Cassandra Voices

Tag: Panopticon

  • Fiction: PANOPTICON

    The Panopticon

    The panopticon is an architectural design for institutional buildings with an inbuilt system of control. Originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham it was later derided by historian Michel Foucoult as replacing fetters with hidden observers, thus creating a form of obedience that is based on information rather than force. The panopticon at the Rilhafoles Hospital in Lisbon – later renamed after Dr. Miguel Bombarda – was built in 1896 and was closely based on Bentham’s ideas.

    Lisbon July 7th 1951

    After more than ten years of incarceration Vladimir was moved to a new cell in Block 8 where they could keep a continuous eye on him. Within a few days he had made the new cell his own with his caged birds, his wildly coloured crocheted doilies, his dolls and his huge picture of the Virgin Mary with vividly painted lips, kohled eyes and a sly side-gaze. When Tiago, the “good” nurse, asked him

    Do you like it here Vladimir?

    Yes. It’s peaceful.

    Don’t you want to ask to leave now?

    No, no. Anyway, who would I ask? The director’s a madman.

    Apart from the disruption of the move Vladimir hardly noticed the new conditions. He knew they were watching him but there was nothing new about that.

    Stuttgart May 7th 1937

    He was a madman, that Portuguese dancer in the corps. Wild mad beautiful.

    This dream had none of the flickering monochrome of “archive footage”: it was as bright and vivid as life itself. He saw the gloved male hand on the door of the sleek limousine. He saw the porcine reddened faces, the uniforms, the flowers, the glint of glass against the plush of the theatre. He was whisked off to luxurious palaces, given costly wines and white powders. In this new and shining prison he was given a whiff of freedom. He was, yes, maddened by it. Sex, beautiful clothes, the smell of money and power drove him mad, unanchored as he was from anything except the actuality of the dance, the orchestra, the theatre, the money he was given every week, the lovely wild greedy boys, the new uncouth country, language and culture, the fawning adoring old men in uniforms. The freedom – or whatever it might be – was delicious and intoxicating and he drank it so, so eagerly.

    Lisbon, May 9th 1980

    The journalist showed up after breakfast. She asked lots of questions to which Vladimir replied honestly but somehow unsatisfactorily. He answered her questions about his time as a dancer touring in Spain and Germany just before the war but he seemed unable to link his own experience to the momentous political happenings of the time and even seemed unaware of the fact that he had been courted by the beasts of the regimes. She was kind to him and endlessly patient as Vladimir provided her with nothing. She asked to look at his paintings and clothes and dolls and suggested that he might consider doing a self-portrait.

    Lisbon, April 26th 1974

    There was a revolution in progress outside.

    The good nurse was late and when he did show up he brought with him a transistor radio which played jolly martial music interspersed with announcements from the Armed Forces Movement. The good nurse hadn’t shaved and looked different somehow, radiant with some hidden happiness.

    Everything’s going to change now, comrade. The revolution has just started. The new world will be for all of us. You too Vladimir. There’ll even be a place for you.

    Vladimir didn’t share the good nurse’s optimistic outlook.

    My dolls don’t quite believe you. They think we’re here for ever.

    Vladmir pointed to his dolls ranged on the bed and on every surface in the small cell.

    No, no, no. In time we’ll all be free. Even your dolls. This place is the old world. It’ll all be swept away I promise you.

    Be careful what you say. The walls have ears.

    Lisbon, November 9th 1980

    As soon as he could Vladimir made good on the promise of his vivid dream and painted a moustache on his picture of the Blessed Virgin. When good nurse Bruno saw it he asked what had happened to the lovely virgin. Oh, said Vladimir, she asked me to make her hairy. Bruno was not a very devout Catholic but, although he thought the addition of the moustache was rather disrespectful decided not to comment any further. The weather had turned cold and Vladimir had enveloped himself in a number of the crocheted blankets he had made over the years. The bold stripes on the blankets made him look as though he had been bound and trussed. On his head was a carefully-made headdress of knitted items and artificial flowers.

