19th July 1999
(c) Copyright 1999: Graham L. Strachan
People are starting to suspect, particularly those in touch with the realities of globalism, that the people engineering this massive reshuffling of humanity are living a different reality altogether from the rest of the community, even though they share a common world and (more or less) the same society. The statements of globalists are becoming daily more irrational and their behaviour more bizarre. They believe in greenhouse gasses, ozone holes, humanitarian bombing, guilt for the past, imaginary money, gambling as economic activity, panic in the year 2000, private ownership of rain, vast right wing conspiracies, and that eight year-olds should be having sex, preferably with a condom and flavoured lubricant. Increasingly the question is being asked, “Do these people really know what they’re doing?” and the answer is perhaps -- but then again, perhaps not.
In his book ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’, psychologist Professor Julian Jaynes identified what he called the ‘bicameral mind’ -- the mind of Stone Age man before he developed language. Because language is essential for identifying concepts -- ideas such as right/wrong, true/false, and so on -- Stone Age man, according to Jaynes, would not have been able to think conceptually, and since concepts are necessary for reasoned thought, he would not have been able to reason either. Bicameral man would have been automatic man. He lived in tribes, and had to, because he had to learn from the tribe the behaviour necessary for his survival. In novel situations he would seek guidance from ‘authorities’, either from within the tribe, or in the form of hallucinated instructions arising in the right temporal lobe of his brain which he interpreted as being messages from ‘the gods’. Bicameral man was not fully conscious in the sense of being able to reason, but he could perform most functions required for primitive tribal existence.
When settled agriculture replaced hunting and gathering, populations expanded and so did the range of new situations encountered daily by the bicameral. Both the tribal organisation of society and the bicameral mode proved inadequate and they broke down. The tribe was replaced by the Open Society in which individuals could use their own knowledge for their own, not tribal, purposes. The nuclear family replaced the tribe or extended family as the principle social unit, and the bicameral mode was replaced by individual mode, which used the imagination and language to form concepts which could be used by an individual reasoning consciousness. Behaviour no longer had to be learned from the tribe, the individual mind could work it out to fit new situations as they presented themselves, and bicameral man was no longer reliant on ‘authorities’. The new man was ‘autonomous’ (self acting) man.
There was, however, a big proviso: the transition from bicameral to individual mode was voluntary. The person had to make a conscious effort to use the new reasoning faculty, and to keep on using it. They had to force their mind to become fully conscious, and to work at keeping it there. If they became mentally lazy, allowed their behaviour become habitual, or fell back on authorities instead of thinking for themselves, they could quite easily lapse back into bicameral mode. It follows that there is nothing to prevent people today from lapsing back into bicameral mode if they too did those things. They would differ from their Stone Age counterparts only in the fact that they could speak, but even so what they say could be learned and recited without the backing of reasoned thought -- cliches, or lines taken from TV scripts or pop music lyrics, strung together into sentences and expressing ideas absorbed by osmosis from the culture.
Add to Jaynes’ observations those of behavioural psychologist B.F.Skinner. In his book ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’, Skinner claimed that ‘autonomous man’ -- the independently thinking and acting, morally responsible, individual human being -- did not exist. According to Skinner, autonomous man was a superstition to explain what science had yet to explain, and that the individual conscious mind was a myth. He obviously gave himself credit for having one. What else could he have been using to develop his ideas? He also gave other behavioural psychologists credit for having them. The whole purpose of his book was to justify the mass mental conditioning of human beings by an ‘elite’ group of behavioural scientists, and there was no suggestion that it was going to be the mindless leading the mindless. So it was only some people -- the ‘ordinary’ people of the world -- that Skinner saw as having no independent mind. Unwittingly, the human being he describes throughout ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’, is a classic bicameral. Skinner obviously believed such a mind existed too, and in large numbers.
