How I dislike the phrase “mental health”. In its benign form it has a pastel, slightly perfumed air about it — something and nothing, as we say. Add the word “problem” and it becomes a spitting mass of contradictions and false positives.

Thanks to new American proposals, “psychosis” is set to become the badge of choice for mental health problems and perceived deviations from “normal” behaviour.

I once wrote an article on the mystical experiences of a few famed saints of the Church. “Hmm,” said an expert, “it’s probably bi-polar disorder.”

Nothing is allowed to exist beyond the current orthodoxy.

Descartes’s I think, therefore I am is a genuine symptom of psychosis because it locks us into random processes of brain activity. This extreme narrowing of experience is a prison cell for the mind, a place where the rest of existence is “other” and therefore threatening. It is characteristic of bullies, dictators, and authoritarians (who think they are always right) and scientism, which restricts all experience to pathways defined by blind intellect.

Only the narrow-minded could classify most human behaviour as illness.

We British should stop listening to American and European narrowlogues and revisit our famed tolerance of quirk, difference and benign oddity. That’s what made our predecessors such good inventors — and among the freest people on earth.

Apart from Boris, where have all the English eccentrics gone?

History teaching is rightly back in the educational spotlight under the new Coalition Government. Schools’ chief Michael Gove is determined to bring back rigorous teaching standards, including a detailed treatment of narrative history.

Pupils need to be able to position themselves in time and space. History gives them temporal awareness of their place in the scheme of things. Labour neglected the subject, appearing to believe that historical accuracy would turn students into Tories. They were probably right.

In my school, I was regarded as a whizz on the French Revolution. I was able to field questions that even the history master couldn’t answer in detail. What was my secret?

I hadn’t then read Edmund Burke’s famous work on the subject, nor yet Carlyle’s. Even Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities was a pleasure for the future.

The source of my devilish knowledge were the novels of Dennis Wheatley, who also wrote extensively on occultism. Anyone who has read the swashbuckling tales of one Roger Brooke, a fictional Englishman who spent the entire period in revolutionary France, will have a sound grasp of that important slice of French, and British, history.

I was lucky to live close to one of the last of the private libraries. It kept every book it had ever possessed, so was a treasure store of old fiction. I lapped it up in huge gulps.

My main point is that fiction can be an effective way of introducing youngsters to historical narrative. I happen to know that Michael Gove is a fan of Dennis Wheatley — who incidentally worked with Winston Churchill during the war.

Might we soon see the old boy back in favour in English classrooms?

Ever since I set up this website, Syntagma, along with Syntagma Media in 2005, I’ve regretted having to use syntagmamedia.com instead of a plain syntagma domain.

All things come to him who waits. The new .co domain suffix, which arrived on July 20, presents a clean sheet for those of us with impure business domain names.

As well as nabbing johnevans.co (a triumph, I assure you), I’ve managed to secure syntagma.co. The “co” signifies “company”, so is a dignified top-level alternative to .com, and is not local like .co.uk.

The present Syntagma site will remain on syntagmamedia.com for familiarity’s sake.

That vanity of vanities, a website in one’s own name, in this case John Evans (dot co) now exists: John Evans’s personal website.

I may yet regret this.

Annoyment of the Week

I haven’t really been annoyed by anything this week. A Conservative Government, albeit a tad diluted, is a serene experience for most of us.

Even Dave’s brutalist approach to diplomacy gives a front-foot feel to the new politics.

Does it get any better than this? When a chap can’t get steamed up about politics, might he be tired of life?

Now I’m starting to talk myself into artificial annoyments. I shall desist and bid you all peace and goodwill.

Germanic sense is beginning to overcome French pursuit of glory.

Wilhelm Nolling, one of five German professors challenging the legality of the European Union’s response to the financial and economic crises, is predicting social unrest.