    You think he wouldn’t like it, says Vladimir, I mean the moustache.

    Who, says Bruno.

    You know….Dr. S. He wouldn’t like to have a hairy Madonna perhaps.

    Dr. S? l

    Yes, he might not approve I suppose.

    Oh Vladimir! He’s been dead for more than ten years.

    Oh, I know but it’s still important what he thinks. Isn’t it?

    No. Not any more.

    Oh, so I can keep the moustache?

    Have you fed your birds yet?

    Dr. Salazar.

    Lisbon, May 7th 1948

    They were very nice to him before the operation. Even the bad nurse. No-one really told him what the operation was or what it was meant to do but he knew that it was a new and revolutionary surgery invented by a Portuguese doctor and that they’d be opening up his skull and that afterwards he’d be free to go and live his life and wouldn’t have to come back to the hospital.

    Leucotomy? Lobotomy? Dr….. Moniz?

    Lisbon, 10th September 1948

    He remembered nothing of it afterwards. They had all told him that it would calm him and make him happier but all he felt was a bit of a headache and some anguish about his head being shaved and swathed in bandages. They kept telling him he was better but he felt just the same. Still full of lust and fury, still only interested in what they called “feminine arts”, still wanting to dress in women’s clothes. So after a short and frightening time in what they called the outside world, here he was, back under their vigilant gaze of the panopticon and the ministrations of the good and bad nurses.

    Lisbon, July 10th 1982

    Vladimir had a huge surge of energy and at last set to work on the self-portrait that the journalist had suggested to him. He used his usual brilliant colour palette and black outlines but this time he was unable to confine the image of himself to the limits of the canvas and his feet, ears and the top of his head were all cut off. He gave himself the same vivid red lips and the heavy eye make-up that he’d given the Blessed Virgin and dressed himself in a variety of vibrant materials. In each of his hands, held in front of him, perched a bird, one blue, one yellow.

    January 23rd 1983

    Is that you? said the bad nurse, pointing at a black and white photograph of a handsome young man in a suit and tie leaning against a car. No, said Vladimir, it’s not me, but he threw me like a doll onto the bed. I think this is me. He indicated another old photo, this time of a dancer onstage and suspended in the air with his feet together, his arms aloft and his painted face triumphant but somehow fearful.

    They all came to Stuttgart and they took us off in their cars. Then we went to Berlin and then they brought me here. Ja, mein herr! Ja, ja!

    Prometheus. Beethoven, Petrushka. Stravinsky. Dolls. Puppets. Ja, ja, ja!

    January 10th 1986

    It was the current bad nurse, Adérito, who broke the news. He was just the latest in a succession of good and bad nurses over the past four decades. Their names changed but they were always either good or bad. Vladimir hadn’t painted anything or made anything for over a year and he was, at last dispirited, hunched in his chair and swathed in blankets.

    You’ll be leaving soon.

    Where am I going?

    That’s your business. But we’ll be free of your nonsense at last. Vladi.

    Nonsense?

    Your knitting and dolls and dressing up and lies.

    Vladimir took the shawl from his shoulders and flapped it at the bad nurse.

    Careful, sweetie, said the bad nurse. Or we may have to take away your privileges again. And then what would happen to your birds?

    Vladimir struck a pose.

    The next day he died.


    Feature Image: Section view of a panopticon prison drawn by Willey Reveley, circa 1791. The cells are marked with (H); a skylight (M) was to provide light and ventilation.[

  • The Relevance of Jurisprudence to Law Part 3

    The remains of unquestionably the greatest intellect of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, are buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. I recently tossed a red rose on the site. I doubt whether Judge Gerard Hogan, to whom I have addressed previous articles in this series, or any other legal positivist, would do likewise.

    While positivists often engage, though disagree, with rights-based -thinkers such as Ronald Dworkin, most exhibit a level of incomprehension, and often outright hostility towards certain forms of Radical Jurisprudence. No doubt the often unclearly expressed ideas of late Marxism, structuralism and post structuralism often are a factor, but that is only a partial excuse.

