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Updates on the update: The ISBN of the second edition of The Tyranny of Ambiguity is to be 978-1-901240-21-4. It has 528 pages, 24 of which are indexes. The price will be £42, which will include UK postage (there will have to be a supplement for overseas orders).
Merry Christmas to all Heretical visitors!
The second edition of TOA is now practically completed, and at page-proof stage, but it has had to be shelved temporarily. The book was put aside to resume work on a paper but it will be picked up again very shortly. There will be an article of mine in the next issue (Issue 52) of Heritage & Destiny giving a psychological analysis of spree killers.
In this report I would like to clear a couple of mundane matters. First is a list of the charges I faced. This is significant in all sorts of ways, not least helping people have an idea whether they are breaking Britain’s notoriously flexible Public Order Act or not. It is, I think, possible to suppose from the list that having a certain political perspective and expressing a sense of humour is illegal.
The list of charges has been moved to the ‘Legal Saga Summary’ page to avoid duplication.
I was convicted of all the charges during a trial and then a retrial, excepting a couple for which the evidence was mislaid. Accordingly, the first edition of the Don’t Be Sheeple is “illegal” while the second edition is not. Distribution of the Crumb cartoons via the internet from a California web server is “illegal” but supplying them in printed form over the counter in a British bookshop is not. Perhaps someone can make sense of this, because I certainly cannot.
While writing the Spree Killers article the topic of humour came to mind and, in light of the above, I shall treat it in more detail here. As with most things, this theme was first explored in The Tyranny of Ambiguity.
This also illustrates why the analysis in TOA is so detailed. Perhaps sometimes it might seem overly so, but time and again it has been found that combining a couple of different aspects from that analysis produces a stunning new perception. The example I have in mind combines ambiguity of intention (AoI), humour and neurosis.
The role of humour, I concluded, was to distribute information and alleviate neurotic tension. An elementary example is the neurotic stress experienced when attempting to avoid tokens. In a super-feminine environment it can be pretty difficult to make a proposal to a female which will not be construed as an arrangement for sex (when, for example, “coffee” has become “sex”). Its antithesis is a group of people using double entendres in jest.
The new realisation, not a fresh insight but one which came crashing to the fore during the spree killers analysis, is that females will suppress perfectly innocuous male instincts in order to maintain them in a state of generalised neurosis. The confused and neurotic male is easier to manipulate, so the more neurotic the male, the more female control can be exerted. This is directly applicable to the inhibition of humour – but only if it fulfils certain criteria.
Some years ago a British comedian, Jeremy Hardy, joked on national BBC radio that “If you just took everyone from the BNP, and everyone who votes for them, and shot them in the back of the head, there would be a brighter future for us all.” Hardy is still working for the BBC, and is thus a member of the British Establishment. His career didn’t dramatically end, nor was he jailed, because his joke fitted with the agenda the media is relentlessly pursuing, albeit less explicitly. This kind of humour is evidently acceptable, whereas one can readily imagine what the reaction would have been had the butt of his joke been another. The obviously comedic hyperbole of the Heretical web pages above is contrary to that agenda, so is not acceptable. Nevertheless humour, irrespective of its form, is a perfectly natural and normal response to tension and taboo, certainly among British males.
Setting humour aside, the basic innocuous male instinct I shall use for the purpose of example is the masculine instinct to distribute markers indiscriminately. One expression of this is talking to people without ulterior motive, passing the time of day or just being sociable.
A marker is inappetent if nothing is desired, otherwise it is appetent. Typical appetent marking is when a female who, on seeing you on the street, might usually give only a reserved greeting or ignore you. When she is in the company of other females however she stops to talk to you. This is because she wishes to demonstrate the relationship she has with you to the other females.
In its primary definition ambiguity of intention is the capacity of a person, particularly a male, to say something to a female (the Approach Statement) without it being construed as a sexual approach. Of course these procedures can be extended to the non-sexual realm, but as usual sexual behaviour provides us not only with the origin of these mechanisms but also with the best examples. A male could approach another male just to chat or share a joke, or he could want something from him (an appetent marker). In Amsterdam, which was the prototype super-feminine environment in which Procedural Analysis was developed, people could become visibly neurotic if you started a conversation and your motive for doing so was not immediately obvious. It was as if the level of societal neurosis was so high that people were unable to withstand any more ambiguity. There were other social aberrations as well, many of which are documented in TOA.
