Shoplifters of the World, Unite and Take Over

It has been a rough month for everyone. I have decided that the rest of the media have talked enough about the Christchurch mass shootings that I needn't write a post saying much about it. I do want to say that I published the last post after the shooting but before I had heard about it; since then I almost entirely avoided watching the news and reading the newspaper for over a week. I will only say that, from what I have seen, what is striking about the media coverage of the massacre is that all the attention has been paid to the victims and to the Muslim community and very little has been paid to the shooter – a good thing because he doesn't deserve the attention. In the immediate aftermath, Jacinda donned a hijab to show her solidarity with the Muslim community. It is worth wondering if American politicians would do the same thing. The immediate reaction by the media was a concerted effort to bring New Zealand together, with headlines saying, "They are us". The same phrase was used at the end of a school performance of Hair by Selwyn College that I saw the other night. To be honest, this phrasing bugs me a little because it suggests non-Muslims talking to other non-Muslims about Muslims. I saw a poster on New North Road today which was much better. It said, "You are us".

The other day I went to the Mt Roskill Cultural Festival with my mother. In a city, Auckland, that is, as I've said before, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world, Mt Roskill is probably the most ethnically diverse suburb. There were food stalls and performances from, it seemed, every country in the world, including Afghanistan. It is a sign of the country's resilience that the festival went ahead and went ahead so well.

For some time now, the main subjects of this blog have been schizophrenia and homosexuality and I want to write about them again. Concerning schizophrenia, I think it important to say that it is impossible to understand psychosis without recognising that the experiences a psychotic endures often have a spiritual or mystical dimension. Karl Jung understood this, in a way – he apparently experienced a psychotic episode at least once, although he didn't characterise his experiences using this word. Some of his major psychological insights were communicated to him by a female voice: this is how he arrived at the concept of the 'anima'. Despite this, based on what I've read it seems to me that Jung often tended, as most modern psychiatrists do, to think of 'schizophrenic' as a category of person rather than as a temporary condition, and consequently didn't realise his kinship with his patients.  I know from my own experiences and from my observations of others that psychosis has a mystical dimension. At the same Hearing Voices group at which I met Jess, in 2009, I talked with a woman who had become 'ill' as a result of postnatal depression; she told us that she sometimes heard a voice telling her that she was intended to marry Christ. I immediately said, "You were receiving a calling to become a nun!" Nuns, of course, are called Brides of Christ. But this woman didn't seem, consciously at least, to be aware of this religious interpretation of her delusion. I knew a kid once who, during a drug-induced psychotic episode, hallucinated that there was a path in front of him and that every time he stepped off the path he felt sick. This was, obviously, an intuition of the existence of Fate, the same intuition that is explored in the film Donnie Darko. Even though a mystical or religious interpretation of madness is almost forced upon anyone who takes a sincere interest in it, most psychiatrists and psychologists are tone-deaf to the spiritual aspects of mental illness. Many years ago, I occasionally formed the delusion that I might be Jesus, or like Jesus in some way, a common delusion among psychotics. When I told the psychologist I saw in 2014 about this, he explained it away by saying that Jesus had magical powers and that psychotics often imagine that they also have magical powers. As I've pointed out before in this blog, the psychologist I saw was a cretin. The reason psychotics sometimes think that they are Jesus is that Jesus took the sins of the world upon himself and was crucified.

If I've had a Messiah complex, it's because I've been compelled to write about sexuality even though I know it's a taboo subject that invites disapprobation. When I was young I was aware of perhaps Foucault's most important book, The History of Sexuality, but I was reluctant to read it. For similar reasons I was reluctant to read Ihimaera's Nights in the Garden of Spain or anything by Proust – I thought I might be contaminated. For some reason, however, I was willing to watch films with gay themes like Brokeback Mountain and, later, Milk. Perhaps it is more socially acceptable to watch gay films than to read books by gay writers. When I was young I didn't want to touch works with gay themes but today I write a blog that often deals with issues of sexuality – a painful irony. I hope that my views are worth reading. Others have written about this subject before but perhaps I have a unique perspective that makes my contribution worthwhile.

What can be said about homosexuality? Homosexuality, it seems, has two facets: what it feels like from the inside and what it looks like from the outside. From the inside, homosexuality is an orientation, a romantic or sexual interest directed towards members of the same gender. However, there are also outward behavioural and even physical signs of homosexuality. Gay men display their homosexuality through body language and vocal inflection. Stereotypically, gay men are all supposed to be thin. In Janet Frame's day, lesbians were all supposed to have big arses – Frame must have been aware of this stereotype, although she doesn't make it explicit, because in An Angel at my Table she sometimes mentions how people would tell her she had a big bottom. More recently, received wisdom had it that lesbians all had short legs; my friend Jess, who herself has short legs, preferred to describe herself as 'long-bodied'. Both Jess and Frame were straight but both were acutely conscious of how others might perceive them, an indication of paranoia, probably justified. The outward signs of homosexuality go further than just body language, physique and voice – stereotypically, gay men like opera and ballet and poetry while straight men like rugby and cricket. Society's habit of stereotyping people feeds directly into Judith Butler's theory that gender is performative, that masculinity and femininity are roles you act out by aligning yourself with social gender conventions, rather than being fundamental aspects of who a person is. I don't like Butler's theory. It is literally soulless – it denies that people have souls. And it exacerbates the worst in human society, our tendency to judge people based on stupid prejudices and ignorant misconceptions. Butler is saying that a person is simply how he or she is perceived by others. Even if other people are cretins.

I have for a long time found these two aspects of homosexuality, the inner experience of gayness and its outward manifestation (sometimes called the gay 'lifestyle'), puzzling. Why do the two seem to go together? When I was young, I could sometimes tell that a person was gay even before he or she came out, and so I assumed that the person was subconsciously telegraphing his or her homosexuality to the world though his or her behaviour, a little like a Freudian slip. The person had a gay soul, a gay True Self, which they were trying to repress but which made itself known through his or her behaviour and choices. To put it simply, I believed in the concept of the repressed or latent homosexual, a category perceptible to the alert observer. As I grew older, I sometimes found that people who I had always assumed to be straight had in fact come out as gay and others who I had alway assumed to be gay (often as the result of juvenile gossip) were in fact straight. But this didn't alter my fundamental conviction that people were born either gay or straight and that it was possible to tell which was which. Sometimes, I knew, it could take a while for a gay man or woman to tell his or her parents and the world that he or she was gay but I felt that only idiots or criminals could remain in the closet past their twenty-fifth year. This is yet another reason why I hate the Mental Health Service. I became sick at the age of twenty-seven and was quite evidently diagnosed by my incompetent psychiatrist as a latent homosexual at the first appointment. At the age of twenty-seven. And they still evidently believed it when I was thirty-three.

At some point in my life, I changed my mind – I decided that a straight man could turn gay. I know that in 2009, when I was twenty-nine, having been a patient of the Mental Health System for over two years, I formed the delusion that male homosexuality was caused by a lack of testosterone and became acutely afraid that the antipsychotics I was taking might somehow turn me gay by fucking with my hormone levels. I felt this even though I wasn't in the slightest sexually attracted to men and even though there was nothing wrong with my sex drive. In 2013, I arrived at a different theory – I decided that the cause of homosexuality was the beliefs of those around the person that the person is gay. This is the theory that I have hinted at for a long time in this blog, a theory that obviously has a grain of truth. What I in effect decided to believe was the opposite of what I believed when I was young. I decided that the outward manifestation came before the inner experience. In essence, a person is put under immense pressure for often a very attenuated period of time by the attitudes of those around him and finally buckles, chooses to be gay, makes that decision. To put this conclusion as explicitly as possible, if this theory is true, homosexuality is a choice.

Of course, as my readers will know, I support the Green Party and, if I were American, would vote Democrat. To say that homosexuality is a choice puts me in an invidious position – it puts me in Mike Pence's camp when I would rather side with Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, and the Democratic presidential candidates like Beto O'Rouke and Bernie Sanders. To make my theory more palatable to my Democrat readers, I proffer the following analogy. Consider shoplifting. Most people don't shoplift but some do. If we wanted we could say shoplifters can't help themselves, that they are born with a shoplifting gene. We could organise a lobby group to fight for the rights of the shoplifting community. In the real world, this doesn't happen: most everyone presumes that the act of shoplifting is a choice. But it is a choice often made after a person has endured a very long period of pressure. We can imagine someone, a woman perhaps, who has never considered thievery until one day, after enduring years of grinding poverty, she decides to nick a tin of condensed milk and a chocolate bar from her local convenience store. This analogy applies, loosely, to homosexuality.

This theory however, that the outward signs of homosexuality precede the inner experience of homosexuality, runs into problems when we consider real world homosexuals. Both Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon are gay but both don't seem gay at all. One of the Democrat presidential candidates, Pete Buttigieg, a man both highly intelligent and morally virtuous, is openly gay. He also doesn't seem gay, camp, at all. Likewise, although my mother thinks Stephen Fry very camp, he doesn't strike me as camp at all. The greater acceptance of homosexuality today than in previous eras means that we now know that many people we would once never have considered gay actually are, because they are willing to come out publicly. The corollary must also be true: there must be many people who seem gay who aren't. I can think of examples from film and TV, and from my own life experience. For instance, I used to know a chap called Wiremu who I always assumed to be gay based on his body language and voice. In recent months I have wondered if I was wrong. This suggests that there might be no relation between the outward signs and inner experience at all.

