Is it Possible To Stay Loyal to our Progressive Predecessors?

The ancients enjoying life are unlikely to have been entirely or even partially mistaken

-Aristotle

 It has been a bad week for Progressivism.  In a stunning loss of ground in the public discourse, progressive teachers and teacher educators are taking an unceremonious kicking from all sides.  

 Progressive or "child centred" education and its shibboleths of group work, mixed ability classrooms and learning by doing, looks like a Caesar bleeding out on the steps of the Forum.  "Et Tu, Brute"?  Aye, and brutal it is to watch.  I find myself increasingly full of pathos for what the current Education Secretary characterises as "The Blob" as it bleeds out with a pitiful moan, scarcely aware of what has happened to it.  Whether it making uncomfortable viewing makes it wrong, is an open question.

D'awww

Twitter has a collective multiple climax over Joe Kirby's quote-heavy assassination of Sir Ken Robinson's  educational philosophy.  Cuddly Sir Ken is the TED Talk favourite with the snazzy RSA animate which makes some school leaders well up and remember the good old days when they actually used to teach a child sometimes.  This is done through cozy pink lenses. His agenda of child-centred creativity and "Discovery" can cause by turns ire and awe.  In this case ire.

Kirby, meanwhile, is a "top graduate", recruited through Teach First, the pathway into teaching which skips the traditional bastions of progressive thought, the university training route, in favour of a managerial approach to the craft. His rejection of the progressive tradition, itself the dominant view of what teaching could be from the mid-50s until more recently, is telling.  

Here is somebody who is in place precisely to invigorate the profession pointing to the existing "dead flesh" and calling shenanigans.  It is the equivalent of a recent med school graduate claiming that the consultant heart surgeon he is observing is drunk.  And it is not an isolated setback.

The second PISA-shock of England's young people proving to have flunked life, as measured by literacy and numeracy, seems to confirm years of criticism over "dumbing down".

"The minister for skills and enterprise, Matthew Hancock, said: "This shocking report shows England has some of the least literate and numerate young adults in the developed world. These are Labour's children, educated under a Labour government and force-fed a diet of dumbing down and low expectations."

Dumbing down, irresistibly, is linked to the type of curriculum which emphasises the intrests of the child.  This can mean following "their interests" at the expense of "what is in their interests".  In paraphrasing R.S. Peters here, who wrote words to that effect in the 1960s I am hoping to show that this particular silver bullet was locked and loaded quite a long ago.

Finally, reliable barometer of the nightmare side of any debate, The Guardian's "Secret Teacher" is outspoken about the "Conspiracy" against older teachers.  I myself recently interviewed a colleague who told me how, as an Advanced Skills Teacher she watched a mentee she trained, and who was teaching lessons she had written with her resources, was appointed to her old job whilst she was encouraged to leave. A cynical mind might point to the vast savings which could be made if such a policy became widespread.  The World Bank, meanwhile, has been floating alterations to pay structures and tenure of staff for some time;

Contract teachers may accept lower salaries and insecure tenure because they are queuing for regular positions

- Making School Work page 227 

In the midst of this, and as someone trained and mentored by those within the progressive tradition, I begin to feel increasingly like the Boy in Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.  In Hemingway's Story, the titular Old Man finds himself having gone eighty five days without catching a fish.  The Boy's parents demand he go "with another boat" as the Old Man is now finally "Salano, the worst kind of unlucky".  The Boy is instructed to go with another, luckier boat.  The young men in the bar laugh at the Old Man.  The older fishermen meanwhile view him with understandable concern.

Debra Kidd does her best to defend Sir Ken and what he represents here.  Her argument, that tradition and wisdom have their place is strong, but ideologically it is hard for progressives to hide behind this. Aristotle might have been right about the Ancients knowing their business , but the brave new world of the sixties had no time for that.  The proponents of post-Empire Britain have spent so long challenging arguments from authority as such, that "we have a lot of experience of " stinks from their very lips.  

However, the paradox is not one sided.  The shock troops of Neo-Traditionalism , like Mr Kirby, are not fighting back a rebellion, they ARE the rebellion. Progressivism has been so widespread, especially in Primary Schools, for so long that it is the de-facto establishment.  For the warriors of the evidence-based, Excel spreadsheet generation to claim they can even imagine what education prewar was like is just as hilarious.  They are in as much of a tangle about what they believe as we all are.  But this is not a simple case of a plague on both their houses.

