While these same academics, writers and opinion leaders quite seriously ponder the notion that opposing political views are an expression of mental disorder or, in other social behaviour that they deem unacceptable – the result of uncontrollable, primeval neurology.

Which, if taken to its logical conclusion, results in various suggestions that democracy is incompatible with environmental sustainability. Such suggestions are in print as serious discussion.

Meaning, at best, the dissenters have to be dis-enfranchised and, at worst – well the whole history of the 20th century is replete with examples of what happens when people you don’t agree with are de-humanised and disposed of.

It seems like that coincident with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, something pushed up the shutters of historical memory in the heads of an awful lot of people who would love to uncork the genie of authoritarianism, in a good cause of course, but who have the education to know better !

Basically there’s the (irresistible?) tendency for them to think as follows: I like doing this. This is good for me. I’m sure it would be good for you too. And for her and him and all of those people as well. In fact everybody should be doing this. In fact, by not doing this, people are just harming themselves and everyone else (the planet.) They should be made to do this.

You often find this, e.g. from one of the rather excitable Johann Hari’s articles last year: “It is not enough for you to change your bulbs. Everyone has to change their bulbs. It is not enough for you to eat less meat. Everyone has to eat less meat. It is not enough for you to fly less. Everyone has to fly less…” etc., etc.

I also see this in phrases like “our alienation from flesh and blood experience”. Now unless there someone reading this comment who is a disembodied brain in a jar somewhere, I’m pretty much assuming that we’re all living human beings and that “flesh and blood experience” is what we’re stuck with. To be alienated from it, we’d have to be comatose or dead, so that phrase doesn’t make much sense. What makes more sense is that they’re saying some kinds of experience are superior to others, e.g. the experience of sitting under a tree and meditating is better than the experience of sitting in a McDonalds, wolfing down a cheeseburger and fries.

If they just stopped there, that would be fine. Some people enjoy sitting under trees meditating, some like eating cheeseburgers. (Myself, I sometimes try to sit and meditate, and also occasionally have something similar to the cheeseburger experience.) But the problem is, they don’t stop there. To misquote Hari: “It is not enough for you to meditate under a tree. Everyone has to meditate under a tree. It is not enough for you to renounce cheeseburgers. Everyone has to renounce cheeseburgers.” What was a lifestyle choice becomes, as Robert Wood just said, “an excuse for tyranny.” There are people who have reached a stage where they become interested in such things as yoga, meditation, or indeed the “other-than-human world” (although lumping these things together might not be very helpful, I think). Some people will never ever be interested in these things, and the thought of making them take an interest, for the sake of the “planet”, is laughable and wrong.

Beneath all the psychobabble and the talk of “helping”, it really is all about power, the power to validate one’s own righteous stance in the world by imposing it upon all those others, who contradict it just by living the way they (we!) do (eating meat, driving cars, flying in planes, not believing in global warming.) Hence the threat of coercive psychiatric techniques to force us all into line, turn the bad deniers into good compliers.

There’s a lot more I wanted to say but it’s a sunny Sunday morning here in London and I’m off to Tesco.

It is nothing more than an excuse for tyranny. The tyrany may be inn the name of “saving the planet” but that is just a lie.

Yes, I am using this posting opportunity as a call to arms. We (all rational humans) must resist the eco-irrationalisms, which is based upon an aesthetic, rather than realistic, view of liefe.

Ironically, this aesthetic view has only become possible due to the success of the suburban economy, mostly in Toronto and other big cities … where people have become detached from , but romantically attached to, nature

Someone who used to work in a mental hospital once told me that the patients generally appeared more normal than the doctors. What I had thought a joke appears to have some seed of truth to it.

What are we to make of this?
“Social Dreaming is a way of working with dreams in a collective setting, developed by Gordon Lawrence and others since the 1980s. The Social Dreaming Matrix is a space where we share our dreams. The focus is on the dream not the dreamer. All are invited to free associate to any of the dreams offered in the matrix, the matrix will then be followed by a space to reflect, enabling us to identify emerging themes and relate them to the theme of the conference.”

Errr… right.

For some reason, I have horrible mental images of a teenager’s slumber party conducted by boiled radical feminists.

Then we have this:
“Constellations, with the help of a trained facilitator, are a potent way of harnessing the individual and collaborative skills that are latent within a group and can lead to surprising experiences of development and healing. Environmental Constellations draw upon both the Systemic Constellation work of Bert Hellinger and Albrecht Mahr, and on eco-psychology.”

What the hell are ‘Constellations’?

“Originally a Reichian body therapist, my approach has become broad based and open to the spontaneous and unexpected. I have an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies, and have also worked with Process Oriented Psychology and trained as a craniosacral therapist.”

A what?
What does any of this mean? Is this some sort of phrenologist, or what?

But all these pales into insignificance compared to this one.
“We are clearly in need of ‘a new plot to live by’ [Hillman]. But what kind of plot, and who designs and runs it, and on whose behalf? It is all too easy to imagine a future in which mind-numbing, Orwellian Eco ‘Newspeak’ about carbon footprints, carbon audits [1000 carbos = one tonne of carbon dioxide] is regularly churned out by PC, Eco thought police, as a substitute for thinking, with joined-up sound bytes designed to send us into a cosy collective sleep, or persuading us to wear anorexic, eco hair-shirts as a sign of authentic, card-carrying party membership. All this underpinned by the vague notion that somehow science or a symbolic parent figure will come to our rescue and solve the problem for us!”

Is this satire/sarcasm from some poor sane soul trapped among them, or is this their actual plan?!

It is surely a very detailed and elaborate fantasy to construct for the sake of a hypothetical discussion point.

I am in no doubt. The real psychology faculty have been killed and eaten by their patients, who are now posing as professors and researchers. Why has nobody noticed?

I find it hard to imagine that anyone could possibly take these people seriously. I am not at all sure that we should be taking them seriously. But what if somebody else does…?

When I think of the years I spent at university learning maths and physics, about the works of Newton and Einstein and Dirac, hoping one day to be good enough to work as an academic, and now to think there are people in British universities being paid for spouting this sort of mumbo jumbo… well, it makes my blood boil.

We ought to be glad they’re on the other side. Just think what our reputation would be if they were AGW sceptics!

If these words were spoken by a sinister Mengele-like psychiatrist in some novel, they’d sound a little ridiculous. I mean, really no-one would ever come out and say something obviously as evil as this in real life, would they? “… when we want them to be more compliant” Mwahhaha… Yeah, right.

Only… WTF. This is no work of fiction. This is real.

Apparently, “Dr. Moffic was invited to join because he was the first to start writing on the psychiatric aspects of global warming and because of his role as the psychiatrist representative from the Health and Environment Committee of the Physicians For [Ahem] Social Responsibility.”