“A transfer union [money flowing from rich countries to poorer ones] will destroy the social peace in Europe”, he said. “We need to form a new heart of the euro: France, Germany, Finland, Austria and the Netherlands. All the other states should be given their freedom back. That would give them a real opportunity to increase their competitiveness through currency devaluations.”

Just two years ago such sentiments were unthinkable. Now they are commonplace.

The shine has come off the EU and the eurozone. How soon before this absurd political confection is holed beneath the waterline?

Pics of the Week

The pictures show the Cathedral Green in Exeter 10 days apart. The first was shot on the 12th of July, the other on the 22nd.

What a difference a splash of rain makes.

John Evans

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Liberal-Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s new overgrown-schoolboy hairdo is much too Red Nose Day for inclusion in a serious political website — so I’m writing about it here.

When William Hague first adopted his Mekon cut, I remember thinking he must have lost his marbles along with his tresses. Do you recall his Neanderthal mane at 16? But, over the years, his egghead look has grown on us. At least it allows him to age gracefully.

By contrast, as Cleggie gets older, his haircut will become younger and younger. A bit like the picture of Dorian Gray.

I bet this dyed, bristly, birdsnest soupcon is redesigned before very much longer.

As a natural-born conservative, I’ve always been attracted to Edmund Burke’s idea of the “natural society” — one in which people find their own social levels according to ability and inclination, and are able to speak out freely as they wish.

It seems obvious to me that such an arrangement results in a generally contented population, and therefore a peaceable one.

The Labour government (1997-2009) has destroyed that homely consensus. Early on, it introduced a rigid system of Marxist equality legislation that imported alien doctrines and rigidities into Britain. All manner of inoffensive folk were inexplicably demonized, and often criminalized, for views and actions that would not have been remarked upon during centuries past.

Ideological correctness was the order constantly barked from above. An Orwellian State sprouted up where once civility and civilization stood. Society as a whole became disorganized and sullen, with serious outbreaks of violence on the streets, especially among the young of all classes. Alcoholism is now commonplace, as are hard drug habits, knife and gun crime.

All this recent misery and disorder can be traced back to obsessive social engineering by government ministers we wouldn’t trust to assemble a flat-pack whelk stall.

How we have lost our natural society, and what we can do to retrieve it, is a big topic for another day. For now, let’s speculate on what the founders of psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung and Adler, would have made of New Labour Britain — in my own, surmised, words:

“Equality is a dangerous matter for politicians to touch. They have no idea what complex areas of the mind they are meddling with. Equality before God, the law and the ballot box is as far as a democratic society should go. Any further and it risks wholesale disturbance across the population.

“If people are forced to bottle up their natural instincts and inclinations, with no outlets of expression, they develop severe anxiety neuroses and tensions that will increasing boil over into social disorder. People who are discontented most of the time inevitably reach for the bottle and the needle to calm their inner turmoil.

“Enforcing equality of attributes is a minefield best left alone. It is also self-defeating because attributes are, by their very nature, unequally distributed across the human population. Every parent observes that fact in the personalities of their children, which are anything but equal, despite sharing a genetic makeup.

“Nothing, save losing a war on homeground, is as explosively destructive of civilized values than enforced equality of attributes. Karl Marx, like all socialists, never understood human nature. Look where that got him — he nearly destroyed the world.”

Something else for David Cameron’s Conservatives to get rid of then?

Have you tried Sainsbury’s sugar-free dark chocolate? I’m chewing on a lump now and it’s surprisingly good. In fact it tastes just like normal chocolate.

It’s supposed to be beneficial to the old ticker too. Something to do with antioxidants and all that.

Predictably, the killjoys were out in force this week rubbishing claims that the dark brown stuff is good for you. You’ll get fat, they shriek. Obesity is a fate worse than death. Stop before it’s too late!

It’s enough to give you a heart attack, isn’t it?

Why do the current crop of British politicians copy everyone else?

Whenever a new policy is suggested, the accompanying spin alerts us to the supposedly comforting fact that it’s been developed and tried out by Sweden/Australia/America … and other generous countries around the world.