In her book ‘Philosophy Who Needs It’ (Chapter 4, ‘The Missing Link’), novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand identified and analysed what she termed the ‘anti-conceptual mentality’ -- a mind which cannot grasp concepts -- ideas. It could perceive solid objects, and identify them with labels (names). It had conceptualised sufficiently to learn to speak, but the process of mental development stopped there, at the first levels of abstraction. It did not develop the ability to make the next step -- abstraction from abstractions -- required for conceptual thought. Rand regarded it as a ‘missing link’, a mind arrested in its development somewhere between the purely perceptual level of the animal, and the fully conceptual level of the properly developed human consciousness -- which is another description of the same mind described by Jaynes and Skinner -- a mind not fully conscious, operating in bicameral mode. Rand, too, believed the condition was widespread and on the increase because, significantly, the modern education system was specifically designed to create it!
It is suggested that significant numbers of people today are actually operating in bicameral mode, some of them because they cannot be bothered thinking for themselves, others because they have never learned to, or they have been actively prevented from doing so by the modern education system. This might be of academic interest only if it weren’t for the fact that through a progressive lowering of academic standards, and the development of ‘soft option’ courses such as Women’s Studies and the like, bicamerals can, by memorising and regurgitating sufficient ‘politically correct’ material, readily obtain university degrees from the social science faculties of Western univerities. The numbers of these graduates have grown significantly over the past three decades, so that they now dominate the governments, bureaucracies, media and academic faculties of Western society. They control the social agenda, they populate the media as journalists, the law courts as judges, and they control NATO. And they literally are incapable of the conceptual thought necessary to grasp concepts such as ‘right and wrong’, ‘truth’, ‘honesty’, ‘justice’, and ‘common decency’, let alone ‘freedom’ and ‘dignity’. What’s more, they deny the validity of all those concepts.
According to Rand, the anti-conceptual mind does not process information properly. Instead of ordering its ideas, its subconscious mind consists of an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings filed into unlabeled mental pigeon holes. It works up to a point, especially when dealing with anticonceptual mentalities like itself, where no search for the entire filing system is required. The person can be active, even a hard worker. They might even be an academic: they can analyse results (concretes), provided they don’t have to worry about their causes (concepts). They may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions, but they have been memorised without being understood. Asked what they mean by a given idea, they will not be able to give a coherent answer. They are counterfeiting conceptual thought by memorisation and immitation. Any reasons they give for their convictions will be thin and ill thought-out, and they will never have asked even the most basic questions.
If one can accept that such a mind can exist, and that people with just such a mind could come to dominate the institutions of governance -- global governance, and what remains of national governance -- for the reasons outlined above, then one can begin to make sense of what is happening to Western society.
It might be thought that the inability to grasp concepts is not too much of a handicap, until it is realised that understanding the world, as distinct from merely perceiving it, requires conceptual thought. As Rand put it, the laws of nature cannot be grasped by perception. As a result, bicamerals literally cannot make sense of the world around them. Because of that they cling to groups with learned ideas for support and safety. In other words, having the tribal mind they revert to tribalism, and since socialism is the political expression of tribalism, it is the natural refuge for the anti-conceptual mentality. Bicamerals are invariably socialists, though not all socialists are bicameral. It is significant that socialists regularly describe ideas they regard as ‘politically incorrect’ as ‘dangerous’. Only a mind which fears ideas because it cannot deal with them could ever regard ideas, any ideas, as ‘dangerous’.
The group provides the bicameral with the things they cannot find within themselves: a sense of identity, a repertoire of learned behaviour, a list of ‘politically correct’ things to believe, and a list of ackowledged ‘authorities’ to believe in. The authorities are thought to know the mysteries the others don’t, and since the bicameral cannot evaluate concepts, people (‘leaders’, ‘experts’, ‘authorities’) are substituted for ideas, and the man-made is substituted for the natural -- thus their obsession with the planned and controlled society. The authorities are likely to be, as Jaynes put it, a succession of charismatic leaders who are highly visible and beyond criticism. There will also be a series of cannonical texts which are somehow outside the usual arena of scientific criticism.
Unable to understand the real world, bicamerals invent their own world and ‘explain’ that. The explanations are not genuine theories based on factual evidence, but ideologies, fairy stories, which try to explain everything -- the whole world, the entire course of history -- in the most simple terms, or in the form of a single encapsulated idea. Thus Marx declared (Communist Manifesto), that “The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles”, and to the bicameral that took care of history. The whole fantasy underlying socialist ideology, of the lost paradise of primordial matriarchal pan-sexual communism, supplanted by the capitalist heterosexual patriarchy, and of the triumphal return through global socialism, is just such a fairy story, unsupported by factual evidence.