    Noam Chomsky – himself a linguistic positivist – once made a comment to the same effect on these authors, exempting Michel Foucault. He had developed a rational understanding of Foucault, but none for example of Derrida, who many including myself regard as largely intellectually fraudulent. Indeed, many Cambridge University philosophers objected to the conferring of an honorary degree on him, although I believe there is an element of truth to his babbling on relative truth or foresight.

    This plan of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

    Panopticon

    It is, nonetheless, easy to see why, as far as my harsh assessment of post-structuralism Foucault is exempted. Foucault makes very relevant contributions to Jurisprudence and the practice of law.

    First, the transplantation of Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon – the all-seeing surveillance prison such as Kilmainham in Dublin – is in Foucault’s view a depiction of modern society, where a uniform doctrine is enforced in schools, law courts and hospitals, leading to blind conformity.

    Foucault presaged the age of Surveillance Capitalism and 24-hour data surveillance in Ireland, achieved in camera in the Quirke Case through the representations of the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee. Thus, we have a global panopticon wherein the value of privacy and freedom is thrown to the wolves.

    Now our judges aside from Hogan, most recently in the Dwyer Case restricting the privacy right, ignore ECHR and EU law. This undermines an ideal of liberty, at least as old as J.S. Mill in modern times, and in fact going back to the Greeks. So, Foucault’s insight is not about postmodernism. It translates into the destruction of rights under Article 3 of the Irish Constitution and 8 and 5 of the Convention.

    The second of Foucault’s contribution is his book on madness in the age of reason. The fundamental tenet is that the Enlightenment / Age of Reason involved the necessity, intellectually and then institutionally, to confine the unreasoned – those who were called mad – into asylums. Well, who is mad and who is clinically insane?

    The recent US Democrat convention, with the rather wonderful Mr Walz speaking from the heart on middle-class US conservatism about banning books and depriving choice stands against that Twitter conversation between Musk and Trump.

    The problem of reason and madness is also clear earlier in Ken Kesey’s masterpieces ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1962). What happens when the lunatics have taken over the asylum and a dissident voice says no? What of when the man or woman of reason, the pursuer of nuance and grey, the boy who cries wolf, the creature of the Enlightenment is locked up by those who are in fact self-interestedly insane.

    Foucault was apparently not on the UCD Jurisprudence syllabus in the late 1970s. A short journey to the Arts block to encounter Richard Kearney’s expertise in Continental Philosophy would have been beneficial.

    Marx and Engels in the printing house of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. E. Capiro, 1895.

    The Crucial Figures

    The crucial figures of radical jurisprudence are not the structuralist, even Foucault, but the great Marxist theoreticians. For Marx law was a mirage, an ideology upholding the interests of the bourgeoisie, He considered it a mere superstructure determined by the economic base. Law, he observed, served the interests of the ruling class.

    Thus, in Marxist terms Hogan’s analysis of Kelsen is a form of intellectual masking or ideology justifying a form of state authoritarianism, which Marx would surely have interpreted precisely as the Populism of the petit bourgeoisie. No judicial deferral should be granted to the popular sovereignty of the mob.

    Marx though is not consistent about law. He argues that in the properly ordered Communist society there would be no need for laws, as we would spontaneously co-operate in our Communist Nirvana. But at times he concedes, inconsistently, that law is not always bad, and a close textual analysis of his views on property rights, and the freeing up of the alienation of estates to facilitate greater capital, shows that sometimes the superstructure can influence the base, and thus influence economic relations.

    So, what of Ireland controlled by a landlord class achieving nothing and facilitating careers going nowhere except to Microsoft and criminal banks, or the legal service class who act like vultures preying on the vulnerable on behalf of the powerful?