Has the UK lost its ability to create policy ideas pertinent to its history and the specific aspirations of its people?

Let’s be frank, the Labour party is an ideas-free zone, it can no more identify the wider needs of Britons than it can manage the economy for any decent length of time.

Under its diktat, almost every part of the country has been reduced to pathetic shards of failure and dereliction. Observe Labour’s strongholds in Glasgow, where constant Labour local government has bequeathed the inhabitants a life-expectancy lower than sub-Saharan Africa.

Make no mistake, the task of the upcoming Tory Government will be like the Labours of Hercules.

As we gear up for a possible June election, all the old arguments about that hallowed stretch of real estate, the centre ground, are bubbling up again.

This sacred turf is said to be the only place from which a party can win a General Election. Both centre-left and centre-right positions deter a crucial constituency — Middle Britain.

Given that Gordon Brown has boxed himself in electorally by a strange combination of anger and timidity — classic traits of the bully — a June 2009 poll is overwhelmingly his least worst choice. Even Peter Mandelson apparently accepts that view. We must assume it’s a strong possibility.

Will Brown try to regain the centre ground for Labour from the artful Conservatives? And should the Tories attempt to defend it by circling the wagons?

My own view is that the so-called centre ground is a myth. Margaret Thatcher won three elections in a row. Her radical thinking became the norm, the consensual heart of British political discourse. Yet most voters saw her as distinctly right wing. How can that be explained?

What she occupied was not the boring old centre, but the High Centre Ground, that pinnacle from which the entire terrain is visible. As the old song has it: “On a clear day, you can see forever”.

This week, David Cameron’s apology for failing to spot the flaws in the runaway economy plonked him squarely in the High Centre of British politics.

You had your chance, Gordon. You blew it!

Again.

For months I’ve been putting up pieces in Syntagma exploring new policy initiatives for an incoming Conservative Government. (Note the capital G in the spelling; Labour always gets a derisory lower-case for its dismal performance.)

However, these snippets are distributed around the site unmarked and less coherently than they should be. So we’ve decided to start a new weekly feature column: Pointers to a Conservative Government on Tuesdays, in the run up to Dave’s misty-eyed entry into 10 Downing Street.

It will be a new dawn, will it not?

It will also be the beginning of a Trojan effort by the Party to rebuild a truly blasted heath of a country. It will take at least three Parliaments to achieve.

We’ve already covered education, manufacturing, public borrowing and public sector govenance, along with globalization and parts of foreign policy (see yesterday’s Saturday Ramble), but will now put them all under one roof for convenience.

I hope the views of a Burkean Democrat Minimalist Conservative (BDMC — a new species) may prompt an echoing response from within the Party’s leadership.

They will need all the help they can get.

John Evans

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I’ve long been an adherent of what I call, Up-To-A-Pointism.

If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences.

Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.

Politicians are largely unaware of this iron rule of nature. They should be. Our future rests on it. It is vital that attempts are made to determine the limits that constrain every policy decision.

The Alan Greenspan era, which finally collapsed in upon itself on August 9 2007, was the last hurrah of Reaganomics: scant regulation allied to free market economics, especially in financial markets.

It passed its point of usefulness around the turn of the century when some Asian countries were shipwrecked by massive money flows in and out of their economies. By then, the essential principles had become inflexible dogma, crowding out necessary evolution of the system.

The Left always brings settled dogma into government. Its methods are already written down by past socialist heroes, so they must be true, mustn’t they? That’s why the Left invariably fails in office.

Blair and Brown knew that in 1997. New Labour presented itself as the champion of free financial markets, just as the notion was beginning to shapeshift into corrosive insanity.

In the U.S., George W. Bush, thanks to Dick “deficits don’t matter” Cheney, was trapped by the dogma of the Right and its sorcerer’s apprentice, Alan Greenspan. A little Up-To-A-Pointism would have gone a long way at that time.