We start our analysis with the female propensity to interpret any friendly approach as a sexual one. If a male makes a friendly or incidental comment to a female, she is likely to interpret it as a “come-on,” i.e. a sexual approach. Under this interpretation she is flattered: it means she is desired (in the language of PA, she is enhanced – Enhancement of Self). Moreover if she transmits this interpretation to the male it is likely to affect his subsequent behaviour. Seeing that she takes this view, he is likely to reserve his friendly remarks to females he actually desires (targets). Thus the female by her interpretation has not only personally benefitted by her enhancement, she has acted for females in the whole, because ambiguity of intention is removed from males generally.
In fact this is an elementary example of Compound Benefit. CB occurs when a procedure confers benefit on multiple levels. Her interpretation of the friendly comment as an approach benefits her individually and females in general. This dual combination is common to many female procedures.
The mechanism can be advanced and made more potent. Transduction is “inducing a false feeling.” The following is an excerpt from TOA (1st ed. p. 439, 2nd ed. p. 435):
Transduction was an important mechanism which was widely used to ensure that only unambiguous approaches were made to females. Simple attempts to be friendly were actively discouraged: a male might make a jocular remark to a female but she, eager to interpret it as an approach and complimentary to her, and just as eager to indulge herself in delivering a rejection, would transduce a feeling of rejection onto the male. This scenario was especially impressive to him because he suffers a double blow: he must endure not only the sense of being rejected (which, had he really been making an approach, he would have half-expected) but being rejected when he was just being sociable. Thenceforth he only approaches targets, considerably weakening his hand because all ambiguity in his intentions has been removed.
The sense of being rejected may be induced by the female’s mannerism, demeanour, subliminal intimation or tone of voice. It can be felt even when no explicit rejection is made. This, I hope, is a clear example both of transduction and of female inhibition of harmless, even beneficial, male instincts.
The big question of course is, what other ways is this mechanism used to induce false emotion and manipulate us? Emotions impel behaviour. Plus, what other perfectly normal (and healthy, and necessary) human actions are being inhibited?
Another outstanding matter is the final reckoning of our Legal Fund. Those who contributed have a right to know what became of their donations.
As I think was previously reported, the unstable and profligate Bruce Leichty in California made off with most of the money. For one of the many minor immigration hearings during the 11 months we spent in Santa Ana City Jail he produced a veritable tome of a legal submission, which would have been just as likely to be rejected had it been on two pages. However its primary purpose was evidently to consume the funds in hand and provide an arguable case for the transfer of those funds to the Leichty mortgage account, or his urgent alimony payments, or whatever. At one point he threatened to turn up at the immigration court and make a scene, I think about the fact that he had not instantly been able to ditch his clients, us having failed to come up with the $30,000 he was then demanding. His submission to the court, now for himself, argued that he was being cast into involuntary servitude (i.e. made a slave) by being obliged to represent us unpaid.
In the module where we were in Santa Ana Jail there was a computer for legal use. At one point after the Leichty affair I used it to draft a Habeas Corpus application to the local federal court, petitioning for our release. It was an uphill struggle, only being able to use it for at most a couple of hours each day, and with frequent difficulty getting prints. After a few weeks however I’d got what I thought was rather a good submission, running to 11 pages or so of dense legal argument. Then the computer stopped working, and by the time the network came back to life weeks later my prospective submission had disappeared, although other prisoners’ files were intact.
Back in England, there was an outstanding legal bill following a complaint from a Jew in Scotland. The individual had complained to the police about some literature he had received with a memory module, resulting in a Scottish criminal charge of “religious harassment.” In England I was prosecuted for distribution and possession of material “likely to incite racial hatred.” So in England it was supposed to be racial, in Scotland, religious. Nothing beats having it both ways.
