So the International Monetary Fund (IMF) believes we are in a “Great Recession”. What a soggy fag-end of a phrase, like a Great Mouse or a Great Flea.

The venerable Dominique Strauss-Kahn can’t bring himself to use the D word, so invents an intermediate superlative — a meaningless contradiction.

If it’s bigger than a recession, it’s a depression. If it’s deeper or longer than a depression, it’s a Great Depression. If it’s bigger than that, it’s Armageddon. Since that’s the end of the world, it would be overdoing it to imagine a Great Armageddon — but no doubt the IMF has that pencilled in for a rainy day too.

All this brings me to the question: why do we put up with these flabby, interfering international institutions? They’re expensive to run, limit the freedom of nation States, and have the aroma of 1944 hanging over them. Foyle’s War without Michael Kitchen.

Unusually, Karl Marx was dead right about globalization. He foresaw the pitfalls, recognizing the open door to empires — statist and commercial — on the back of spurious political unity.

The British East India Company was the prototype. When it failed, the authorities picked it up, mangled the good bits, and created imperialism from the wreckage. In its day, the Empire gave more than it took, but can we imagine it now?

Today, the big supranational institutions, many created at Bretton Woods in the 1940s, have a watching brief over the planet. As we have recently come to realize, they are not doing a good job.

So what if Britain resigned from all of these bureaucratic behemoths, dealing with each situation on an ad hoc, case by case basis?

I can hear the cries of indignation already from people who go with the flow for a living. A study conducted at the Harvard Business School reported that a third of students defined right and wrong in terms of what others were doing. The professor who compiled it said, “They can’t really step back and take a critical view. They’re totally defined by others.”

Let’s consider this question with an open mind then.

Would Britain lose status? What status? The Labour government has surely destroyed all respect for the country worldwide. Even the Americans seem ambivalent about us these days.

Resigning our seat on the Security Council, and our place in the General Assembly of the United Nations, would release us from the spider’s web of socialized command and control exercised by “the international community” — a phantom beast that leaves us to pick up the tab, while others ignore the precepts.

Goodbye UNHCR (a factor in the UK’s massive immigration problem), UNESCO, UNICEF, and all other spin-offs that allow totalitarian regimes to lecture us on law and the raising of children. These global quangos reduce us to slaves in our own country.

The G8, G20 and the soon-to-be upon us G200, would not be missed either.

NATO could go too. It’s responsible for the British Army’s underfunded and unsupported agony in Afghanistan. If the Europeans won’t fulfil their obligations, why should we?

Ditching the World Trade Organization (WTO) which, if it were a nation, would be designated a failed State, would place the onus back on us to produce the goods and services others want to buy — genuine free trade.

The IMF and OECD could also be dispensed with, joining European “human” rights conventions and other busybody groupings that have destroyed our once fine legal system.

And finally, the European Union, heir to Louis IV, Bonaparte and Hitler in its zeal to bring all of Europe under its hegemony. A simple trade agreement is all the UK needs.

The result would be a short period of confusion as our over-remunerated and feather-bedded MPs, and faux lordlings, came to terms with actually running the country, not pretending to be in charge of a mock legislature.

The focus of govenance would be transformed. The Houses of Parliament would receive back the 80 percent of legislation idly handed on a plate to Brussels. Changes for the better would be enormous. Voters would vote again, ensuring the best people were elected to the House that really mattered.

It wouldn’t be paradise or utopia, certainly, but not the current dystopia either. It would save desperately needed money, even if the Security Council seat were regarded as too important to lose.

For too long Britain has followed the rest into a glum international socialist arena dominated by the bogus “human” rights agenda.

Britain did lead the world once, why not again?

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.

Abraham Lincoln’s famous maxim, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time”, is so obviously true you wouldn’t expect anyone to fall foul of its remorseless logic. Yet that is precisely what Britain and some other Western countries have done over the past decade.

It began with Bill Clinton and his obsessive pursuit of minority interests to bolster his poll results and show how caring he is to the wider electorate. In Britain, Tony Blair followed suit under the banner of The Third Way, a neo-Marxist equality agenda of endless social tinkering and mindless bossiness. It was how they would make the entire population love them to bits — they thought.

The Third Way signalled the death of Bentham’s Utilitarianism in British politics and the beginnings of an eerie hero worship of carefully selected in-groups and minorities.

Jeremy Bentham’s Embalmed Body

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), philosopher and social reformer, paved the way for modern fully-franchised democracy with his great maxim, “The object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. It has been the basis of modern society ever since and has clearly worked well. He even provided a mathematical formula for calculating the best possible outcome in every situation.