There is a second reason why this theory is problematic. In 2010 and 2011, I was aware that the people treating me, my psychiatrist and key worker, thought I might be gay or bisexual but although this sometimes bothered me a little, it didn't make me unwell. I just lived with it. In 2013, I became psychotic again. On 18 January 2014, immediately after the Big Day Out, I woke in the morning feeling as though a patina of gayness had completely covered my skin. Every morning for years after I woke every morning with extraordinarily unpleasant images of homosexuality in my head; this didn't stop completely until early 2016. I struggle to find the right term for this experience. The Calvinists talk about 'regeneration', the process by which a person's defences are broken down before he or she can receive grace. The Catholics talk about the 'dark night of the soul'. The Jungian psychoanalysts talk about ego death or psychic death. Whichever term you want to use, it was terrible. It seemed I needed to endure this hell to realise that homosexuality is a choice, but the problem with this construal of my experiences is that, despite all this, despite the spiritual torture I endured for years, I never seriously considered the possibility that I might be gay. I'll deploy another analogy, one I have used before. Everyone presumes that if a person kills someone else, the decision to do so is an act of free will: our whole justice system is built upon this assumption. But the vast majority of people would never consider killing anyone. Once again this analogy applies, loosely, to homosexuality. I would never choose to screw a man in the same way that I would never choose to kill someone.

The last couple of paragraphs may lead readers to be understandably confused about how much moral opprobrium I am suggesting should be assigned to homosexuality. Is it as minor a transgression as shoplifting or smoking pot? Or is it as bad as murder? What I am trying to say is that, for other people homosexuality should be regarded as a minor, forgivable infraction. For me it would be as bad as murder.

The culture wars that were fought and are still being fought in America often seem to be a war between liberal atheists who support gay rights and religious fundamentalists who are basically homophobic and think homosexuals are all destined for hell. Recently this issue has blown up in the Australasian media as a result of comments made by NRL player Israel Folau, when he said that homosexuals should repent and find Christ or else be destined for hell. What I would like to suggest now, as an alternative to the theory that homosexuality is the result of a free decision, is that the cause of homosexuality is God's will: I would like to suggest tentatively, as an alternative to the rational explanation I suggested above, an irrational one. I would suggest that Fate or God decides who is gay and who isn't; consequently, I think that there should be a reconciliation between religion and homosexuality. Such a reconciliation in fact seems to be going on. There is, for instance, in the Anglican Church a current and fierce debate about the allowance of same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly gay bishops. Very recently, Buttigieg, who is an Episcopalian, had a public fight with Pence in which he said that if Pence had a quarrel with him about his sexuality he should take it up with Butigieg's creator. There is, in fact, a Christian Left, as there should be, because Christianity is basically a left-wing religion. Stephen Colbert is a committed Roman Catholic but I'm pretty sure he supports gay rights and birth control. Hasan Minhaj identifies as a Muslim but likewise upholds the Democrat moral positions on all the major culture issues. Both Colbert and Minhaj put true compassion ahead of blind adherence to doctrine. The issue of how religions go about accepting homosexuality is incredibly complicated but progress does seem to be happening, and the world does seem to be changing.

At the moment, it is difficult to guess what will happen in the 2020 American presidential election. I don't yet know if Buttigieg is any more competent than the other candidates but it seems to me that to have an openly gay president might be of great symbolic importance in reducing stigma around homosexuality, in the same way that Obama's two terms was a great stride forward in African American civil rights, and so I would tentatively support him. Perhaps Buttigieg would be a brilliant president. If he does become president however we should all expect a backlash from the right that would dwarf the backlash against Obama.

In this post, I have been making two proposals. The first, rational and secular, is that homosexuality is a choice but not a choice that should be censured or condemned; it is a choice often made as the result of an extremely long period of social pressure The second, religious, is that God decides who is gay and who isn't, and so religiously inspired homophobia is misplaced. It is unChristian (and unBuddhist, unIslamic, and so on) to hate gay people.. Either way, methods of treating the mentally ill who have issues with sexuality should change. Suppose a person shows up in the office of a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, or a counsellor, and says, "I think I might be gay!" The therapist should say, "Do you want to be gay?" If the patient says "Yes", the therapist should simply say "Okay". If the patient says, "No", the therapist should say, "You can't be gay unless you want to be".

I'll finish this post by talking about something quite different.. In the previous post, I was a little unfair to Bill Maher. Although Maher seems to support Israel over the Palestinians, he also said in the same episode that he recognised that the opposing viewpoint is defensible. It is fashionable, even among leftists, to bag Bill Maher. Some fools even go so far as to say Maher is a racist because he accidentally used the n-word once, when it is obvious that he isn't. Truly he seems to me a very good person.  I like Maher – in fact, since Jon Stewart retired, Maher has been my favourite comedian-pundit. He and I sometimes differ but on a whole I regard him as a voice of reason in a deranged world. Maybe I'm a little deranged myself occasionally but I'm simply trying to find the logic in the madness.

Jewishness and Zionism

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called "On Jewishness". In today's post, I want to venture into somewhat controversial territory again – I wish to describe the effect that the Jewish dominance of the intellectual scene has on Gentiles, and then turn to the vexed issue of Israeli-Palestinian relations. My reason for doing so is to uncover a type of madness in the Left as well as the Right, that cuts across the political spectrum, an insanity that has worsened under the Trump presidency. It's an issue that no-one seems prepared to talk openly about and so someone has to. Hopefully, I will present these issues without offending anyone, or only offending people who are unwilling to think critically about the issues.

We live in a world where it is potentially offensive for a Gentile to opine on issues relating to Jewishness at all, so I need to say this. I am not anti-semitic. When I was a teenager, one of my favourite books was Kafka's The Trial; the Coen brothers are some of my favourite directors (second only to David Lynch); I love Neil Gaiman's work and Gaiman (although I didn't know this when I was fifteen) is Jewish. I am a fan of stand-up comedy and there have been many famous Jewish comedians, such as Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Andy Kaufman, Sarah Silverman, and of course Jon Stewart. Bill Maher's mother is Jewish and so he could identify as Jewish if he chose although, in the past, he has seemed to me to identify more strongly with the Irish side of his family. At my pub quiz yesterday, I found out that Harrison Ford's mother is Jewish which means Ford could also identify as Jewish if he chose to – this came as a complete surprise to me because Ford doesn't look Jewish at all.

As this introductory section indicates, there are lots of people in the public eye who are Jewish, or who have Jewish descent. In the world of literature this skewing is less apparent, but in the world of philosophy and theory it sometimes seems that there are more Jews than Gentiles producing important work. This is the case even though it is estimated that there are only seven million Jews living, for instance, in the US. Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Althusser, Derrida, Chomsky, Pinker, and Butler, among many, many others are Jewish. The host of Majority Report, Sam Seder, is Jewish and Sam Harris's mother is Jewish. A day or two ago, I saw on CNN Fareed Zakaria interviewing a Standford neuroscience professor about how we're neurologically wired to divide the world into 'us' and 'them' groups – inevitably, of course, this professor turned out to be Jewish.

Given the enormous influence Jewish intellectuals, who tend to be leftist and often radical, have over the intellectual scene, we might look for an explanation. There is an argument from evolutionary psychology that Jews simply tend to be cleverer than other ethnic groups. The argument, if I remember it correctly, is that in the couple of millennia after the diaspora, Ashkenazi Jews, who were consigned to ghettos in European cities, survived by taking on jobs such as money-lending and legal work; selective pressure acted upon the Jewish population, making them genetically more intelligent than Gentiles. This argument resembles in some ways another argument from evolutionary psychology, that during the centuries when slavery existed in the United States, white slave-owners deliberately bred intelligence out of their black slaves, treating them like domesticated animals, and that consequently African-Americans are genetically stupider than white Americans. I find both arguments abhorrent. One of my core beliefs, a belief so foundational I never even question it, is that intelligence and success is the result of complex cultural factors, even luck, rather than DNA. Intelligence isn't genetic. It seems to me that the current fashion among theorists to embrace evolutionary biology is pernicious and possibly evil, a reappearance of eugenic ideas we associate with the Nazis. I will return to this idea later in the post.

How can we explain Jewish success without attributing it to some kind of hereditary cluster of intelligence genes? We can talk about upbringing, nurture rather than nature. Consider Jewish comedians. It is possible, even likely, that Jon Stewart watched Woody Allen films when he was young, and consequently decided  as a result that comedy was a viable occupation for a young Jewish kid. Likewise, other Jewish kids, aware of the strong intellectual tradition already in place among Jews, decided that philosophy was a viable vocation over, say, police work or basketball. People choose which jobs they want to pursue, and role modelling plays a strong part in these decisions. There is a long history of argumentation and disputation in the Jewish community, and this also plays a role. Furthermore, although this sounds like a stereotype, I believe it true that Jewish parents push their children extremely hard to succeed academically, that Jewish kids are steered, if not towards stand-up comedy and philosophy, then towards professions like the law, banking or medicine. Another ingredient is what modern Marxists call 'cultural capital'. In the Hollywood film industry, getting ahead often involves networking, having the right friends, and if a Jewish kid has a Jewish uncle in an important position, he or she is more likely to get the job. This sounds like a conspiracy theory but it is a simple truth about the way the world works. In the entertainment industry, as so often in life, it isn't what you know but who you know that makes the difference.

In the introduction to this post, I said that I wanted to talk about the effect a perceived Jewish dominance within the philosophical field and the entertainment industry has on Gentiles (where I am using the word Gentile to refer to anyone who isn't Jewish). Many people who become dimly aware of this Jewish hegemony (for want of a better word), but who don't critically enquire into its causes, can end up believing in a Jewish conspiracy a la "the protocols of Zion". Other Gentiles however take the exact opposite tack – many, often liberal, react to it by forming the secret wish to be Jewish. I have felt the same way myself, and I have often intuited signs of the same wish in others, often in those close to me. This strange tension, a world of Gentiles who want to be Jewish and Jews who, because of their opposition to Israel, don't want to be, is explored in the novel The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson.