Since bicamerals have no means of evaluating the beliefs they adopt, they can be induced to believe almost anything: that the world is warming up even though there is no evidence of it; that holes in the ozone layer over the poles (where there ought to be holes) have been caused by farting cattle or CFCs that are heavier than air; that banning unpopular views is necessary to ensure free speech; that guns commit murders; that bombing defenceless civilians is collateral damage; that the suppression and distortion of information is consistent with a free press; that there can be democracy with only one set of policies to choose from; that morals are a social control conspiracy by white heterosexual men in individualist mode; that condemning socially destructive behaviour is ‘being judgmental’ and therefore wrong, while the destructive behaviour itself isn’t, and the list goes on.
Over the past three centuries the practical jokers of modern philosophy have fed a continuous diet of speculative rubbish to bicamerals who have swallowed the lot: the idea that all reality is in the mind (Berkeley, Hegel), and that consequently New York city would disappear unless somebody was watching it; that there are all sorts of filters which prevent man from perceiving the world around him (Hume, Kant); and that ‘truth’ is not that which coincides with objective reality, but a process whereby opposing ideas interact and merge and the whole ‘truth’ won’t be known till the ‘end of history’ (Hegel). As Ayn Rand put it, they have been sold the idea that A is not A, and because it has come from ‘authorities’ they have believed it.
Unable to process facts or reason logically, bicamerals lay claim to a special way of knowing -- they ‘intuit’ truth -- in other words they feel it. So that while empirical studies repeatedly find that women initiate domestic violence against men as often as men do against women, bicamerals in women’s groups dismiss the findings as ‘counter-intuitive’. The facts conflict with their intuition (feelings) so they dismiss the facts. A recent report in the ‘American Psychologist’ claimed that fathers are ‘not essential’ components of family life, and in the traditional heterosexual family role might actually be detrimental to their wives and children. These politically correct conclusions ignored a huge body of evidence indicating precisely the opposite.
Again because they cannot reason from facts to logical conclusions, bicamerals ‘intuit’ the conclusions first, and then hope some facts come to light to ‘prove’ them. Such proof is always ‘just around the corner’. In some cases -- such as the Theory of Evolution -- the proof has been ‘just around the corner’ for 150 years. Bicameral social scientists have even urged that governments legislate the Theory of Evolution to be true to save having to wait any longer. One supposes ‘evolution denial’ will then be made an offence to ensure that the truth stays true. Evidence which tends to confirm bicamerals’ intuited conclusions is invariably proclaimed as another triumph of science, while evidence tending to disprove them is routinely ignored, or dismissed as ‘politically motivated’, part of some ‘vast right wing conspiracy’.
A more disturbing development is the actual falsification of results to ‘prove’ the intuited conclusions. Under the influence of bicameralism, some parts of science are becoming a bit like the opinion poll: whoever pays for the research can expect to end up with the results they want. So it was with Kinsey’s studies of sexual behaviour. By choosing samples loaded with sex offenders and manipulating his data, Kinsey ‘proved’ 10% of the male population of America was homosexual. The results have been shown beyond question by Dr. Judith Reisman and others (see ‘Kinsey, Sex and Fraud’, and ‘Kinsey, Crimes and Consequences’) to be scientifically fraudulent, but bicamerals continue to feed the lie to school children as scientific truth. A similar scenario surrounds the accepted ‘fact’ that HIV causes AIDS, when again there is still no evidence that it does. There is evidence however that the homosexual lifestyle itself may cause the cluster of syndromes collectively called AIDS, but to say so is politically incorrect and thus taboo. So HIV continues to wear the blame, and may well do forever.