    The legal realist Oliver Wendell Holmes in his famous rebuke to unregulated free market economics in Lochner (1905) said the Fourth Amendment does not enact Mr Herbert Spencer’s social statics, and nor should the Irish Supreme Court enforce the interests of the commercial fat cats of Aran Square or elsewhere.

    Many Marxists, such as Lenin, saw the necessity for rules in a never-ending interregnum on the way to a Communist Utopia, which is never to be achieved. More pragmatically, the fundamental question for any judge which the Marxists pose is: whose interests do the rules serve?

    The Marxists influenced the critical legal studies movement, which to some extent educated me, adopting the radical indeterminacy thesis, an idea borrowed at one level from the legal realists. They argue that given the plasticity and malleability of rules, legal outcome can be very unpredictable and in fact subjective.

    There really is no such thing as a ‘plain fact’ or literal interpretation of almost any legal text. To avoid nihilism we should invoke moral principle as a corrective.

    Alienation

    The term alienation coined by Marx more generally to describe exploitation of workers serves as a warning as to how our government is destroying both the working and middle classes,

    Subsequent Marxist have been more approving of law. The legendary Antonio Gramsci, while imprisoned by Mussolini, adopted the phrase ‘hegemony’ to suggests as necessary a form of co-operation in law, politics and culture between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Now this coalition argument suggests law can be used as an instrument of social change. That depends on a desire to change for the good.

    One wonders whether the new, petite bourgeoisie-aligned Keir Starmer government in the U.K. should be a source of optimism or seen as a false dawn? More taxes on the wealthy, or further savage austerity for the poor?

    The Rule of Law is a central concept in jurisprudence, though hotly contested, and Marx aside, it has dominated the thinking of some of the main Marxists thinkers of recent vintage.

    In his codicil to Whigs and Hunters (1975), E.P. Thompson expressed a view on the Rule of Law as an unqualified good, which at times could check arbitrary authority. That of course assumes the Rule of Law exists in an ethical polity. It is not that evident in Ireland today as core principles are violated or improperly implemented.

    Thus, the independence of the judiciary is not obvious in Ireland, the use of in camera proceedings, akin to the promulgation of secret laws, is a cardinal violation of the notion that justice must be carried out in public. We also find an apparent tolerance of police corruption, the abandonment of substantive rather than formal equality, and indeed the abandonment of constitutional rights.

    Thompsons argument is premised on the idea that the judges are willing to enforce the rule of law, often with the effect of unsettling vested interests, as in the recent, painfully prolonged, Assange case. Irish judges are more likely to do the opposite.

    Jürgen Habermas

    Habermas

    Jürgen Habermas is, as ever, a crucial contemporary thinker, and, with all due respect to Gerard Hogan’s veneration of Kelsen, he is not just the world’s leading intellectual figure but the towering German intellect along with Thomas Mann and Kafka of the 20th century.

    Since Habermas abandoned the Frankfurt school, and thus post-structuralism, he has become, for over fifty years, one of the great proponents of the Rule of Law and legalism. He stresses the importance for judges not to subvert rights and parliamentary laws protecting civil liberties including the right to protest, viewing civil disobedience as central to revitalizing democracy.

    In contrast, the knee jerk reaction in Ireland and the UK has been to give more powers to the police to regulate dissent.

    Habermas’ other idea of communicative action, borrowed at one level incidentally from the arch positivist Austin, is the elaboration of the idea of ideal speech. His ideal for the vindication of speech rights is the eighteenth century salon. The ideas of communicative action in legal and judicial terms blends into the ideas audi alterum partem (‘listen to the other side’), and the obligation not to be either subjectively or objectively biased.

    Ideology, a term adopted by Marx, has been reinterpreted by Slavoj Žižek, drawing on another Marxist in Lacan, as ideological misidentification. In both instances, and applied to law, there is the sense that the bureaucratic class are engaged in false consciousness or deceptive ideas.

    Lon L. Fuller, who is not a Marxist but a natural lawyer, argued that once a legal system has not a tinsel of legality left, but enforces barbarism, it is no longer a legal system.