I might digress for a moment to make a possibly interesting observation. The Matrix is a very Jewish film. The secret settlement of those who have escaped the Matrix is called "Zion" and the myth among the escapees of a chosen one who will appear to save them is simply the Jewish myth of a Messiah yet to arrive.

This brings me to my second topic: Israel. I cannot stress the following point strongly enough. It is possible to oppose Israeli policies without being antisemitic. This should be obvious but it isn't. I have had trouble tracking down the source of this info but, as I understand it, a few years ago the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) defined antisemitism in such a way as to suggest that any criticism of Israel was antisemitic; the UK Labour Party refused to accept this definition, resulting in an enormous schism in the party and controversy in the media. The leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has been embroiled in charges of antisemitism in part, I understand, because he supports Palestinian self-determination. I don't know enough to wade into this issue in British politics but this example is a representative example of a tendency of some Zionists to characterise all critics of Israel as Jew-haters (and those Jews, like Noam Chomsky, who venture to criticise Israel as "self-hating"). The issue of Israeli-Palestinian relations is often presented in black-and-white terms, that you are either for Israel or against it. Sam Harris, for instance, who is something of an apologist for Israel, argues that the choice people have is between supporting Israel or supporting Hamas with its avowed goal of destroying the State of Israel and establishing an Islamic State. This is a false dichotomy; one can criticise Israel without seeking its dissolution. Can't we have something in-between? A solution that works for both Jews and Palestinians? The best solution is for the Israeli and Palestinian territories to merge, forming a multi-ethnic, democratic, secular state, like pretty much every other state in the world, in which Palestinians and Israelis (together with the other Arabs and Christians who live in the region) have equal citizenship rights and are treated the same under the law. I hope I am not altogether misrepresenting Chomsky when I say that this is his preferred solution. A second more feasible if less utopian answer is the 'two-state solution', something the UN has argued for since 1974, in which Israel and Palestine exist side by side as two sovereign nations. Many Palestinians support this proposal, although only if the countries return to their pre-1967 borders. Whatever the solution, it necessarily involves giving Palestinians greater self-determination and rights. To support Israel, as Harris does, is a vote for the status quo, for the current mess, for everlasting occupation of the Palestinian Territories. It seems Harris, and the Israeli Right as led by Netanyahu, really want the Palestinians to somehow just simply disappear.

As the previous paragraph suggests, I tend to side with the Palestinians. The reporting I have read and documentaries I have seen over the years have suggested to me that these people, in a way stateless, live under unbearable conditions. For every Palestinian kid photographed throwing stones and splashed over the World section of the newspaper during an Intifada (there hasn't been one for a while), there's a Palestinian kid shot by an Israeli soldier. The daily mistreatment of Palestinians doesn't often make the news. What does is the building of illegal but tolerated Orthodox Jewish settlements on land which should be Palestinian – problematic not least because the Gaza Strip is the most densely populated area on Earth. Last year, under the leadership of Netanyahu, the Knesset passed legislation saying “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it”. Arabic, formerly an official language, was stripped of this status; Hebrew became the the sole official language. I include a link to interesting article written by an Israeli Arab which talks about how the system in Israel legally discriminates against minorities (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/13/netanyahu-israel-palestinian).

Israel seems to me a right-wing, even fascist state, and so it is ironic that it is supported by Jews around the world who tend to be liberal and left-wing. The madness of the current situation is exemplified by a fascinating factoid. I read a survey last year that found that only two countries in the world liked Donald Trump more than Barack Obama. One was Russia. The other was Israel. Netanyahu is currently campaigning for re-election and posters pasted across the cities of Israel show him and Trump together, demonstrating, I guess, that Israel has strong friends. In a Youtube clip, Slavoj Zizek talks about how Netanyahu has courted far-right, populist governments in Eastern Europe, exploiting what Zizek describes as "zionist antisemitism". Zionist antisemites don't mind Jews so long as the Jews "go back to where they came from" (i.e. Israel). Zizek cites the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik as an example of zionist antisemitism. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE6VWYwO-4Y)

This madness, the fundamental contradiction in the Jewish community on this issue, filters into the whole global culture as a result of the influence Jewish thinkers and performers have on the world. After Charlottesville, many in the media sought to portray Trump as a Nazi because he was supported by neo-Nazis – but Trump himself isn't antisemitic, even though the media wanted him to be. Yes, he is racist (against black people) but his adored son-in-law is a devout Jew and his daughter converted to Judaism. Breibart News, the far-right publication involved to some large extent in the election of Trump which is described by Wikipedia as advancing neo-Nazi ideas, was originally founded to be "unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel". Trump likes autocrats, likes Putin and seems to even like Kim Jong Un – he seems to want to align himself with other autocratic, populist leaders. And to some extent Netanyahu can be considered one of those.

On his show last week, Bill Maher defended Israel by saying in effect that, yes, the Palestinians are suffering but that they brought it on themselves. I fail to see how the Palestinians asked to be occupied and have their human rights taken away. I think Maher, like Harris, believes that the Palestinians want to destroy the Israeli state and so the occupation is justified. But if this was ever true, is it still true today? Is there not perhaps an appetite for a two-state solution among Left-leaning Israelites and moderate Palestinians? The arguments in support of Israel depend on a certain way of characterising Palestinians and Israel's neighbouring Middle Eastern countries, on the idea that Israel is fighting for its survival. But is this characterisation necessarily true? In order to find a solution to a social problem, we need to see the best in other people, recognise our shared humanity with those we disagree with on some matters or have had conflict with, enter into constructive dialogue. We need to find common ground. Northern Ireland shows that progress, peace processes, are possible – although the Israel-Palestine conflict is arguably much worse than the situation that existed in Northern Ireland. Yet it certainly doesn't help to deliberately inflame tensions as Netanyahu is doing by allowing the building of illegal settlements and by making the Israeli Arab minority into second-class citizens.

We are at a very worrying point in history and nobody seems willing to talk about it openly. First, as the Trump phenomenon and Breitbart News shows, there seems to be a bizarre alliance between neo-Nazis and Zionists. (Many American Evangelical Christians are also Zionists because they believe supporting Israel will hasten the Second Coming of Christ, but this isn't something I want to go into here.) Second, although the Jewish community presents itself as unified and cohesive, it is riven down the middle between Right-wingers and Left-wingers, between Trump supporters and Democrats. Third, the availability of biographical information about celebrities on the Internet means it has become far easier to learn who has Jewish heritage and who doesn't, with consequences I won't speculate on here. Lastly, all of this has coincided with the rise in popularity of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology in the universities. Although evolutionary psychology is championed by fundamentally decent people like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, I view it as inherently dangerous;  it licenses the fascist idea that some people were born intellectually superior to other people. All of this contributes to the schizoid nature of the political discourse today.

Israel was founded in 1948. Before then there was a trickle of Jewish immigrants settling in Palestine, setting up kibbutzim and living alongside their Palestinian neighbours. I understand that Chomsky views this period in Jewish history very positively, and that the social organisation of these early communes influenced his later political beliefs. The establishment of a Jewish state however, in 1948, could be considered the last gasp of the old colonial system, a system in which Europeans in London or Brussels could decide which imperial power had governorship of which parcel of land by drawing lines on a map. The establishment of the state of Israel rather ignored the fact that people were already living there. Now, although Zionists argue that the current debate concerns the right of Israel to exist, that Palestinians and others constitute an existential threat to Israel, I think whether the establishment of Israel was a good thing or a bad thing is irrelevant. Israel has been around for seventy years and has a population of 8.7 million. Israel isn't going to disappear, and rational opponents of Israeli policy know this. The issue is, rather, what form will Israel take in the future? And what form will Palestine take?

The IHRA, in its definition of antisemitism, says that comparing Zionism to Nazism is antisemitic. It is also antisemitic to suggest that Jews have a 'double allegiance', that they are loyal not only to whichever country they live in, but also to Israel. With respect the first stipulation I turn to my friends Monty Python. In The Life of Brian, a scene was filmed in which Eric Idle played a Jew in a Nazi uniform declaring his desire for "an ethnically pure Jewish state". This scene didn't make it into the final cut, perhaps because in a film that was always going to be controversial, this was a step too far. Or perhaps because it wasn't funny enough. With respect to the second stipulation, a little while ago I found an essay on the Net, an essay that was considered, tempered, and I think objective, that pointed out that in Jewish schools in America, kids are taught to regard support for Israel as part of their Jewish identity. Unfortunately I can't remember where I found this essay but it seemed to be just stating facts. Overly strict definitions of antisemitism have a way of stifling debate. I have said before in this blog that sometimes I only work out what I am trying to say by saying it, and this is the point in the post where I articulate where my logic has led me. Although I tentatively raised the possibility of a two-state solution, I think that in the current climate this is not likely at all. Within Israel and within the US, the Jewish community has enormous money and clout and, from a Marxist perspective, it is not in their self-interest to support the oppressed. In Israel, this means not supporting the Palestinians. In the US, it means not voting Democrat. The madness in the US in its variety of forms is I think symptomatic of a seismic shift going on underground, a shift in which the Jewish community stops predominantly voting Democrat and starts voting Republican instead. Trump's vociferous support for Israel and Netanyahu is a shameless attempt to secure the Jewish vote, and it may just succeed. It is a shift that will leave traditional lefty Jews like George Soros, Bernie Sanders, and Barbara Streisand behind. Maher gets things wrong from time to time (who doesn't?) but when he said that Trump's election was a "slow motion right wing coup" I think this is what he was talking about.