Then came the Clinton/Blair obsession with “dog whistling” — the pursuit of prescriptive minority rights which are often rolled out at the expense of other minorities and almost always the majority itself.

Let’s look at an analogy of Bentham’s dictum in action. Somewhere in Holland a hole appears in a dyke. A small boy senses the danger and stops the flow by putting his finger in the hole.

His cries alert farm workers nearby who rush to his aid only to find other holes appearing. They stop the trickle with their own fingers. Soon, at the urging of the Mayor, others are rushing onto the scene until the whole village is there with their fingers in hundreds of holes.

“What do we do now?” somebody shouts.

A distant voice cries, “There’s another hole.”

So now the dyke will give way taking the entire population of the village with it. The Benthamite view would be to send a small repair party to the dyke to assess the likelihood of saving it, while evacuating the rest of the village to safety. In other words, it may mean sacrificing the few in order to save the majority.

Stable Families
We know that children are happiest and more stable if brought up in married two-parent families. All the statistics prove this self-evident fact. Why then would a couple with children be financially better off in Blair’s Britain if they were not married? And why are the same “rights” given to same-sex couples in loose relationships as to married families?

Bentham’s relentless logic means that public policy should never be confused with private kindness, which is exactly what we’ve got in Brokeback Britain.

The greater public good has been destroyed in favour of a patchwork quilt of minor prescriptive measures, all jangling against each, causing huge resentment in the so-far silent majority, and destroying all social cohesion in the cities and in the country.

Children run wild at night, tormenting adults who can’t take action because of the Children’s Rights Act. This situation is an example of extensive child neglect in a society that increasingly looks to the state for everything. And that’s not to mention the destructive Human Rights Act which grants British civil rights universally to the whole world in an act of unparalleled betrayal of a nation’s right to protect itself from harm.

If New Labour had foresworn the advice of its militant Marxists, oddball, second-rate academics, and heeded the wise words of Jeremy Bentham, little of this would have happened.

That politics today is broken is clear. Only the resurrection of Bentham’s Utility agenda can save it. It’s not as if he’s that far away. His perfectly embalmed body, still in his familiar clothes and sitting in his favourite chair, can be seen in a glass cabinet in a London University college.

It would mean the end of prescriptive legislation, social engineering of the many by the few, the massive centralization of power, and the loss of the balm of Superdemocracy.

As General George Patton once said : “Don’t tell people how to do things, [suggest] what to do and let them surprise you with the result.”

Thanks to Aaron Brazell at Technosailor for the Patton quotation.

If all the words expended on Fatblogging were reflected in results, we’d now be debating the horrors of Size Zero bloggers.

How is it, we would complain, that these skinny wretches can be allowed to practise Fatblogging when they look like matchsticks on stilts?

Well, the answer lies in human nature. Words are rarely turned into reality. The Tao Te Ching says : “He who speaks, does not know. He who knows, does not speak.”

Wise words indeed. It’s the motto of us Thinbloggers.

This is just a preamble to tell you that my Fatblogging efforts lost two whole pounds, only for one of my knees to give out. The result has been three days of keyboard bashing with virtually no exercise. Outcome? It’s all back on again.

Prospects : I still have 7 lbs to lose in 9 days. Will I succeed?

He who knows, does not speak.

Why do people make resolutions at New Year? January is a dark and dismal month and it’s always easy to break them.

Me? I make mine on my birthday in mid-March when spring has raised a tentative finger to the heavens. Yes, I really am two fish swimming in opposite directions. You always knew that didn’t you?

As for spring, here are two shots I took on my walk early this morning in the West Country of England :

So what are my resolutions this year? I only ever risk three. Here they are :

1. Give up politics — I’m a bit of a news junkie which, given the state of the world (especially Britain) makes me mad as hell. It then takes an hour to disperse the bad chemicals generated.

So no more newspapers, no IP channel hopping. Reading matter will be strictly books until further notice.

2. I hesitate to use the word Fatblogging, since this has become an obsessive cult in some quarters. See the originator : Jason Calacanis, and the pupil : Jeremy Wright. Not for the weak of stomach or faint of heart.

However, I have 7 – 12 lbs of winter pudge to shift before Easter, so it has to be done. Press ups and weights at 7.15am, followed by a brisk five-mile walk. Also, food that couldn’t be faulted by Mahatma Gandhi on a good day. Seriously.

3. Make more time for the two books I’m writing and stop getting caught up in the endless memeing and fizzy-pop of the blogosphere. Memeing? Well, Fatblogging for starters.

That’s it. I’m not going to be posting my weight every 10 minutes as some are doing, so you’re welcome to return to the civilized environment that is Syntagma — an (almost) Fatblogging-free zone.

Mind how you go.