openly had slaves - which is pretty much all recorded human societies them until circa 1800.

That's all there is to it.

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Just a note to give a name to what the media does all the time with big visceral impact news stories - stories about atrocities, particularly nasty crimes - they ensure that the first report is such as to frame the long-term memory of the story.

This operates on the well-understood principle that strong emotions tend to become firmly linked by memory to the specific circumstances in which those emotions are experienced - then when a memory of the specific circumstances is recalled, so is the emotion: and that emotion affects the cognitive-processing of the memory.

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For example, the first report of a terrorist bombing atrocity will create a strong emotion - a visceral response - that will: 1. tend to be remembered enduringly; and 2. tend to become attached to some specific circumstance surrounding that visceral response.

The media will therefore, either speculatively or simply by association, e.g. by mentioning in close temporal or spatial relation to the evoking of the emotion - link the visceral response to the atrocity with something of which they disapprove: Christians or Right wingers usually.

The memory laid-down will then contain both the strong negative emotion, and the specific linked circumstance - i.e. the cocnept of Christian or Right winger.

Then recalling memory of the atrocity will evoke Christians or Right wingers; while the evoking of Christains or Right wingers will often evoke the emotions associated with the atrocity.

And all of this happens without need for conscious awareness.

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(Note: this mechanism is distributed through much of the psychology of learning and memory, but the mechanims is best described in the work of Antonio R Damasio: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html )

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Conversely, the mass media will either omit mentioning the name of Leftist-approved groups (eg. Leftist-designated 'victim' groups) - so that this specific circumstance is not then linked by memory to the bad feelings evoked by the atrocity.

Or, on the rare occasions in which the approved group cannot avoid being mentioned, it is spatio-temporally kept-apart from the nasty stuff, or padded-around with boring stuff - or indeed the whole report made unclear and boring (perhaps by usage of extreme bureacratic language), so the specific circumstance is not remembered, or the visceral impact of the actual event is played-down (in a context where the mass media usually exploits such things to the limit and beyond).

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All this is in line with basic psychological theory regarding memory and how it works - stuff I teach to first year students.

Once the frame is established - once there is a negative emotion associated in memory with the Leftist disliked groups such as Christians of Right wingers - then people are very resistant to change.

People exposed to the mass media do not necessarily know why thinking about these groups evoke nasty emotions, but it does; and because they do not know where this association came from - this link, once made, is very difficult to undo.

It seems that we are very attached to our first impressions; and the mass media knows this and exerts itself to the utmost in managing specifically these first impression; because it doesn't much matter what happens in subsequent news reports.

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Once people have been given the feeling that Christians or Right wingers are (somehow) responsible for an atrocity, then that feeling may - in practice - be ineradicable.

Once the emotional link has been made between a terrorist act and Christians, for instance, then people don't readily forget it, and are remarkably-reluctant to change it.

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Or, when an atrocity is not linked with its obvious perpetrators by the first report, when the first report says nothing about perpetrators; or labels them only using indirect, incomprehensible or boring speculations, hedged-about with qualifications and using unfamiliar technical terms; or slips immediately from labelling to worrying about the possible unfair backlash against people of the type under consideration - then the visceral emotion has nothing to attach-itself-to and is less likely to be remembered.

People are less likely to remember what happened when the emotion is free-floating, meaningless, as not been allowed to attach to any particular circumstance; because raw emotioin cannot be-made-sense-of, cannot be integreated with other knowledge.

Insofar as people do remember atrocities unattributed at first exposure, they will have a feeling that there is some uncertainty about who really did that bad thing.

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The media know all this stuff, and they use it all day, every day - they get in with the first strike, manipulate our first impressions; and that is all they really need to do.

We also need to know it, and recognize what they are doing to us.

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Suggestions at:

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/if-you-were-including-tolkien-in.html

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Total resistance to the modern mass media is impossible in The West - because the mass media is pervasive and omni-seductive.