Public Intellectuals

I can't remember when I first heard about Noam Chomsky. When I was a teenager, my brother took an interest in the book and subsequent documentary "Manufacturing Consent" and in the  years after I formed an impression of Chomsky as a lefty critic of capitalism and American imperialism, as well as being someone who had radically influenced the development of the field of linguistics. In 2011 or 2012 I borrowed "Year 501" from the library but, and this is painful for me to admit, was forced to return it before I finished it. In 2017 I came across Chomsky again when enrolled in a University course about Political Economy, watched "Manufacturing Consent" again, and read some supplementary literature about it. I have included the essay I wrote about his theory in this blog (it's the post called "Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent in 2018"). Since then I have become much more interested in Chomsky. There are numerous clips of him speaking at seminars, panel discussions, in interviews and debates available for everyone's delectation on Youtube. I can now say that I like Chomsky very much indeed. His greatest achievement, the theory of Universal Grammar, seems one of the most important contributions not only to linguistics but to science and philosophy of the twentieth century. He speaks knowledgeably and clearly not only about linguistics but about history, politics, philosophy, and science generally. His enormous erudition and surgical precision concerning important topics is always on display. Chomsky is a bona fide public intellectual.

What is a public intellectual? A public intellectual is a person who takes an interest in important but abstract ideas, and communicates his or her views about them to a lay audience. The public who consume these disquisitions tend to be people who have studied but have left academia, or people who have no tertiary education at all but have an appetite for ideas. Unlike those intellectuals happily ensconced in universities who spend all their time talking to other scholars via the books they write, public intellectuals seek to explain their ideas in ordinary language in order to be understood as widely as possible. Public intellectual speak down as well as across. France has a long tradition of public intellectuals but these savants are less common in the United States and completely absent from New Zealand – the closest we have are those newspaper and magazine columnists who write about the scholarly books they read and the latest scientific research. Deborah Hill Cone, the columnist who resigned a couple of months back, could be described as one of those mob, the closest New Zealand comes to having a scene for public intellectuals to act in.

However, times they have a way of changing. Over the last five years (I'd guess), the role of 'public intellectual' has boomed. The culprit? The internet of course, and particularly Youtube. Fifteen years ago, Youtube was where you went if you wanted to watch really short clips of cats doing silly dumb things but, today, anything and everything is on Youtube – old episodes of Monty Python, every song ever written (including classical and operatic pieces), snatches from CNN and Fox News, talks explaining quantum physics and Euler's Identity... just about everything. And unlike Google, Youtube, employing complicated statistical algorithms, works out the stuff its users are interested in, and steers them towards those videos it has been decided you and those most like you most like. It is in this environment that public intellectuals increasingly thrive. Youtube has dozens, perhaps hundreds, of TED talks (one I can recommend is "The Science Delusion" presented by Richard Sheldrake). Want to know the views of Sam Harris on free will? Just search "Sam Harris" and "free will" and an apposite video will pop up. Of course, Youtube is not the only platform through which public intellectuals can get their views across – Sam Harris has a podcast. And, in a feedback circle, public intellectuals can exploit their fame by giving stand-up orations to large paying audiences, which in turn amplifies their internet presence.

I said that Chomsky is a bona fide public intellectual. I now want to turn our attention onto someone who is taken to be one also but isn't – Jordan Peterson.

Oddly, I discovered Jordan Peterson through Stephen Fry. For many years I have been interested in Fry, not because I was familiar with his work with Hugh Laurie (I wasn't) but because he is an intelligent openly gay man. I like Stephen Fry because he is proof that at this particular stage of human social evolution, gay men come out and so, consequently, if a man says he is straight, he wouldn't lie about it and should be taken at his word. (I hope this odd rationale makes sense.) Last year, I discovered that numerous skits from A Bit of Fry and Laurie had been uploaded to Youtube and I voraciously consumed them. Perhaps halfway through last year, I became curious about Fry's attitude to political correctness and searched "Stephen Fry" and "political correctness". What popped up was a debate on the topic between Michelle Goldberg and Michael Eric Dyson, on one team, and Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson, on the other. The moot was "What you call political correctness, I call progress". Fry and Peterson were arguing against the resolution. The debate was stupid – it seemed that all four orators had different ideas about what political correctness is. Fry's idea seemed the closest to mine: I think political correctness is the idea that we can control behaviour and attitudes by making rules about what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable speech. It was immediately evident that Fry and Peterson were strange bedfellows. Peterson is right-wing whereas Fry is a self-described "social justice warrior" who simply dislikes the idea that speech should be censored or that speakers should self-censor, and who is uncomfortable with modern PC terms like "cisgender" and "heteronormative". Peterson's argument didn't address my or Fry's understanding of political correctness at all. In fact, it was stupid to the point of incoherence. And yet, after watching this debate, Youtube's algorithms decided that I had an interest in Peterson; I didn't set out to find Peterson but, in a way, he found me. After watching the video of the debate, I was suddenly being pointed to lots of other online clips of Peterson fulminating against the Left and proffering muddled defences of religious sentiment, such as the video of Peterson debating Harris on religion. Obviously Peterson is the public intellectual du jour. 

I don't pretend to be an expert on Jordan Peterson but he seems to me to be a shallow thinker, a rhetorician who enjoys the sound of his own voice and his own fame, a man whose views are confusing because they are confused. I'll pick out two examples of Peterson simply talking bullshit. Peterson seems to imagine there is a kind of leftish conspiracy, that the Left can be characterised as "Postmodern neo-Marxists". The equation between Postmodernism and Marxism is just plain wrong. Postmodernism can usefully be defined as a skepticism towards meta-narratives, and Marxism is just another meta-narrative to be skeptical about. A prominent methodology within Postmodernism is deconstruction and many have pointed out that one can deconstruct the left as easily as one can deconstruct the right. A famous essay on Postmodernity, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", argues, as the title suggests, that postmodernism is the natural philosophical foundation for neo-liberal capitalism. But Peterson's devoted right-wing followers lap up this sort of overly simplistic bullshit, that postmodernists have a Marxist agenda, regarding Peterson as a kind of heroic crusader fighting against an evil Left who want to take away people's guns and emasculate men. Probably this is because the right want someone perceived as smart on their side. (Peterson also argues for enforced monogamy and is a hero of the In-Cel movement.)

The second example of Peterson's empty rhetoric I found in a clip in which he is talking about income inequality. Peterson argues that the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest 1% is inevitable because life is like a game of Monopoly. But why should we accept this simile? Perhaps life is like a game of chess. Perhaps we are seeking to outmanoeuvre an invisible opponent who will always inevitably win. Or perhaps life is like football, that we are part of a team battling against another team. Or perhaps life is not like a game at all. Perhaps it is is a collaborative exercise. Perhaps we are like a bunch of villagers in tenth century England working together to build a cathedral. Yet Peterson's arguments depend on his audience uncritically accepting the analogies he proposes without justification, a sure sign of empty rhetoric.

Interestingly, if you look up Chomsky and Peterson on Youtube, you'll find bits from talks by Peterson juxtaposed with bits by Chomsky, as though Chomsky is replying to Peterson. Chomsky always comes across as the deeper thinker with the greater erudition.

So if Peterson is a fraud, why is he famous? In 2016, Peterson, a professor at a Toronto university, was involved in a controversy because he refused to use the pronouns preferred by transgender people. He even appeared in front of a Canadian senate committee arguing against a bill that would have made it illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of "gender expression". This controversy was the springboard that vaulted Peterson into the celebrity stratosphere. Peterson resembles another hero of the "intellectual dark web", Brett Weinstein, who also became famous as the result of a controversy – Weinstein had been the victim of student protests at Evergreen University in Washington State. Both Weinstein and Peterson are professors; both are vocal proponents of Darwinian explanations for human behaviour; both got in trouble with students and faculty because they objected to excessive political correctness. Peterson is a conservative and Weinstein is a progressive but both are alike in that they fell foul of what is perceived to be a far-Left culture on campus among both lecturers and students. This is what members of the "intellectual dark web" have in common – they are seen as renegades or apostates fighting against academia itself, which is construed as embracing a monolithic far-Left ideology, "postmodern neo-Marxist" to use Peterson's term. The public intellectuals who have become famous are always fighting against something. Harris is famous for fighting against religion, particularly Islam. Peterson is famous for fighting against "neo-Marxism". Chomsky, although he doesn't really belong in the "intellectual dark web", is famous for fighting against neo-liberalism and American imperialism. Youtube users like this belligerent attitude among their heroes – and once some professor or ostracised ex-professor becomes famous, he (it is almost always a 'him') immediately starts popping up among the recommendations that appear in Youtube's right-hand column, if the user has shown any interest in any other members of the "intellectual dark web".

It is possible, even probable, that the algorithms that send clips from Peterson my way direct other users to the "postmodern neo-Marxists" Peterson rails against. But I myself seldom get such recommendations.

The question then is: does being involved in a scandal qualify someone to be a bona fide public intellectual? Of course not. Chomsky has been involved in scandals but only after he had become famous. Chomsky has earned his status as the leading intellectual in the world through hard graft – he has written something like over a hundred books. Peterson and Weinstein are famous for being famous. In this they resemble Khloe Kardashian and Paris Hilton who became famous after sex tapes they were in were illicitly leaked onto the Internet. The result of the celebrity obsessed culture we live in is that we tend of confuse 'fame' (or 'notoriety') with genuine intellectual value. If I'm going to end this post anywhere, I might as well end it in the following way. Jordan Peterson is the Khloe Kardashian of the public intellectual scene. And, like Khloe, he is going to prove only a flash in the pan.

Concerning Some Experiences

I'll preface this post by saying that I feel like absolute crap. I had my injection today and my brain feels swaddled in cotton wool. I also found out this afternoon that my latest review, carried out by a psychiatrist called Nick Hough, went against me. I am still considered legally insane. In tonight's post, however, I intend to repeat two true stories I have told elsewhere in my blog, from a slightly different angle – specifically I want to describe who knew what and when.

