Sacred and Profane Cannibalism; They Rotted in their Own Dung, The Fickle and Verminous Colony; Putrid Worms and Vile Snails Those are some of the chapter-headings from Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams, [1] not a work for the faint-hearted or weak- stomached. Neither is it a work for the evidence-collector, being impressionistic and uncritical; for Camporesi… read more »
Charles Fort [1] used to maintain that an idea would spread when its time had come, and although truistic the idea is difficult to resist when one finds what seem at first glance to be partial accounts of systematic ideology appearing incidentally in books on other subjects. The present example occurs in The Greening of… read more »
WORK Is it good or bad? On the one hand, worries about unemployment, and cries of triumph at having got more people back to work. On the other, a report that since 1979 the increasing productivity of car factories has enabled them almost to halve the number of people employed to 289,000 – and that,… read more »
The vast mass of non-political people set the limits within which society is able to operate, anything they refuse to accept being “politically impossible.” Effective prohibition of alcohol is one example of this, effective prohibition of abortion another. The people rarely try to argue a case for drinking or abortion, they just carry on with… read more »
WHATEVER happened to the Community Charge? Our choice now seems to lie between a government determined to introduce a poll tax and an opposition half-heartedly resisting it. The difference between them rests on political-ideological rather than economic grounds; many supporters of the government know the new tax will cost them more than their rates and… read more »
For ages I’ve been tempted to write dealing with one aspect or another of s.i. It seems such a rational theory and yet it is one that I will never accept because, if true, it follows that humanity is doomed never to make any real advance. IC35 arrived just as I finished – finally –… read more »
Pat Robertson, a television preacher now seeking the Republican nomination in the US Presidential election, recently visited a school in the remote and mountainous north of New Hampshire. He asked the pupils whether they had taken drugs or knew anybody who had done so, and everybody in the room put a hand up. [1] If… read more »
The mystics have long insisted on the need for recognition of the dark side, and one achievement of the past century has been to link this intuition with the methods of science, producing rational studies of the irrational. One example appears in Aldous Huxley’s studies of consciousness-changing drugs (mainly, in those innocent days, peyoti) but… read more »
For people who claim to be rational, or trying to become so, one task overrides all others: to understand the society we both inhabit and constitute. Only by doing this can we hope to understand ourselves, our gods or our environment, for all of these are largely produced by our ideology-governed society. People display different… read more »
In 1845 Johann Kaspar Schmidt, writing under the name of Max Stirner, published his version of egoism. Highly original, intensely provoking, puzzling and disconcerting, the book acts as an irritant. Working with the English translation by Steven J. Byington [1] I produced more than one short study (appearing in IC and Freedom) which proved on… read more »