So powerful, so all-encompassing, so alluring, so addictive that nobody who is compelled to remain within the modern situation ever could be sufficiently firm, conscientious, wholly unflagging and well-motivated.

Fighting the enticements of the modern mass media is a constant battle; and constant battle first makes us jaded, then desperate, finally leaves us exhausted - and when our resistance has thereby been broken-down, then the mass media will get us.

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Total resistance is impossible, but perpetual resistance is necessary - indeed resistance makes all the difference: all the difference between losing and keeping our soul.

Resistance to assimilation by the mass media, hence to the forces of darkness, requires unceasing vigilance, unresting alertness, unpunctuated strength of will... in other words it is impossible; therefore all this must be backed-up by continual repentance.

Only by refusing to give-up the resistance, despite the demoralisation of innumerable hourly failures, will we be able to have any significant freedom.

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However armoured you may be, you will have chinks of weakness - if not now, then at some time or another, sooner or later.

And the mass media is omni-potently set-up to penetrate all possible chinks of weakness.

And however tiny the initial penetration of your armour; the mass media has the capability (and purpose) to enlarge that breach; and like a parasitic wasp laying eggs inside a worm, where they may hatch and devour it utterly from within, so the mass media can enlarge and grow within you until it has consumed your soul - even starting from the smallest of beginnings.

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Is the situation then hopeless?

No - not for a Christian. For a Christian this is merely a quantitative amplification of normal life, life as it always has been.

But the situation does need continual vigilance, sustained attempts to restrict and minimize exposure, and an open-ended willingness to acknowledge and repent your own multitudinous failures to resist the mass media; and the renewing resolve - despite this - to try again, starting now.

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This capacity to perceive and acknowledge one's own faults, to take responsibility and repent, is surely near the core of the Christian life, and far, far more important than the strength of armour or will-power.

Christianity is not, ever, under any circumstances, only a matter of following rules with perfect obedience - and even if this were possible (and in the case of the modern mass media for most people most of the time it is not possible perfectly to follow the rules of righteousness) - then to follow the right rules for the wrong reasons or in the wrong (un-loving) spirit is utterly worthless.

Our recidivism, our endless failures, ought to makes us ever-more humble and grateful for the forgiveness consequent upon Christ's atonement.

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So long as we acknowledge and repent - and do not defend, nor justify, nor rationalize - our failures, either to ourselves or to others; the number and frequency of our inevitable failures is immaterial, and we will not be - we cannot be - corrupted by the mass media beyond prospect of rescue at the last.  

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Although I have been reading Middle English for forty years, on and off, including the Gawain poet - and more recently Langland's Piers Plowman - and although I knew in theory how the alliteration was constructed - until today (this very evening) I never understood how the alliteration did the primary work of poetry which is to make it memorable.

Or rather, memorizable - by the poet.

...That being the primary origin of poetry.

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(And the un-memorability of high status modern poetry (coughSeamusHeaneycough) is a clue to the fact that it is not real poetry - not the same kind of thing which poetry was in pre-modern times.)

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Anyway, today, this evening, the penny dropped. I worked-out for myself - piecing together clues from re-reading the descriptions of the mechanisms of alliterative verse especially by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis - and adding the principle that memorability was the key.

Thus I worked out 'in a flash' how alliterative poetry must have been written, remembered and recited - and then I was immediately able to confirm this by finding some recently-posted (and not previously viewed) informal YouTube recitations from a young expert in this topic at Leeds University - one Dr Alaric Hall (whose PhD thesis was on elves! http://www.alarichall.org.uk/phd.php) - which completely confirmed my thesis.

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The basic structure of Old and Middle English alliterative poetry was that it was written in two half lines - each half line with two stresses which alliterate twice in the first half line, and then on the first stress of the second half line.

Alliterate - Alliterate // Alliterate - Not

The key insight was from Lewis's essay (in Selected Literary Essays) when he said that the three alliterating words in a line carried the essential meaning of the line.