There is a song by Queens of the Stone Age with the chorus, "Whatever you do... don't tell anyone." (It goes with the song "Nobody Knows".) I hated this song in 2009 because, although I understood what it was talking about, I had no secrets of my own to tell and I hated its imputation that th. However, dear reader, you might consider this song, like "Nobody knows" the soundtrack for this post. I would also point the reader to an excellent essay on the net called "Why psychiatry is evil" (http://www.wayneramsay.com/evil.htm) and the Youtube clips by Robert Whitaker.

In the post "Definitions of Sexuality" I described something that happened to me when I was about twenty-two or twenty-three, I would guess in 2003. At this time I was working at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron as a waiter/barman/ functionary. When work finished, the other bar staff and I would sit around and have a few drinks. In 2003, sometimes these drinking sessions that I had with the other workers would last until dawn. In 2003, we had a new barman called Stefan. He was a little older than the rest of us, and was a reformed methamphetamine addict. He liked, when he was at home, to smoke pot and try to solve the Cryptic Crossword. Stefan I would describe as straight – in fact, during the time I knew him, he embarked on an affair with my female boss Moana. They would go to motels, smoke pot, and fuck. I didn't know Stefan well – in fact, I was intimidated by him. He scared me a little.

One time, a few of the other workers and I were drinking and smoking pot all night. I didn't smoke pot much, by the way. In fact, I disliked cannabis; it made me too paranoid. I only smoked it as result of peer pressure. At about four in the morning, Stefan asked me if I wanted "seconds". I thought he was going to exhale pot smoke in my face but what happened was that he put his lips against mine before exhaling. I didn't like this. I didn't like this intimacy with another man. I neither wanted nor enjoyed it. As I've been in pains to point out in this blog, I am heterosexual, which means not only that enjoy heterosexual experiences but also that I abhor homosexual ones. It was shortly after this 'experience' that I formed a relationship with my second girlfriend Maya, perhaps partly in self-defence.

Although my colleagues at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron saw this 'kiss', it didn't mean much to them or to me. But this was the closest I'd ever come to a homosexual experience. When I became a patient of the Mental Health System in 2007, I knew that the people treating me thought me a homosexual with secrets to hide. I don't feel I need to prove this anymore. I can remember in late 2009, after I had been put on Olanzapine, I went to the wharf where the Squadron is based with my key worker – I knew that the stupid bitch thought I was homosexual and I felt like saying, "This is the closest I've ever come to a homosexual experience. And it didn't even count." I never talked about it though. In 2013, I re-entered the Mental Health Service because I thought there was still doubt about my sexuality in the public arena and I wanted to get it on the record that I am straight. I thought that by doing so I could help my friend Liz, who I've called Jess in this blog, that I could prove her straight as well. Obviously, I find it difficult to say that with both my ex-girlfriends and the occasional fling with a girl, I'd had sex a lot in my life. But I tried to say this. Around the middle of the year, I was listening to Radio Hauraki and heard Jeremy Wells describe an unpleasant experience he'd had– he'd been cajoled into kissing an old woman by his mates, something that had been seared into his brain as an unpleasant memory. I decided that, not only did I have to at least allude to the fact that I'd had numerous heterosexual experiences, that I also needed to say that I'd had a lack of homosexual experiences. I wrote a short essay describing what happened with Stefan that I gave to my psychiatrist. From her body language, I don't think she believed it. In fact, at the Independent Reviews I've had since being put under the Act in early 2014, she has repeatedly tried to imply that I was homosexual. At the last she tried to imply that I often cruise K Road looking for homosexual encounters. Obviously, the bitch is stupid. Why would I mention the experience with Stefan if I was trying to hide a secret homosexual lifestyle?

I remember in mid 2014 talking with my then Key Worker Josh Brasil. I said, "I've had two homosexual experiences in my life." He said, in tones of incredulity, "At the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron!" I said that the second was with Jon Stewart, specifically in early 2010. He had no idea what I was talking about, although I'd given the shrinks an essay describing my entire life shortly after being put under the Mental Health Act in early 2014.

I now need to describe a second experience I had. I have described this experience before in the post "Date, Dosages, and Other Matters". At the beginning of 2006 I moved into a flat called the Big House. I had twenty flatmates. During my time living there, we had one openly gay flatmate (he tried to get on New Zealand Idol); all the rest of my flatmates, as far as I could tell, although hippies, were straight. About a fortnight before I went to work at bFM, a German backpacker came to stay at the flat. I made friends with him and we went out clubbing. The next morning I drove him into town so he could catch a bus; my car ran out of petrol and I pulled into the bus stop by the Civic. I helped the German get to the bus station, went to a nearby petrol station to buy some petrol, and then went back to the car to fill it up. I had a bus hooting at me while I did so. A young street kid appeared and decided to help me. Out of a slight feeling of elation and excess of friendliness occasioned by the situation, I said to the street kid, "Do you want a ride somewhere in my car?"

You need to remember that I was a lot younger then; it was also about 10am on a weekday morning. The kid agreed. We went to a petrol station so I could finish filling up the car; I noticed that the street kid had a school bag full of cans of bourbon and coke. I was already regretting my impulsive offer. I said, "Where do you want to go?" He said that he had friends in St Helliers, so I drove there. On the way, he asked if he could use the bathroom and I stopped at a public restroom near Mission Bay. I half thought he expected me to follow me in. We drove on to St Helliers and it turned out that he didn't have friends there, so I drove back to town. I asked him, "Where do you want to go?" He said, "I want to go with you, Andrew!" I arrived back at Fort Street and, because he refused to get out of the car, I pushed him out.

Now, this story could sound bad to some people. I made a mistake offering to give this street kid a lift and I knew almost immediately that it was a mistake. However, the difficulties that I suffered later didn't result from this experience but from the fact that I told people without being clear about what happened. At this time, I was living with hippies who have a looser idea of social convention than other people; I also had arrived at a point in my life where although I was totally heterosexual (by definition – I was only sexually attracted to women), I saw signs of homosexuality everywhere. When I got back home, I told my flatmates that I had accidentally picked up a male prostitute. When I first went to work at bFM a couple of weeks later I told Jose Barbosa the same thing. It was a bad experience and I wanted to tell people because it was upsetting. I suspect that I also told my brother, although I can't remember doing so.

Now, people who hear this story may suppose that my decision to give the street kid a lift and my subsequent interpretation of what happened was an early warning sign of the psychotic episode that I experienced the next year. I prefer to believe that this error contributed to the episode I experienced later, was a cause rather than a consequence. If you want a better explanation for why I became ill in 2007, you need to go back to 2001 and the film I wrote (which I described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and described the consequences of in the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia"). I felt in those early days and since that I was in the grips of a malevolent fate. As I said in other posts, when I volunteered at bFM, I vacillated between thinking everyone at the station thought I was gay and thinking that everyone else was gay. In order to fend off these fears, I wore a Gryffindor t-shirt which had been given to me by the mother of my first girlfriend Danielle. I wore this shirt in the hopes that it would prove a kind of magic charm or talisman – I knew I was straight even if others didn't and the shirt was my good luck charm. One day I was in the side-room and saw on the internet a story on Stuff news about Daniel Radcliffe's role in the play Eques. I followed the link and was presented with a picture of Daniel Radcliffe near naked. It was precisely at this moment that Mikey Havoc walked in from the main studio to see me looking at a near naked picture of Daniel Radcliffe.

I would now like to venture into more obscure waters. I lived in the Big House and worked at bFM – both the Big House and bFM were incredibly cool among my peers, people in their twenties. (I wrote a story inspired by the Big House called "Starlight" which can be found in this blog.) The main reason I went to work at bFM is because I thought it would be cool to do so. Of course, and this did not seem obvious to me when I was young and is not obvious to most young people, although the word 'cool' has positive connotations and the word 'gay' has negative connotations, it is often difficult to draw a line between the two. Lou Reed, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Kurt Cobain, Anthony Kiedis, Mike Patton, and Josh Homme, among many others, are cool but only one simple step away from being gay – they have never really come out. (Although Kiedis identifies as 'queer'.) A part of the reason I became unwell is that, although I was something of a bohemian, I had internalised some reactionary prejudices. I knew people might think I was gay simply because I lived in a large hippie flat, and I knew people might think I was gay because I had chosen to volunteer at bFM. A major cause of my psychotic episode was that people at bFM themselves thought I was gay, although in my madness, I turned it around and decided they were gay. In fact, for much of 2007, I decided that the word 'cool' was code for 'gay'.

In this blog I have talked a little about Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. I myself never have believed that sexuality was performative but I have realised over the last ten years that many people, typically women but men as well sometimes, do regard gender and sexuality as performative, as what you do rather than who you are. Straight men enjoy rugby and cricket, get real jobs like being barristers or doctors or tradespeople, get married and have kids; gay men read poetry, watch ballet, listen to pop music, wear skinny jeans and have relationships that can be difficult to categorise. Of course, this is all bullshit. Sexuality has nothing to do with lifestyle and everything to do with who one falls in love with and who one wants to fuck. But Bohemians nevertheless get a bad rap, particularly by psychiatrists who don't understand this culture. A couple of songs which spring from the Bohemian culture and say something about it are "Bohemian Like You" by the Dandy Warhols and "K" by the New Zealand band The Tutts.