The same can be said for globalization. Up-To-A-Pointism should have been applied long ago to the idea that “the world is one and the same.” In political and economic terms, it isn’t. It never was, and it never will be.

Today, Gordon Brown’s shiny new big idea — riding on his newly-found sense of invincibility — is to summon a meeting of “world leaders” — shades of Bretton Woods — to reshape the global system in accordance with the old puritan’s post-war, iron-clad viewpoint.

So it’s back from Greenspanomics to Truman and Attlee — or Churchill and Roosevelt if you believe Gordon Brown. Remind me, what happened to the Bretton Woods agreement on global fixed exchange rates? I seem to recall it foundered irretrievably in 1971.

New dogma is replaced by the old stuff. Democracy is ditched for governance by foreign leaders, unelected by us, and unaccountable.

On a global scale, and at regional level — the EU in Britain’s case — we are ordered about by layers of oligarchy, lacking knowledge of who we are, and uninterested in our wishes and cultural preferences.

More than anything now, the world needs Up-To-A-Pointism to refresh its grasp of reality and to grapple back our basic freedoms from the hobgoblins who would rule over us.

If we’re looking for an iconic figure for the new age of austerity, it should be Edmund Burke not Leon Trotsky.

John Evans

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A few people have asked me what I mean by “Mediate Yourself” — see previous post.

Most of us are almost totally mediated by “the media”. We obtain our views, much of our knowledge, and virtually all of our obsessions from these rich sources.

The result is a kind of addiction by which we become dependent on being fed experiences we should be getting from real life. The media’s lack of actuality is its unique selling point. It allows us to stand back from life’s messier aspects, while getting a taste of them via the media. The blackside is that this lack of actuality means young people don’t learn the lessons of bad decisions, like criminality and violence, until it’s too late.

The obvious question then arises: who mediates the media? The answer is, in almost all cases, the zealots.

Zealots have a long history. You may remember them from the New Testament, or any other ancient and modern text. Whatever the purpose, there is always zealotry in the background. Smart readers may quickly spot that these very texts were often written by other zealots masquerading as friends of humanity. Who else but zealots would go to all that trouble?

Far from history being driven by “the economy, stupid”, as the Marxist zealots insist, it is in fact powered by all manner of zealousness. Jihadist zealotry, for example, is not conspicuously driven by money.

Now, there is nothing wrong with some elements of zeal per se. Without enthusiasm there would be no progress, and probably no fun either. But we must distinguish between zealotry and enthusiasm. The latter is harmless, the former has an unbreakable intent and a belief in their mental construct, often the fashionable assumptions of the age.

Since the media — especially television — will not tolerate anyone who is dull or uninteresting, the zealots have a head start in the race to be media performers, and even controllers of the pipes.

So we are mediated by the media, which in turn is mediated by various species of zealot.

That brings us on to what a zealot does and why zealotry is bad for us.

Zealots take hold of the unmediated, infinitely variable, analog nature of existence and pull out a range of simplistic propositions, like magicians with a hat, which, they say, represent the truth of the world. Being zealots, any opposition will not be tolerated.

For example, the present Western zealotry can be summed up in a few words and phrases: “carbon footprint”, “sustainability”, “global warming”, “climate change”. The drama of disaster movies is their weapon of choice. Fear is their stock in trade. Mediocrity and conformity the result.

Zealots of the Roman Empire turned the practical and spiritual Jesus story into the all-pervasive controlling orthodoxy of the Middle Ages — the first real totalitarianism. That zeal is still with us and has spread to other religions. Thus religion has become the possession of zealots the world over.

In politics, the “natural philosophy” of Edmund Burke, which once characterized England and the common law countries, has been transformed into the iron-girder prescriptiveness of “human rights” and the equality agenda, among many other humanmade straitjackets we have to tolerate. These are vigorously underpinned by the tyranny of statute law and various “international” institutions notorious for their bleak influence and ineffectiveness.