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This suggests that the poet constructed the poem around the three alliterating words in each line, and remembered it by learning these three words, and recited it by stressing these three words.

It is likely - given the way that memory works - that the unstressed words and the non-alliterating stressed word in each line were skipped-over, somewhat variable, and probably paraphrased in actual performance-from-memory.

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How would this work in recitation?

Well not in any of the ways that I had heard alliterative verse performed by actors - who focused on the meaning of the lines, as if they were prose.

But it would, I expect, have sounded like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C6FbdX-UFQ

or perhaps even more like this (the first part of the same passage, done in an even more un-inhibited style):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PQN9X4P7ZY

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Having spent several years proving - to my own satisfaction, at least - the innate corruption of the modern mass media; the question arises of what kind of influence or impact is sought by a blog of this type. Is it a part of the mass media?

Well, no. The actual audience is small enough to fit into a single lecture theatre, and the number of comments amounts to just a few per post - this is not operating on any kind of 'mass scale' (except in unrealized potentiality).

But what would happen if, by some ill-chance, this blog attracted an order of magnitude greater notice:  if I had an audience of thousands, tens of thousands per day - if a had to sift through and perhaps respond to hundreds of comments? If my postings were regularly featured in the mainstream mass media?

What would happen if, in other words, this blog joined the mass media?

Clearly any good in it would be destroyed; by one means or another. A blog can only join the mass media either by tailoring itself to the mass media, or else by being misrepresented by the mass media.

The mass media simply cannot include the kind of material which is mostly featured in this blog - it is an impossibility, it simply cannot be represented there - only if grossly distorted or inverted in its meaning; and this is structural, not a matter of anybody's particular will.

So, there is a sweet spot of influence and impact for a blog such as this one.

The current audience for this blog could valuably be scaled-up, to a point - but going beyond that point would necessarily be destructive.

So, I think this blog could usefully grow somewhat more, maybe to double its present level of clout?

But somewhere between that doubled-point and a ten-fold amplification, the blog would either explode or implode; but would anyway not be the same thing at all; but would become assimmilated to the mass media.

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http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/animal-spirits-akerlof-shiller-review.html

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As of a few minutes ago, I noticed that the blog has passed a million page views - specifically it had one million, forty-four thousand and eighty-one page views for 2074 posts; which is [frantic punching of calculator buttons...] a mean-average of about 484 views per post.

(But of course the true distribution of page views in heavily positively skewed - a few with thousands of views, and most with less than two hundred - hence non-normally distributed.)

Is this quite good? Or (as I suspect) seriously lame for a blog now running for more than three years at a rate of around two posts a day (including links to my other blogs)?

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Well, it's good enough for my purpose - which is absolutely not to make any kind of mass media impact and not to fuel any kind of mass movement (either of which would be fatal); but to reach a reasonable number of individuals, with the purpose to help save and preserve their souls in the present epidemic insanity.

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Yes, pretty much correct.

It turns-out that 'everything' is, pretty much, explained by sex - at least so far as secular modern societies go.

Specifically, it seems that libido, the sex drive, is - in the absence of religion - the most powerful of human drives.

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In particular when we consider not only the primary sex drive - the drive, that is, to have sex; but also the sublimated sex drive - which is the sex drive transformed into other motivations.

Freud never satisfactorily defined the specifics of sublimation (presumably because he was talking and writing utter nonsense 99% of the time) - but from an evolutionary psychology perspective it seems obvious that the major sublimations of the sex drive are onto those behaviours which are associated with greater sexual opportunity - for men, primarily high status (relative to other men), and also masculine physique and masculine-typical dominant behaviours; for women the appearance of youth and health; for both sexes the signals of sexual availability.

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As society has progressively, step-by-step, eliminated religion - then sex has come to the fore as the primary remaining motivation - the only strong motivation left-over under atheism; and conversely, the sexual impulse has been perhaps the primary motivation for the elimination of religion.