In the post "Why I Am So Clever" I talked about my first girlfriend Danielle and I want to say a little about my second long term girlfriend. I started going out with her when I was about 23 and didn't finally break up with her until I was 29, in late 2008. In fact, although I often talk of her as my "girlfriend", our relationship could be better described as being a relationship between two good friends who often had sex. I was actually in love with her best friend Sara, and Maya knew this. When I travelled to Europe in 2004, I cheated on her. (I wrote a little about this trip in the post "Stolen Kisses".) I found out in the interval between leaving the Big House and being put on drugs, when I  was close to well, that she'd unsuccessfully tried to cheat on me. Our relationship was destructive, both to her and to me, and both of us had difficulty getting out of it, although I tried in 2007. It is difficult to categorise my relationship with Maya; for obvious reasons when I have talked about her in this blog and to my psychiatrists, I have described her as my girlfriend but she might have categorised our relationship in a different way. In early 2009, when I became psychotic again, I had a consultation with a psychiatrist called Nick Hough (the only time from early 2007 and until January 2012 I saw a psychiatrist other than Tony Fernando); I told him, "I wish I hadn't broken up with my girlfriend!" He repeated the word "girlfriend" in evident surprise. I leave it to the reader's intuition and guesswork to find some explanation why he found it surprising that I said that I'd broken up my girlfriend. The obvious explanation is that she didn't feature in my notes at all. I still have mixed feelings for Maya and don't know whether to hold her partially responsible for my illness or to excuse her. She would often say around me, "Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen!"

This post has wandered over a number of different subjects. I don't know how to bring it to a conclusion. So I will leave it there.

Evolutionary Psychology and The Gay Gene

I have just finished reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It's brilliant. I could wax lyrical about how wonderful this book is in this post but that wouldn't be very interesting. Instead I am going to critique it a little – it is possible to like a writer without agreeing wholesale with all of his ideas. In particular, I am going to show shortcomings in the particular Darwinian model of evolution he espouses and demonstrate the bogusness of evolutionary psychology. Because I had to leave the book itself in Whanganui (where I spent the last week), this post won't contain quotes and I will be working from memory. Remember, one can like a person or a book without agreeing with all of his, or its, arguments. If this post is a little badly written, I apologise. I might have brain damage.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins is aiming to prove a number of claims. He endeavours to show how all the main arguments normally wheeled out to prove the existence of God are flawed. In particular, he seeks to show that the argument from design, the argument that the complexity and apparent perfect fit between organisms and their ecological niches can only be explained by the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient designer, is unnecessary, that evolution through natural selection is sufficient to explain life today in all its forms; he deploys the anthropic principle to explain why Earth has the perfect conditions for both life and intelligent life, and for the origin of life itself. It is possible to argue, and some have, that morality is grounded in religion; Dawkins argues that morality is independent of religion, and, drawing on evolutionary psychology, seeks to show that a moral sense can be viewed as an adaptation beneficial to the survival and propagation of the humans who have it. Dawkins goes on to argue that religion is not just unnecessary, otiose, to the project of explaining 'life, the universe, and everything', it is positively harmful to those who have been infected by this meme. He shows, for instance, that scripture is not only largely invented but presents a Jehovah who is jealous, vindictive, and possibly even sadistic, and cites examples of believers who had their lives ruined by stories of hell-fire and damnation. (Dawkins doesn't mention James Joyce but Joyce is also someone whose childhood was marred by pulpit sermons about eternal perdition – see Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) This summation of the book of course leaves a lot out – for the full picture, I refer the reader to the book itself.

Dawkins is engaged in a kind of war, the same war others such as Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens are fighting and have fought. On the one side, we have atheists who espouse a particular model of evolution (in which natural selection acts upon small chance mutations to gradually modify species), atheists who accept mainstream scientific accounts of the history and prehistory of the world, and, on the other side, Fundamentalist Christians who believe the Bible to be literally true, that the world was created in seven days by God some four thousand years ago, and that fossils are the traces left of animals who lived on Earth before the Flood but weren't taken on board the Ark. Dawkins explicitly says that the target of his righteous indignation is the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He only briefly mentions polytheism and never engages with Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism, or any of the other major or minor religions (although there is a fascinating section on Cargo Cults.) It is a war between science and dogmatic monotheism. Interestingly, all of these militant atheists (to the ranks of which we can add Bill Maher) think that atheists are actively persecuted, and that it takes courage to 'come out' as an atheist. Dawkins, in the introduction to his book, explicitly compares the atheist  social project to the Gay Rights movement. Dennett has performed a similar rhetorical gambit, saying that atheists should identify as 'Brights' in the same way that homosexuals identify as 'Gays'. The world, Dennett is suggesting, is full of closet atheists who should feel proud of their atheism rather than be ashamed of it, should loudly and proudly proclaim their commitment to a Godless materialism to the heavens, and should take the fight for science to the stupid and ignorant who are threatening to remake America and other countries in their perverse image. The analogy between this fledging "Atheist Pride Movement" and the Gay Pride Movement evinces a misunderstanding of homosexuality itself, and of the Gay Pride Movement. Most obviously, gay men and women didn't pick the word 'gay' themselves. In 1900 it meant 'happy, or carefree'. Starting in the 1930s, through semantic drift, it became a derogatory epithet applied by heterosexuals to homosexuals, and then, later, presumably after decriminalisation, it was re-appropriated by the homosexual community, in a similar way that the African-American community has re-appropriated the word 'nigga'.

Of course, Dawkins and Dennett are opposing people who regard the word 'atheist' as a derogatory epithet. But this is something I've never been able to understand. Although I went to Sunday School when a small child, I was raised by atheist parents in a mostly secular country (New Zealand). I never felt ashamed to call myself an atheist, never felt the need to 'come out' as one, and regarded the religious minority as a stupid but harmless cadre who should be humoured rather than battled against. The direction of my life has been in the opposite direction to the people Dawkins describes in his book – from a scientific materialism to the vague sense that the world has a supernatural dimension. I haven't converted to any Abrahamic religion but I have rejected Darwinian evolution as Dawkins and others characterise it. Dawkins is critical of agnosticism and religious moderates (those who see the bible as figurative rather than literal, and cherry-pick the bits they like while disregarding the bits they don't) – I forget his reasons but they are probably similar to the reasons advanced by Sam Harris when he argues that the majority of Muslims, while not being Islamic terrorists, are sympathetic to terrorism. Even a little religion is a bad thing. The truth Dawkins overlooks is that the vast majority of people, particularly here in New Zealand have a sense that the world has a supernatural dimension but don't subscribe to any organised religion. These are the people who put down their religion as "Jedi" in the census, who read the daily horoscope, practice yoga, get their fortune read by tarot readers, are interested in Feng shui and attend talks by the Dalai Lama. New Age Hippies, in other words. I have a friend, very credible, not at all flakey, who as an adult lived in a haunted house and for several nights in a row saw the ghost of a small girl sitting at the foot of his bed crying.  This friend is not religious at all. I have had very many weird experiences myself. Towards the end of The God Delusion, Dawkins describes a women he'd corresponded with who, as a child, had an imaginary friend she called "the purple man". The night before she first went to school, the purple man told her that he was going to stop seeing her because she didn't need him anymore; he vanished from her life for many years, returning, in a dream, when she was an adult, at a pivotal moment in her life. Dawkins reports this story but doesn't seem to register the fact that stories like this suggest that the world is stranger "than is dreamed of in your philosophy", that quasi-religious experiences occur to people all the time. Personally, I don't think Darwin has sewn everything up – this is why I like Rupert Sheldrake as much as Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins seems to suggest that the only alternative to Abrahamic religions is Darwinism, and speaks positively of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is the theory that proposes that behaviours, personality traits, and cultural norms are genetic, and evolved under the influence of natural selection. I don't like evolutionary psychology. I think it is speculative and unfalsifiable. And I can give reasons for this judgement. At one point in The God Delusion, Dawkins discusses romantic love. The explanation for romantic love, the phenomenon of a man and a woman falling passionately for each other to the exclusion of everyone else (with sexual jealousy as a concomitant although Dawkins doesn't mention jealousy), is that it ensures that their progeny will be brought up in a secure, safe, nurturing environment in which their needs will be met. Humans are 'designed' (by natural selection), if this argument is correct, to be monogamous. However, several years ago I read an article in The Listener discussing another theory, also based on evolutionary psychology, which proposes that human beings in our primitive days engaged in group sex. This theory is associated with psychologist Christopher Ryan. The evidence for it includes the fact that women are capable of multiple orgasms, suggesting that, in prehistory, women would have sex with multiple men at the same time. So which is it? Are humans naturally monogamous or promiscuous? To answer the question, we would need to go back in time a hundred thousand years to observe the sexual mores of our ancestors. Which is impossible. All evolutionary psychology is is a set of Just So stories (a reference to Kipling which I hope is not too obscure); it is a set of hypotheses almost unsupported by evidence. We could attempt to reconcile the two hypotheses discussed above by suggesting that primitive humans engaged in group sex in the caves they lived in, and that the impulse to love monogamously appeared later, making the capacity of women to experience multiple orgasms a vestigial trait, a little like the appendix. But this would also be simply another Just So Story.

There is a deeper problem with Dawkins's argument. Dawkins's most important book was his first, The Selfish Gene. In it he proposed (this is not an exact quote) that organisms are effectively vehicles for their genes, robots that are 'designed' to carry and replicate DNA. This view of organic life follows directly from something that a friend of mine, a biologist, calls the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Organisms are born with a set of chromosomes, DNA, that acts as a blue-print for the organism, and which never changes. Yes, mutations can occur (and must occur if we are to accept conventional Darwinism) but these mutations almost always occur in the space between successive generations, in the gonads, so to speak. These mutations are small and random – usually they are detrimental but occasionally they are advantageous, meaning that the organism with the mutation has an improved chance of surviving longer and having more offspring than its rivals, thus passing the mutation on to its own offspring. This is, more or less, the standard picture of Darwinian evolution.