Since they have no way of grasping objective reality (concept), bicamerals have no understanding at all of ‘truth’, that which corresponds with it. They will solemnly declare that “There is no such thing as objective truth”, and fully expect the world to accept that statement as being objectively true. Their difficulty in coming to grips with ‘truth’ even gave rise to a special branch of philosophy based on a particular definition of it, which anchored it to concretes bicamerals can understand. Pragmatism defines truth as ‘what works’. Even ‘what works’ was too conceptual for the bicameral, so it was reduced further to ‘true is what works for you’. Thus the philosophy of the ‘me’ generation was born, which places bicamerals at the centre of their own universe.
According to Rand’s analysis, needing the tribe for survival, the anti-conceptual mind will display fierce loyalty to the group, but not to the ideas professed by the group (concepts), to the people in it and its leaders (concretes). Bicamerals must all protect one of their own, right or wrong, against outsiders. True to form, while American feminists were strident in their opposition to harassment of women in the workplace when it involved Judge Clarence Thomas, when Bill Clinton, one of their own did it, there wasn’t a feminist voice to be heard. Even when Clinton was impeached for lying under oath, bicamerals in the American congress failed to see that as sufficient reason to remove him from office, such is the degree to which this phenomenon has permeated the society.
Being tribalists, bicamerals get very worked up about ‘racism’, but since racism is a concept they have absolutely no idea what it means. Since the only way they can deal with concepts is to anchor them to concretes, the only way they can decide whether an action is racist or not is by who did it. If whites did it, it was racist; if blacks did it, it wasn’t. That’s because white people ‘are racist’, and black people ‘are not racist’. Bicamerals are incapable of evaluating the behaviour of either. Similarly they cannot understand that their own attitude is the very essence of racism the concept. As for the logical inconsistency of their stance, the very idea of logical consistency (concept) is, like racism itself, beyond their comprehension. Feminist bicamerals have even declared logic, along with genuine science, to be a deliberate construct of the patriarchal conspiracy to subjugate women.
In the field of ethics bicamerals are totally lost. Moral principles (good/bad, right/wrong, common decency and so on) are concepts. The bicameral has absolutely no idea what they mean, and no way of ever knowing what they mean. Bicamerals are amoral -- without morals. They may use the language of morals, but without conviction. If they do act morally it is purely by chance, or because it was necessary to gain some personal or political advantage. They are certainly incapable of a consistent pattern of moral behaviour, and for that reason cannot be trusted, even by their own. According to their fairytale explanation of the world, morals are nothing but arbitrary rules constructed by the individualist order for purposes of social control. After the triumphal restoration of pan-sexual matriarchal socialism, moral rules will disappear, so the story goes. In the meantime they teach little children that ‘good’ and ‘right’ are whatever you ‘feel’ are good and right ‘for you’. Again the concept, which is incomprehensible, is anchored to something understandable -- self-interest -- which is ultimately the only thing the bicameral really does understand.
The idea of honesty (concept) is also beyond their reach. If bicameralism is as epidemic as this article suggests, lying and corruption should be widespread, and indeed they are. Recent studies have shown that people now lie routinely, some of them under oath. Much of the breakdown of marriage can be attributed to the failure of young people to place any significance at all upon their marriage vows. Similarly, corruption is a growing problem: in the International Olympic Committee, in the bureaucracy of the European Union, and in national governments which are lying to their people while they globalise their countries on the sly. The mass media constantly withhold, distort and falsify information, and bicameral journalists appear to see nothing wrong with it. If they do, they apparently see nothing wrong with continuing to work for organisations whose policy is propaganda.
Bicamerals are now gaining prominence among the judiciary, a line of work which, because of the need to understand and apply legal principles (concepts), more than any other requires the ability to think conceptually -- that is if concepts like ‘justice’, ‘fairness’ and ‘impartiality’ and ‘consistency’ are to remain pillars of the justice system. Predictably those concepts are rapidly being discarded and replaced by arbitrary and biased law, including ‘hate crimes’ and other nonsense. Unable to understand the legal principles enunciated in previous cases, bicameral judges are ignoring the theory of precedent designed to give the law consistency, and adopting instead a ‘judicial activist’ approach, making up the law to fit each case. It was precisely the lack of this sort of arbitrariness which distinguished the law of free countries from that of brutally oppressive regimes like the Soviet Union. That distinction is rapidly being lost.