This reminds me of pre-scientific, actually primitive, concepts of truth. I would say these are however ubiquitous: it is fact-based thinking that is rare. A common form of truth is ‘What’s good for me (or my population) is true, what’s bad is false.’ Another is ‘Whatever argument I can get away with’ (cf. Proposition 8 in TOA). This is the female strategy, probably deriving, as most, from the female’s lesser physical strength. This handicap impels the evolution of policies to compensate for it. There were several times when detailing the essentials of Procedural Analysis to females and they took it in and concurred. After all, signals, markers, tokens and handles are natural territory for the female. Their fine degrees and manipulations can be expressed to each other through tone of voice and other subtle means, which females comprehend but males do not. It’s just that they (signals, markers, tokens and handles) have never been formalised.
Then in discussion with the women the point would arrive when they would realise that this new-fangled behaviour analysis was contrary to their interests, and from that point on no concession of its validity would be given. None, no matter what was said or argued.
Judaism provides a good, if incidental, example of differing concepts of truth. Religious Jews believe they can trick God, and this is a concept of a Supreme Being which the Christian finds exotic (see Jewish History, Jewish Religion by Israel Shahak). However I have again digressed, and will return to the financial matter.
I had written to the Scottish lawyer who represented me at the Glasgow court from Santa Ana Jail telling him I will sort out his bill when I am able. A discount had been implied as I had not qualified for Scottish legal aid. I contacted him while I was at the hostel in York and he sent a bill for about £600, I forget the exact figure. I replied saying, perhaps he’s got me mixed up with the English Legal Aid Board, with its annual budget of billions? And would he settle for what’s left in the Legal Fund, which was about £300? In very lawyerly terms he agreed, and that was the end of the money. It did get spent on what it was intended for.
In the forthcoming edition of TOA the footnotes have been incorporated into the main text and descriptions of many of the characters have been enhanced. The "minor subculture celebrity" in the first edition is now named as Genesis P. Orridge, still a minor subculture celebrity but now in New York earning a prize for longevity. The Amsterdam pirate radio stations I broadcast on are also now mentioned and a couple of events removed during previous over-zealous editing have been restored. Overall, the changes make the book easier to read as a narrative.
The minor breakthrough I mentioned – of the relationship between Response Displacement and Neurotic Suspension – has been included in the new edition, since only a minor addition was required. It appears that Response Displacement provides the impetus into Neurotic Suspension, and this is proposed as a model for Neurotic Suspension generally.
A first report is that TOA is much more readable without the footnotes. The price has yet to be fixed, but it will have to increase on the first edition (£30) because binding costs have doubled.
I’m pleased with the Spree Killers article, and believe it sheds light on an awful, modern phenomenon which is certain to recur. The editor certainly liked it. I can relate to the character Joseph Grand in The Plague by Albert Camus, who thoughout the novel is striving for the perfect opening sentence. He imagines a publisher seeing his manuscript and crying, “Hats off, gentlemen!” However Grand never gets beyond that first sentence, producing a mini-manuscript which consists entirely of drafts and amendments to that single sentence: it is never quite perfect.
Good writing involves two elements: the ability to write engagingly, and maintain the reader’s attention, and having something to say. The second component is the more rare. In ‘Spree Killers: The Forefront of Knowledge’ I have managed to combine some stylish prose with an important, probably ground-breaking, analysis. It may be the best article I’ve ever written and my fear right now is that I shall have difficulty matching it in the future. That dual combination of inspired writing and critical message doesn’t happen often.
I was in a music shop in York recently and found myself being offered an Ensoniq SQ-80 synthesizer cheaply. This is an old 5-octave digital synth with analogue filters. It’s rather battered and crackly, but if nothing else I could use its plain keyboard. It didn’t seem very impressive, and not liking the programmer-like interface I was close to getting rid of it. That is, until I connected it via MIDI and drove the synth from the Yamaha’s fully weighted keyboard. It came alive! So now often emanating from Heresy Manor is a rich blend of concert grand and Fender Rhodes pianos. After three years inside (and 9 months in a probation hostel) my fingers are coming back to life. Music is just a hobby now though, the important thing is the psychology and on that front I’m very busy and making progress.
Simon Sheppard, December 2012