Zealots rule. They mediate us from their positions in the media, religion, politics, education and much of current discourse. Of course, truth eventually surfaces again, but there’s no respite. They are quickly replaced by counter-zealots who deliver fresh dollops of anxiety and suspicion.

There is no such thing as a sustainable zealotry. They last just long enough to do their damage before being overtaken by other merchants of zeal. Worse, many hide their sense of entitlement behind a benevolent front.

In the age of an overwhelmingly powerful media, we must learn to mediate ourselves or become the slaves of zealotry and mediocrity. Or might that be “mediacrity”?

Mediate Yourself — Stand Out From The Crowd, by John Evans, will be published within the next 12 months.

Warning : This is totally off-topic and is inspired by yesterday’s news of the rapidly disintegrating state of the British Home Office under Tony Blair’s pitiful administration.

It’s not a rant though. Promise. Just a look at the Panglossian fantasies that drive British policy nowadays : “Everything for the best, in the best of all possible worlds”.

The UK Home Secretary has said that the Home Office is “not fit for purpose”. It has lost control over almost every aspect of the criminal justice system, the prisons and immigration.

The root of the problem is the Blairite Human Rights Act, passed in jubilant self-congratulation in 1998, plus a delegation policy that places key people in post by political persuasion rather than competence. Both break the fundamental principles of Superdemocracy.

The idea of a Rights Society is all the rage in Labour-dominated Britain. It sounds good. We all have defined rights which mean we’re free, yes?

NO.

Freedom is not about giving everyone and anyone “rights” without checks and balances. Many of the rights we have we make for ourselves, through hard work and merit. Merit brings us wealth and allows us the freedom to enjoy the best things in life without too much worry or disturbance.

Basic rights, like equality before the law, God and the ballot box, are the rights of all citizens in any democratic country. Some of these rights should not be given to anybody who simply turns up on its shores. Civil liberties don’t travel beyond the jurisdiction that defines them.

Cast these rights liberally around to everyone on the planet and they will act as magnets for mass, unstoppable immigration of people who know only two words of English, “My rights”.

The so-called Human Rights Act allows anyone who enters Britain full rights to the treasure of its citizens, even as far as mandatory housing, health care, schooling, legal bills, and a “salary” for life. Since newcomers have not earned these “rights” they just impoverish the country’s citizens, without adding a jot to the nation’s well-being.

Of course, if you say that, you risk sounding rather mean-spirited. That’s the weapon of choice in destroying the truth in this case. The government has woven new taboos against challenging any of its equality agenda, even embedding them into statute law. Never mind that this kind of equality : equality of attributes, needs a totalitarian regime to enforce, you are stigmatized if you complain.

The reason for this Home Office-induced catastrophe is that decisions are taken by greenhorn, starry-eyed politicians and their political appointees, who see themselves as benefactors of mankind — albeit with other people’s money and lives. They have no idea of the complexities of the case, nor of the huge response they are initiating.

Moreover, nearly every agency in Britian is now run by knee-jerk Blairites who act according to political received opinion rather than careful, dispassionate, and expert consideration of the situation.

Merit is the way out of this morass of incompetence and waste. A common cry in England now is “Nothing works anymore”. That’s because the “All shall have prizes society” is run by dolts and slackers, as could be predicted before it was imposed on us.

When each critical decision, no matter how small, is taken at the point of maximum competence, near enough, everybody in the community benefits in an cumulative way. The small increments of improvement mount up over time, completely transforming the landscape and the way it operates. That’s Superdemocracy.

So-called Human Rights are a way of moving resources from the competent who have worked for them, to the incompetent who have not. It depletes a society’s level of expertise and tilts the slope of impoverishment ever more steeply downwards.

The Rights Society should be replaced with Superdemocracy, especially in the public sector where chaos finds its natural breeding ground. The Home Office is just one example that needs to be addressed in haste.