Thus we live in by far the most sexualized environment in the history of the world - with extraordinarily widespread actual sexual licence and a vastly greater scale of sexual depictions; but a great deal more of behaviour primarily-motivated by sexual goals - plus, in addition, very clear and widespread sublimations of the sex drive with wholesale fake signalling of status and masculine physique and behaviour among men; fake signalling of youth and health among women; and massive advertisement (also often fake) of sexual-availability among men and women.

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Secular modernity is very obviously mostly, therefore, a matter of the libido and its sublimations - presumably because this is what most powerfully motivates secular Man, what gets things done in a world without religion.

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So Freud was right! - in a way...

Or rather, when a society becomes degraded and corrupted by secular, materialist and selfish influences - such as those of Freud himself - then, indeed, libido and its sublimations do come to the fore and begin to explain most of what goes-on.

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In the year 161 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus ascended the Julian throne. Under that strenuous and ethical rationalist, persecution [of the Christian church] began to change.

The self-consciousness of the Empire as regards Christians took, through the mind and person of the Emperor, a more deliberate form. What had been irritation, fury, riots of the blood, became a deliberate moral and intellectual effort. [...] 

The 'good' Emperors had come to regard Christianity as an evil, as all tolerant and noble non-Christian minds tend to do. 

Partly, no doubt, the best Emperors had the highest idea of their duty to the safety of the State. But also they had the highest sense of moral balance and the least sense of the necessity of Redemption.

The worse Emperors—Commodus, Heliogabalus—had a more superstitious impulse which was certainly more in accord with the asserted dogmas of the Gospel.

Gods, and the nature of the Gods, are likely to be better understood by sinful than by stoical minds.


From The Descent of the Dove - a short history of the Holy Spirit in the church, by Charles Williams - 1939

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NOTE: A profound observation.

The most moral of non-Christians, if they begin to understand Christianity and take it seriously, often come to regard Christianity as an evil. 

I know this from my own past experience, but I think many lifelong and devout Christians are unaware of the fact. 

As Charles Williams noted; the worst, the most systematic and thorough, persecution of Christians came from the best pagan Emperors. 

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In the mid-seventies, as a mid-teen, I discovered Classical Music, and of course wanted to buy as many vinyl LPs as possible, so I could study and enjoy my favourite pieces.

My staple diet was the Classics for Pleasure series, since these were both the cheapest LPs, and also (almost all) very good performances.

My way-in was probably via the performances of Bach's Brandenberg Concerti by a scratch orchestra (that is, an orchestra assembled for the occasion) called The Virtuosi of England, conducted by Arthur Davison, from a new edition by Richard Townend, and the recording produced by John Boyden.

I ended-up buying quite a lot of these Davison/ Townend/ Boyden/ Virtuosi of England recordings of  Bach, Albinoni, Vivaldi, Mozart, Purcell and what-not. I almost always liked them a lot; but they are somewhat mysterious, unappreciated and undocumented.

I infer that the Virtuosi of England (who were often listed by name) were composed of some of the best London orchestra musicians of that era - principals from the various 'sections' of the Philharmonia, BBC Symphony, LSO etc., freelancers of the stature of David Munrow (recorder) and other Professors from the Royal Academy of Music - presumably moonlighting for extra pocket-money; and led, usually, by Kenneth Sillito (who led the Gabrieli String Quartet, and the very best chamber orchestra I have ever known: The Academy of St Martin in the Fields).

The Virtuosi of England... Long-gone, unrecognized, but not forgotten by me - on the contrary remembered with gratitude; and their clean, fresh, firm vinyl performances still being enjoyed (despite forty years worth of accumulated scratches)!

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The early Leftists, Fabians and Bolsheviks, for example, were very keen on central planning and 'rational' decision making in the economy.

Indeed rational planning was the absolute centre, focus and main plank of Leftism in most of its modernizing varieties. 

This led to the desire for totalitarian dictatorship, and experiments with it.