Feminist bicamerals have terrorised the courts and juries into believing that women never lie, and never commit crimes unless driven to it my men. Mystical doctrines have found their way into the law, such as the ‘battered wife syndrome’ whereby everything from cutting off penises to murdering sleeping husbands can be excused; and the so-called ‘repressed memory syndrome’, whereby women ‘just forget’ things allegedly done to them by men, and then ‘suddenly remember’ them again years later. Increasingly judges are seeing their role as giving legal effect to socialist social policies, and facilitating the move to globalism and world government by circumventing Constitutions.
The inability of bicamerals to grasp concepts has had its humorous side: the feminist objection to the use of the word ‘man’ (concrete) for ‘mankind’ (concept), for example. To the concrete-bound bicameral mind the idea that ‘man’ can represent anything other than an actual man is inconceivable, and because of the political influence of feminists in American bureaucracies, the world has been treated to the silly spectacle of bicamerals sanitising the entire English language after 10,000 years to make it ‘gender neutral’. The name ‘manhole’ has now been changed to ‘access hole’, and the myth thereby created that because the name change was necessary, women actually went down them.
But mostly the results of bicameralism are not funny, they are deadly serious. Bicamerals seek positions of power because, unable to understand the natural world, they crave control over material reality and other people. They cannot abide by the first requirement for living in an Open Society -- ‘Live and let live’. They simply cannot leave other people alone. Under their neo-tribal influence, Western society has been fragmented into numerous pressure groups whose interests are perceived to be in conflict with the individualist community. The new tribes are united by the institutionalised paranoia known as ‘victim psychology’, a manufactured belief that the various groups (women, blacks, ethnics, homosexuals) are being victimised, or have been in the past, justifying special attention and consideration by the state. The individualist community is expected to feel guilty, and to apologise for perceived injustices against former tribe members now dead, some of them dead for thousands of years.
As Rand explained, the anti-conceptual mind fails to ask the two cardinal questions: ‘why?’ and ‘what for?’ The lack of the ‘why?’ wipes out the concept of causality and cuts off the past, while the lack of the ‘what for?’ wipes out the long range purpose and cuts off the future. Therefore only the present is fully real to the bicameral. Memory remains -- bits and pieces of the past -- but without goal or meaning. Prediction is impossible. The future is a blank because it cannot be grasped perceptually. Predictably, socialists have never had any idea of what their future utopia would be like, and will not be drawn into discussions about it. All they can say is that we should continue to plunge blindly on towards it, whatever it might be.
It might be thought that the best thing that could happen to bicamerals would be to let them have their way and to watch their imaginary utopia degenerate into a bloodbath and collapse in a heap. But that has already happened -- in the Soviet Union. Still they are not convinced -- they want the world. Deprived of the ability to think, they hate those who can, and are determined to subjugate them. Their hatred of ‘autonomous man’ has erupted in violence at many points throughout history, from the forcing of Socrates to take hemlock for teaching politically incorrect things to the youth of Athens, to the confinement of Galilleo to house arrest by the Roman Church for saying the earth revolved around the sun, to the wholesale purging and ‘re-education’ of genuine intellectuals by communists wherever they seize power, to the beating, murdering and even eating (!) of genuine intellectuals by bicameral Chinese students during Mao Tse-Tung’s cultural revolution.
Bicamerals are dedicated to the destruction of individualism, the nuclear family, and Christianity whose cardinal sin was to teach that God created men as individuals, not tribes, in His own image. As both Karl Popper [‘The Open Society and its Enemies’] and F.A. Hayek [‘The Road to Serfdom’, and ‘Law Legislation and Liberty’] have shown, throughout history bicamerals have tried to destroy the Open Society and return the human race to the tribal organisation, even though it is far too late for that. Bicamerals are now frantic for globalism, their latest attempt, this time to turn the whole world into one big tribe or ‘global village’. To get their way they are lying and deceiving, openly committing treason, walking all over constitutions and individual rights, perverting the law, unashamedly indoctrinating children with lies, and bombing people who won’t bow to their will. They regard themselves as chosen by ‘history’ to lead the world into the future, and the troubling fact is -- they are not fully conscious.
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