    To round the series off, a Marxist would fully understand the rage of Populism, but not necessarily approve of it. Of course pure Communist societies do not work, but nor does pure neo-liberalism. Indeed, Ireland is not working except for the landlord class.

    What does work legally ethically and morally is a social democratic Just Society advocated by the master John Rawls. What does work is Sweden, Denmark, Norway and much of northern Europe, where people are not in Marxist terms commodified and viewed as product, but in the moral Kantian sense things in themselves.

    John Rawls intellectually speaking would never have existed but for Karl Marx and a difficult thing for a legal positivist practitioner to realise is that Marx is in fact the greatest of all legal, political and economic philosophers. This is not to say he is entirely correct or a model to be followed in overall societal regulation, but a useful corrective to interpret laws and asses whose interest they serve and, if necessary, to bend rules to achieve socially just outcomes.

    Dworkin in fact argued that the South African judges during Apartheid should potentially have lied about the content of a racist law. I also agree or rather at the very least that they should have interpreted it to bring about socially just outcomes.

    Marxism at its best focuses on civil and in particular social and economic rights, and the judiciary responsibility to enforce them into the law and the Constitution, to the extent that this is consistent with the Rule of Law.

    Feature Image:Tomb of Karl Marx, East Highgate Cemetery, London.

     

  • I Do Not Consent

    I didn’t particularly want to write this article.  I didn’t want to get involved in the whole online social media circus of opinion and rebuttal, triggering and offense. But I feel like I have something to say, and what I have to say is important. So I’ll speak my truth.

    About a month ago, I completely removed my attention from the hysterical world of 24-hour news cycles, social media, the conspiracy theories, the craziness, the arguments and rebuttals, the fear, projection and lashing out. So I stopped watching the news and left Facebook, and very liberating it was too.

    The collective process the world was going through as a result of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) was taking its toll on me. I had never experienced such fear and anger online before. People were literally lashing out, blurting their unprocessed emotions, fear and anger, all over social media, mirroring perhaps, conversations that were occurring in family homes all around the world.

    Instead, I put my energy into the world around me: learning new skills, fishing, growing food, renovating a cottage. Putting my energy and vision into creating a new reality. But something is making me speak out at this time.

    I would like to preface what I am saying by acknowledging that Covid-19 is a real threat that has caused great loss and suffering to many families all around the world.

    The collective hysteria resulting from it, however, is every bit as damaging as the virus itself.

    On the nature of fear

    My background is as an outdoor guide. I spent two decades guiding in remote and sometimes dangerous rivers and mountains on four continents. During that time I became very familiar with the nature of fear. A large part of the psychological aspect of guiding in adventurous environments involves managing people’s fears.

    Solo seakayaking around Ireland, 2014.

    One lesson I learnt beyond any doubt is that fear is contagious. Just like a virus. If one person in a group becomes fearful, it spreads like wildfire throughout the entire group, a legacy of our evolutionary heritage, and the fight or flight mechanism.

    What we have witnessed, in the past few months, is the entire human species in fight, flight or freeze mode. It is collective anxiety on a global scale, amplified by social media and hysterical media coverage.

    Our political leaders, for the most part doing their best and responding to an unprecedented situation, were pressured by a fearful media and hysterical public to do something, anything, and naturally they reacted from a place of fear.

    As anyone with a background in adventure sports will know, good decisions are never, ever made from a place of great fear or hysteria.

    The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti wrote: ‘Fear of any kind breeds illusion … where there is fear there is obviously no freedom … It makes one tell lies, it corrupts one in various ways, it makes the mind empty, shallow.’

    I am not suggesting that our government in Ireland is consciously part of some nefarious plot to undermine democracy. Not intentionally anyway. But democracy has nevertheless been undermined as a result of the hysterical response to Covid-19.

    In the UK, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption said: ‘This is what a police state is like, it is a state in which a government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes’. He has called the lockdown ‘the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history’. When great legal minds are telling us that the rule of law is being undermined, we should listen.