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But modern Leftism seems to have dispensed with rational central planning, and embraced uncontrolled chaos with no centralization (instead discipline only by an un-centred mass media) and zero rationality (instead only black-box bureaucratic procedures).

It seems superficially strange - and it would be strange if Leftism really had a positive and constructive agenda - but of course it does not.

Leftism, as it developed, was revealed as a negative agenda - defined by being against this, that and the other (against class inequality, but not in favour of equality, against sexism but not in favour of ignoring sex, ditto race...).

And it turns out that in reality Leftism is against economic freedom, 'laissez-faire' self-regulation and autonomy of economic agents, but not actually in favour of central and rational planning - but actually merely in favour of destroying economic freedom.

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It turns out that the Left wasn't really all that bothered about the very thing that was placed at the absolute centre of their supposed political agenda.

It turns out that the Left is more concerned to implement destruction than to create anything in particular.

It is long overdue that the real nature of the Left was recognized - because, let's face it, there is by now plenty of evidence.

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A long time ago, mainstream Leftism used to be utopian - and to re-explore that era I began looking through my old copy of News from Nowhere, by William Morris - which always struck me (as a youth) as the most desirable socialist utopia I encountered.

I did not get very far reading it - because, although it is beautifully written, after about six pages I was overwhelmed with 'yes, I get the idea' and couldn't be bothered to read more and more examples of it.

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The idea is that a socialist society would be like an ideal holiday, in a beautiful and unpolluted country, full of wonderful arts and crafts, and people who are warm, friendly and hardworking from the sheer joyous expression of their nature.

It is a world in which, so far as the externals of life go, there is nothing wrong.

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But it is no better than an idealized holiday.

And I find it impossible, by any degree of extrapolation or amplification, to make an idealized holiday into an eternal Heaven. It is simply inadequate to my-self, and especially to my best-self.

To be contented for eternity with an ideal holiday I would have to be much less an entity than I perceive myself to be (at my best) - I would have to excise my deepest yearnings.

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To a person who is crushed by poverty, pain, sordidness and tyrannical authority - an ideal holiday sounds like more than enough - to escape seems sufficient.

But to anyone who is not currently so crushed, and who has actually experienced something approximating to the perfect holiday, it is clear that no matter how vividly painted - such a world is not utopia.

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It is also based upon either an error or a self-deception regarding human nature, and the possibility of Men being always as Men are at their very best; which means blaming all the significant evils of men upon social circumstances.

(Instead of Man being born free yet everywhere in chains; it is a case of believing that men Men are born good, but are everywhere being made to do evil by 'society'.)

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But I find that the example of family life is qualitatively different from that of holiday. Family life at its best is something that I can easily imagine may be imaginatively extrapolated into such a type of ideal, that it would indeed be eternal fulfilment.

This is perhaps because family relationships have (at their peak) a divine quality, which reveals a level of response in ourselves and possibility in the nature of things - specifically an extension of family relations to include the divine -  that makes Heaven imaginable merely by quantitative extension.

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In sum, an ideal holiday seems stubbornly to remain at the level of pleasure - and no matter how much pleasure may be amplified and sustained, pleasure does not suffice.

But an ideal family is a different matter, being of the realm of love - which in actual practice, as well as imaginable aspiration, satisfies us more deeply and fully than any conceivable pleasure.

Ideal family love satisfies, yet not only as a perfect blissful moment (although there are those); but also and mostly as a thing incorporating motivation and purpose, a thing changing and growing, and a thing we do not merely observe but are on-the-inside-of, completely involved-with.

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The following excerpted talk from one of the Mormon leaders (an Elder of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles) demonstrates to Mainstream denominations what needs to be done, what should be done, by Christian leaders when confronted by escalating secular persecution.

What an edifying and inspiring contrast this is when compared with the weak, weaselling compromises of so many other Christian leaders.

**

From the lecture No Other Gods by Elder Dallin H Oaks, presented at the CJCLDS General Conference October 2013.