The Selfish Gene was published in 1976. During the 'nineties, a shift away from the Central Dogma occurred, a shift christened 'epigenetics.' It has been gaining steam ever since. Epigenetics is the idea that the environment, both within and without a cell, affects DNA, and that these alterations can be passed on to future generations.  In a way, in retrospect, this notion should have been obvious. Liver cells are different from red blood cells and both are different from neurons, yet all three sorts of cell contain exactly the same DNA. Presumably, in different types of cell, different genes are turned on and others are turned off. But how does a cell know which genes to turn on and off? The instructions presumably can't come from the DNA itself but rather from the cell's location with respect to other cells.

But epigenetics does more than suggest that genes can be turned on and off by environmental influences, that environment can affect gene expression. It is possible that the environment can alter DNA itself. I don't have any solid evidence for this hypothesis. When I planned this post, I intended at this point to discuss a newspaper article I read last year I think. This article reported the extraordinary story that one of a set of identical twins who had spent time in space away from his brother, returned to Earth with DNA 7% different from his brother's DNA, presumably as a result of the effects of weightlessness. Unfortunately, when researching this article on the Internet the day before yesterday, I found some evidence that this story, widely reported by world-wide media, was wrong – what changed was not the astronaut's DNA code but gene expression. (See  https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/03/20/space-astronaut-twins-dna-changed-how-some-reports-botched-the-story-and-what-we-really-know/). Nevertheless, I remain committed to the idea that it is possible that environment can alter DNA, not in the sense that random mutations can occur, but rather in the sense that DNA can be altered constructively, that genes can change in order to improve the fitness of an organism with respect to new environments.

There is a third possibility, one I have mentioned in the posts "On Evolution" and "The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia". It seems to me that, for evolution to occur, when a significant mutation occurs, it must occur in a number of individuals in a population in the same vicinity at the same time. This idea puts me at odds with conventional Darwinism and the neo-Darwinism espoused by Dawkins et al. This is why I am sympathetic to the 'morphic resonance' hypothesis devised by Rupert Sheldrake. Interestingly, Noam Chomsky, who is irreligious but doesn't share the militant atheism of people like Dawkins and Dennett and is sometimes sympathetic to religious people, believes that the language instinct evolved all at once, in one massive step, rather than as a series of incremental chance mutations. So I have good company in rejecting conventional Darwinism.

At this point I want to turn to the hypothesis that homosexuality is genetic, that there is a 'gay gene'. The idea of a 'gay gene' runs completely counter to conventional Darwinism because, if homosexuals don't have children, this particular gene shouldn't be passed on to future generations – this is why it is so odd that Dawkins and Dennett continually compare the atheistical movement to the Gay Rights movement. If traditional Darwinism is correct, the gay gene shouldn't exist or, at least, shouldn't be prevalent as it apparently is. The estimate often trotted out by commentators on sexual politics is that 10% of the world's human population is homosexual. Let us suppose for a moment that the gay gene does exist. I believe all other living creatures are heterosexual so it is reasonable to suppose that a hundred thousand years ago, all humans were heterosexual. Suppose homosexuality is a chance mutation. How could it be passed onto future generations if the individual born with this mutation wasn't sexually attracted to the opposite sex? If 10% of the world's human population is homosexual, this suggests that for hundreds of thousands of years gay men and gay women have been procreating , that the secret history of the world is a history of closet homosexuality. This kind of reasoning, by the way, is what drove me mad back in 2007.

We could turn to evolutionary psychology to help solve this puzzle. One hypothesis I read about a long time ago is that, although gay men don't children, their sisters do, and the gay uncles assist and support in the rearing of their nieces and nephews. This is known as 'kin selection' (look it up). Now, if this hypothesis is correct, it is empirically testable. We could consider the sisters of gay men, today and in the past (assuming we can know for sure who in the past was homosexual when the word 'homosexual' hadn't been coined), and find out if they had more children who survived infancy than women from solidly heterosexual families. I suspect that even if such a research project was undertaken, nothing would be found.

So far I have treated the gay gene as something that people either have or don't have, but this treatment requires finessing. In fact, every human is diploid, like other animals that procreate using sexual reproduction, and inherits two versions of every gene, one from his or her mother and one from his or her father. The technical term for different versions of the same gene is 'alleles'. If we presume, reasonably enough, that the homosexual allele is recessive, it becomes possible to suppose that homosexuals have two gay alleles, are what is technically known as 'homozygous recessive'. A person can only be gay is he or she carries both alleles. The much larger number of people who are 'heterozygous' (who carry only one copy of the gay allele) are heterosexual because the straight allele dominates over the gay allele. According to my calculations, if 10% of humanity is homosexual, homozygous recessive, 60% of the world's population would be heterozygous.

Particularly in Africa, large numbers of people have sickle-cell anaemia. People with this congenital disease are born with blood cells that are defective. The disease is genetic but it is a recessive allele that causes sickle cell anaemia – sufferers are homozygous recessive. They need both alleles to be sick. People with only copy of the allele, however, people who are heterozygous, are more resistant to malaria because of the shape of their red blood cells. There is thus an evolutionary advantage to being heterozygous that balances out the possibility of being born with the congenital disease, meaning that the frequency of this allele occurring in Africa remains constant in the population as a whole. Is the same perhaps true of the gay gene? Perhaps carrying one copy of the gay allele confers some evolutionary advantage? Once again this hypothesis is empirically testable but, to test it, we would need solid statistics about who is gay and who isn't, who is homozygous dominant, who is heterozygous, and who is homozygous recessive.

Up to this point, I have discussed the gay gene as though it were only a postulated entity. But in 2012, New Scientist published an article citing research by a couple of geneticists who claimed to have found the gay genes (there were two of them). One gene is active in foetuses shortly before birth, and the other affects the thyroid gland. (Google "the gay gene" and "New Scientist", and the article should pop up.) Dawkins, in The God Delusion, says that when confronted by Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God, one immediately senses it must be false but that it can be difficult to say why it is false. I feel the same way about this New Scientist article. It must be false. Perhaps it is simply bullshit. Although in this post I seem to have tentatively accepted the notion of a 'gay gene', in fact I abandoned this hypothesis many years ago. Either the article is bullshit or there is some other explanation for the geneticists' findings than the conclusion that some people are simply born gay. Perhaps the genes don't directly code for homosexuality but for something associated with homosexuality, like a love of opera, and it is because others think the person gay that he turns gay. (I met a gay man once, by the way, who said that he felt he was letting down the gay community because he didn't like opera.) Or perhaps everyone is born heterosexual and a person's experiences and decisions cause his DNA to change. This is a radical idea but no more radical than the theories proposed by Sheldrake.

I'll finish this post by saying where I am, mentally, since my dosage was increased. I am not at all psychotic. But then I haven't experienced any psychotic symptoms at all since around halfway through the year before last and my dosage was increased only two or three months ago, for very little reason at all. I do feel physically sick a lot. I worry that in this blog I may make mistakes from time to time (I nearly said that I had experienced psychotic symptoms, a typo that could possibly have had very dire consequences.) I wish the arseholes would just allow me to discontinue a medication that does more harm than good.

I went into the Taylor Centre yesterday to receive my Olanzapine injection and, before my injection, the nurse said, "Do you consent to having an Olanzapine injection?" I'd never been asked this before. As the people treating me know, I'm under a fucking Compulsory Treatment Order and have been since around February 2014; I have requested and received multiple Independent Reviews to try to get out of a Mental Health System that is so badly broken there is no way to fix it, and lost every time. I have never had a choice. I asked her, "What would happen if I said 'no'"? but got no real answer. The fact that she even asked me this question reveals how insane the Mental Health System is.

The Causes of Schizophrenia Part 2

A part of the purpose of this blog is to show two things – that mental 'illness' has causes and that a person changes over the course of his or her life – although when I started writing this blog it wasn't my intention to talk about myself. In today's post, I want to talk about another element that fed into my first psychotic episode. I am going to take the risk of talking about my family a little. It is the only way to prove my point.

Although I am completely heterosexual, I have had an interest in homosexuality for a long time, although this interest didn't lead me to talk about it with others or to read Queer Theory such as the work of Michel Foucault or Judith Butler. From my early teens onwards, I had a fairly simplistic view of sexuality. I thought people were born either gay or straight. In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009", I said that I believed in a gay gene but in fact I never had any clear idea about the cause of homosexuality – I just felt sure that people were born either one way or the other. (Kurt Cobain evidently believed it had something to do with the hormones in utero.) I could generally tell who was gay and who was straight by their body language. As I grew older, I observed that some gay men and women could take a long time to come out of the closet but I believed such men and women were in denial of the True Selves and that they tended to be happier after they had come out. I had no evidence for this belief.

The truth is that the world is far messier than I believed when young. I'll tell a story that illustrates this. When I was twenty-one I had a friend, not a good friend, who I would occasionally go to strip clubs with. This is a period in my life I am not proud of. I believed this chap to be straight. One evening we went back to his place to drink and he said to me, "Did you ever feel like kissing a man?" I got out of the house as quick as I could and didn't see him again for thirteen years. When we caught up again, he was in a relationship with an Asian girl. Although he didn't reference the moment that ended our friendship back when we were young directly, he indirectly apologised saying that at the time his parents were going through a messy divorce.

When I went to study at Dunedin when I was eighteen I made a friend called Sarah McConie. More than anyone else, she has influenced my views on sexuality. When I first knew her, she was a brazen lesbian and was in a relationship with a girl who majored in contact juggling at Circus School. I think in first year, Sarah went to Wellington and slept with a man; when she came back she told us all (my friends and I), "Guess what? I'm not a lesbian anymore!" Soon enough she went back to loving women. After I came back to Auckland, I fell out of contact with her.  But then a couple of years later I bumped into her at Borders. She introduced me to her fiancé John. I was surprised and she said, "Oh, that's right! Andy knew me when I was a lesbian!" Sarah and John were married for several years but eventually the marriage fell apart when she fell for someone else – her female riding instructor. When I heard about this, I took it as confirmation of my basic beliefs. Her marriage to John had been a phoney marriage during which she'd been in denial of her True Self.