    Our civil liberties and civil rights are not something that we be taken for granted. We forget now that Irish independence and the fight for freedom came at a high cost. ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’, is a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson.

    It does not matter whether you consider yourself to be politically on the left, centre, or the right, the erosion of civil liberties that has occurred in most Western democracies over the last few months is something that should concern you. if the there is one thing the history of the last century has taught us, it is that tyranny can take many forms.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

    You may well have great trust in our current government. That is not the point. The point is that future governments may well use the same arguments to repress civil liberties. Consider the possibility of a less benign government with opposing political views to your own coming into power in the future, and using the precedents set at this time to undermine your civil liberties. We do not have to look far back in history to see that such events are very possible. Once a precedent is established, it is an easy path to follow.

    Over two thousand years ago, Plato warned of the dangers of tyranny arising from a fearful and chaotic democracy. The people, when afraid, beg for a strong leader to come to save them. Tyranny can arise, not from a despot seizing power, but through a fearful public demanding protection from an external threat. This threat is real, but is overblown: ‘This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.’

    Many other great political thinkers have expounded on the idea of the tyranny of the masses. The great Irish political theorist Edmund Burke, wrote in a 1790 letter that ‘The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny’.

    John Stuart Mill in his famous essay ‘On Liberty’ (1859) spoke of the need to protect against, ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling … as the majority opinion may not be the correct opinion.’

    We confront a dystopian nightmare of an Orwellian society of constant surveillance, with the government and/or corporations controlling what we can think, what we say, and how we act.

    Militaristic language has become all too commonplace, thereby justifying extreme wartime measures. We talk of ‘front line’ workers. Much as these amazing doctors and nurses are doing a wonderful job and should be commended, there is no ‘front line’.

    This is not a war. You cannot fight a war against a part of Nature. That is like fighting a war against yourself, a mass collective schizophrenia. This is part of the problem with our current rational-materialistic society: in our arrogance we believe ourselves to be somehow separate from Nature. This crisis is showing us clearly that we are not.

    The following liberties have been undermined since the start of the Covid-19 hysteria:

    1. The right to personal liberty and to protest. 

    Article 40.4 of the Irish constitution guarantees a right to liberty, while Article 40.6.1 says you have a right to assemble and to associate freely.

    The right to assemble and to protest is an essential part of any functioning democracy. Remember the mass civil unrest that was occurring in Hong Kong and France before Christmas? This has disappeared without a trace. Are we no longer allowed to march on the streets should the need to protest arise? What is now stopping future governments using the ‘health and safety’ of the public as an excuse to crack down on civil disobedience?

    1. The right to free speech. 

    One of the most important of our human rights, established as early as 1789 in Article XI of the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ – ‘The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely’. Article 40.6.1 of the Irish Constitution guarantees a right to express freely  your convictions and opinions .

    However, this right has come under attack in recent months, with censorship becoming very prevalent. Any questioning of the mainstream narrative quickly gets labelled ‘false news’ or a ‘conspiracy’ theory, thereby stifling debate and discussion. Who has the power to decide what is false news? Do you, or do I? Or does some unelected Youtube or Google content executive?

    The mainstream media and social media companies have unprecedented power to manipulate the narrative. Social media and search engine algorithms can effectively control what we read and see, and therefore control the reality we live in. Who decides what we should think, and who holds this absolute and terrifying power?

    I may not agree with what you are saying, but I absolutely respect your right to say it. Otherwise, one day, we may find that right has been taken from us.

    1. The right to privacy.

    Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.’

    The seemingly benign concept of using a ‘contact tracing’ app could easily be misused by governments to normalise mass surveillance of citizens at all times, in the interests of public safety. Keeping track at all times of where you go and who you are with, a smartphone becomes like a voluntary ankle tag. With smartphones becoming almost essential to function in society, this mass surveillance is constant.

    One of the very worst tendencies this crisis has brought out in people is of of neighbours spying on one another, settling old grievances by informing. Have people forgotten already how secret police, such as the Stasi in East Germany, controlled populations by encouraging this behaviour?