The problem can be illustrated with a thought experiment. Suppose we have a man who is married to a woman, who even has children by her, but is sneaking off for homosexual liaisons at restrooms and public parks. Such men are not uncommon among Republicans in the US. Two terms are available to be applied to such a man – we can either say he is a "closet homosexual" or we can describe him as "bisexual". The American pundits I like, such as Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee, tend to use the term "closet homosexual". As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, the views of the Left on this issue are conflicted: openly gay men and women are ostensibly praised and commended while closet homosexuals are ridiculed and condemned. The term "closet homosexual" is pejorative across the political spectrum. The term "bisexual" however is problematic for many people, both on the left and the right, because of the belief, that I myself shared, that people go either one way or the other. In fact, there are many famous women today who identify as bisexual – examples include Anna Paquin and Miley Cyrus. But there are very few men who identify as bisexual. The only example I can think of is Green Day frontman Billy Joe Armstrong (and I could be wrong.) For men, coming out as bisexual is a step on the road to coming out, or being outed, as gay. Elton John came out as bisexual prior to coming out as gay, and Freddie Mercury came out as bisexual to his girlfriend before immersing himself in the gay scene; although he never came out as gay this is how the world knows him. I think the difference between men and women with respect to bisexuality has a simple cause: men are prepared to have relationships with bisexual women, but women are unwilling to form relationships with bisexual men.

The beliefs I had are in fact typical of the American Left today. In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, an Indian woman reveals to Raj that she is a lesbian but that because of attitudes to homosexuality in India wants to keep it hidden. She wants to marry Raj because she thinks he is also gay and might like the idea of a "phoney-baloney marriage". Raj says, "My baloney prefers women!" In the episode he considers the idea of marrying her anyway and discusses it with Howard and Bernadette. At the end of the episode, Howard says, "I think gay people should marry gay people." Raj says, "Do you have any idea how homophobic that sounds?"

Even Bill Maher, a straight man who supports gay rights, exhibits the prejudice that people simply go one way or the other. On one of his shows, he had Ryan Seacrest as a guest, and Maher took the opportunity to ask him the meaning of the word "queer", saying that most of his gay guests were in the closet as so he couldn't ask them. Now, as I understand it, men and women who identify as queer do so because their sexual identities are not conventionally heterosexual – it is a term for men and women who have had a consensual homosexual experience or two but otherwise identify as heterosexual. Anthony Kiedis is an example of a man who identifies as 'queer'. Seacrest was bullied by Maher into saying that the words "gay" and "queer" are synonyms, when they're not.

For many years, there has been a debate in the Left between those who see sexuality as fixed and those who see it as fluid. Lady Gaga expresses the first view in the song "Born This Way" while Katy Perry expresses the second view in the song "I Kissed a Girl". Ten or fifteen years ago, people often spoke about 'experimentation' or 'bi-curiosity' but this particular paradigm appears to have evaporated. I think the reason Gaga triumphed over Perry is that the idea of sexual fluidity leads directly to the Republican idea that sexuality is a choice and to draconian forms of treatment such as Conversion Therapy. In 2012, a couple of geneticists published an article in New Scientist claiming that they had discovered the two genes responsible for homosexuality, proving that sexuality isn't a choice. I suspect that there is some kind of problem with their methodology but this isn't something I intend to explore here. As a consequence of this change in the political landscape, 'experimentation' and 'bi-curiosity' have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

At this point, I shall turn to my own life.

In 2001, a friend who had come out as gay the previous year or year before came up to Auckland with a girl I'd also known in Dunedin, Renee, who I'd had a crush on. The three of us went to a gay club – I was curious about such places, not because I was in any way bi-curious but because I am open to experience. The next night Renee and I ended up at my father's place for dinner. Also present was a friend of Jan, Helen. All through dinner Jan and Helen were laughing at jokes like high-school girlfriends but every now and again Jan would direct glares of pure hatred at me. After that dinner I decided two things: first, that my step-mother hated me and second that she was having a lesbian affair with Helen under my father's nose. Of course, I never told anyone about the second suspicion. My subconscious belief, or delusion, that my step-mother was a lesbian, wasn't helped by the fact that for many years Helen was always present at the family Christmas parties and birthday parties. The convention, I believe, is that only family members and partners of family members should be present at occasions like these. But Helen was always there, as though she were a member of the family.

(To round off this story, I should say that during this visit I entered into a kind of relationship with Renee, a relationship that became a long distance relationship when Renee went back to Dunedin, but which completely broke down when I sent her an ill considered email which was racier than it should have been.)

The subconscious conviction that my step-mother was a lesbian is part of the reason I decided in 2007, when I had my psychotic meltdown, that my father was gay. I couldn't understand why a straight man would willingly marry a lesbian. (I need to note, by the way, that the marriage between my father and Jan had been on the rocks for years.) In the interval between leaving the Big House and being put on antipsychotics, I had dinner with them and erupted at them, an eruption a long time coming. I said, "It's not natural." Now, this might seem like a right-wing assertion, that I was saying that homosexuality isn't natural. In fact, I believed that some people were naturally straight and others naturally gay – like Howard in The Big Bang Theory I believed that gay people should marry gay people. I thought it unnatural for a gay man to marry a lesbian woman and have children; I thought homosexuals should all come out.

My opinions on sexuality are today, in 2019, totally different than in 2007. Back then I believed that the world was ruled by closet homosexuals; in 2009 I believed there was a vast community of bisexual swingers having clandestine sex with each other, an idea that horrified me. By 2014, I had changed my views, as shown by the story I have published in this blog, "69". I now think bisexuality exists and is not something to condemned. It should, however, be out in the open, rather than hidden from view. I also spent years working out the cause of homosexuality and no longer regard it as being as natural as heterosexuality. Of course, the one thing that hasn't changed is my own sexuality: I am as heterosexual now as I was then.

Of course, as my readers know, from the beginning I was misdiagnosed. The people treating me thought, I think, that I was sexually confused, when, in fact, my first episode resulted, in a way, from an excess of homophobia. (I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and "Cannabis and The Causes of Schizophrenia".) In 2007, I sometimes believed that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. The psychiatrists are completely unwilling to admit that they made a mistake. In 2017, I told my psychiatrist that I believed my stepmother was a closet lesbian; I thought it was the kind of thing I was supposed to talk about with my psychiatrist. At the independent review held shortly after, she wrote in my report that I had said my step-mother was bisexual. Given the preceding discussion of the difference in connotation between the terms "closet homosexual" and "bisexual", it should be obvious that this misreporting of what I had said had implications that went against me. Evidently Murphy didn't feel it worth reporting that I disliked my step-mother. This is just one example of the way the Mental Health Service has distorted and falsified its records about me to confirm a misdiagnosis.

In this blog I have said Murphy, a couple of months ago, doubled my dosage. I want to explain what happened because I distrust everything she has ever written about me. At an appointment about halfway through last year I brought in a friend with whom I have been going to a pup quiz since 2010. I wanted a witness who could see for herself how dishonest and incompetent Murphy was. Murphy said almost nothing during the appointment. A day or two later, at my friend's place, we discussed the appointment; my friend had had nightmares about it. She said about Murphy, "She's a lesbian, isn't she?" My friend had decided that Murphy was a lesbian because she was so badly dressed. I stuck up for Murphy, saying that it was unlikely she was a lesbian because she'd been pregnant in 2013 when I first became a patient. A couple of months ago, during another appointment, I reported to Murphy what my friend had said. Before I could tell her that I had stuck up for her, she threw me out of the room. When she allowed me back in, she told me that she had decided to massively increase my dosage. In a letter she told me it was because I had laid a complaint against her with the Disability Commissioner, and told me, being the hypocrite that she is, that the increased dosage would help me. The hypocrisy is that I had given her an opportunity to correct the mistake; people in the Mental Health Service lie about their patients all the time and the patient is never given the opportunity to correct their mistakes.

Because people have always misunderstood the nature of my illness, I live in a kind of hell. I'll illustrate this with a couple of stories. In 2015, I think, I told my older brother about the time a jerk had got in my face when I was about 22 or 23, something I have described in the post "Definitions of Sexuality."  My brother said, "Did you love him?" I said, "No, he was an arsehole. But the point is, that's the only homosexual experience I've ever had." My brother flinched. I have a friend, Rene (not to be confused with Renee, the girl I mentioned above) with whom I occasionally meet to drink red wine and discuss philosophy. Last year or the year before last, I was visiting my aunt, a late-in-life lesbian (although I didn't know that then) and friend of Jan, when my mother brought up my friendship with Rene. My aunt said, "Why don't you introduce him to your father?" On two occasions, one of Jan's brothers, someone I see very infrequently, has asked me if I was brought up by fundamentalist Christians. Obviously all three of them, including my brother, completely failed to understand me.

I'll finish this post by filling in a couple of details. My father and step-mother divorced a number of years ago, I think in 2010 although I am not sure. It is possible I was wrong that she was having a lesbian affair, but it is no longer something that occupies me much, because she is out of my life. I wish also to briefly describe what has happened in Sarah's life in recent years. For a long time she has been in a civil union with a woman much older than her called Sue. A couple of years ago (some time after I wrote "69") we caught up and she told me that she had a lover, a man called Gordon. Sarah, Sue and Gordon were in a kind of triangular relationship: they all lived on the same property but Sarah and Gordon lived together in a caravan. Last year, Sarah fell pregnant and recently had a baby. When she was going to antenatal classes, she didn't take Gordon, as you might expect – she took Sue. The schemas we create to try to make sense of the world often fail. The real world can be very messy indeed.