    The French philosopher Michel Foucault believed that: ‘the power of a goverment is co-extensive with its ability to surveil’,  and wrote about the symbolic prison of the Panopticon, in which prisoners never knew when they were being observed, so were obliged to be on their best behaviour at all times. We are living in a digital panopticon, and giving governments unprecedented powers of surveillence.

    Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.

    Moreover, with cash becoming redundant through this crisis, governments and corporations have acquired an even greater capacity to surveil, and therefore control, our lives. In the U.K., Derbyshire police used drones to film hillwalkers in a remote mountain area, while in California police fined surfers a $1000 for catching waves.

    Is this the kind of society you want to live in?

    1. The right to bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty.

    Are we going to give away our right to bodily autonomy to pharmaceutical companies, and the possibility of a mandatory vaccination programme?

    I am neither pro- nor anti- vaccination, but I believe that people should enjoy an absolute right to decide what is put into their bodies, freedom over their own body. A right to bodily integrity has been recognised by the courts as an unenumerated right, protected by the general guarantee of ‘personal rights’ contained under Article 40 of the Irish constitution.

    There is some disagreement in the scientific community around the safety of vaccines, with billions of dollars having been paid out in compensation by the Vaccine Injury Courts over the past thirty years, but any dissent of the mainstream Big Pharma narrative is brutally suppressed and attacked. In the Middle Ages, heretics were burnt at the stake for daring to question the mainstream version of reality. While they are not burnt at the stake today, anyone who questions the mainstream narrative is attacked, vilified, and discredited

    If anyone thinks these concerns over civil liberties far-fetched, I suggest you look at the situation in China at the moment, where the government has used the crisis to strengthen its grip on power, and to crack down on dissent.

    Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    What sort of world do we want to live in post-Covid-19?

    I would easily sacrifice an element of safety for my freedom. I want to live in a world where personal liberty and civil duties are both honoured and respected; where personal sovereignty is not given away to unelected global corporations; where political power remains vested in individuals and communities, and a central State does not have unchecked power to interfere in citizens’ lives. Where policing is by consent, and not by coercion and control. I want young children to be able to run freely in the outdoors without fear, or masks.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

    I do not want to die anytime soon, but if I do, so be it. I have long accepted that one day I will die. I would much rather die a free man from Covid-19 than live in a dystopian surveillance society. What we are seeing is a global collective psychological process, the unconscious and unprocessed fear of death. By facing and accepting our own mortality, this fear dissipates.

    I do not want to live in a sanitised, risk-free, nanny-state surveillance world, where the government knows where I am at all times and controls what I think, what I can say, what I put in my body. I do not consent to this version of reality. I will not be part of it.

    The real front line is about personal power and self-sovereignty. Reclaiming our power from the unelected Silicon Valley AI/tech, media and pharmaceutical executives, who have acquired greater power over every aspect of our lives, with hardly any oversight.

    We need to come terms with the immense power that is accumulating in Google and Facebook to influence, manipulate and control what people think. Even that most Machiavellian of realpolitik bureaucrats Henry Kissinger recently wrote: ‘The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order. But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even more sweeping technological revolution whose consequences we have failed to fully reckon with, and whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms’. He who controls the algorithms controls the world.

    This is not a world I want to create. I do not consent. For sure this crisis has brought out the very best in humanity, with neighbours helping one another, communities coming together, increasing food security and developing a great sense of solidarity. But we cannot, Pollyanna-like, ignore the potential for the slide into a dystopian surveillance society.

    What sort of society do we want our children and grandchildren to inhabit? This is the real front line. We have had a great opportunity for reflection and collective dreaming, for visioning and birthing a new society and new reality. The birthing process of the new world will be messy and painful, as births always are, but the baby will be born.

    We are not powerless. We have the power to rewrite the story and create a beautiful world for future generations. Let us make our collective vision a beautiful one.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)