From America, which is about 2 years down the Academy/Teacher First road (there they are called Charter Schools and Teach For America respectively), there is growing dissent.  It is even coming from ex-acolytes of what some of its UK intake freely call "the Teach First cult".

Catherine Michna, an academic and former TFA-er has revealed she "Does not write references" for students to join TFA because they do not know how to teach.  Her defence of the "lifers", unionized members of staff she encountered before getting out of school teaching for good, hinges on a belief that she would not have survived the process without borrowing their resources, ideas and, if I may presume to extend the point, their authority.  It is surely significant that the operation which moves us closest in the developed world to the World Bank "dog eat dog" employment model cannot control its own alumni.

Unlike the newspapers I use a picture of her school and not her face

Then we have the Strange Case of Annaliese Briggs.  When NUT conference heard from the podium this year that a PGCE teacher trainee had needed to be excused from her lectures to meet with Boris Johnson about the school she was opening up there were hoots of derision.  Not even six months later, Miss Briggs, the 27 year old Headteacher with no formal qualifications, has quit 5 weeks into the term, unable to cope. This is a major blow for the notion that new-old trumps old-new. That ideology which requires that such a person to be able to cope because she trumpets the notions of 'rigorous', 'knowledge based' learning cannot will such things into existence.

In short, it's a damn mess. But worst of all is the profound disloyalty to the older generation.  What we do with them, the Baby Boomers as they age and retire would be a constant psychic disturbance to any culture.  To one as narcissistic and obsessed with physical perfection as ours, it is a perfect storm of vanity and horror. The knowledge of how many of them there are, and of the enormous changes they have seen, haunts us in our inexperience and naivety.
  

In education, it is entirely possible that there will never be time for the experiment in child-centred learning to return to the mainstream.  At the same time, its techniques are now a permanent part of every teacher's repertoire.  The ability to split a class into groups, to mind-map and to have a student deliver a plenary in the form of a rap battle are now, for better or worse, part of the job.  Whether we use them or not is up to us, but there they are.

It might be easy, like Mr Kirby, to tear into everything that has been done for the last fifty years, and call for a return to an age which may or may not have ever existed.  I prefer, however, to think of Hemingway's old man, and his words to the boy when he asks if he will ever catch the big fish again,

"It is difficult," he says, "and I am not as strong as I was...but I am a strange old man, and there are many tricks."

Hegel Sends No Postcards

Preamble

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words.

As such, we often begin our lessons with an image. When I am starting to study a thinker, I usually look for one of the books in the "Introducing" series, or else for a diagram which sums up their ideas.  Usually many of these are available on line.  "RSA Animate" works this trick.  We believe that once we have seen and made real a concept, we will better be able to grasp it, that it will provide a "map" for the oncoming conceptual territory.  Are we right?

R. Appignanesi & O. Zarate, (2007), ‘Introducing Freud: A Graphic Guide to the Father of Pyschoanalysis,‘ Icon Books

I do the same when beginning lessons (present pictures, not marry my mother).  Experience has shown that Literature classes like to see the writer, character or scenario they are studying beforehand.  It has the advantage of drawing to the surface all of their prejudices early.  There was much sniggering behind hands at a picture of tall, awkward looking Arthur Miller before Year 11 had read The Crucible (not to mention before they discovered which genius-IQ blonde he was married to).  Yet the Michael Gove is dismayed that students are drawing pictures of literary characters on paper plate masks and walking around making conversation.

Another teacher records a lesson for A-Level English students in which they were asked to depict literary characters on a paper plate – drawing a face on the plate - and then asked to use stickers to define the character’s principal traits - pinning the stickers on their clothes and mingling with other students, while they introduce themselves ‘in character’.

BUT!  To me it was important that my class thought they knew Miller before they discovered who he really was, and so I was quite happy to show them a picture of the man.  And don't textbooks have pictures?  Is that so wrong?

Good show

This is heuristics.  A heuristic is a mental shortcut which takes us more or less to where we want to be.  It seems no bad thing, in and of itself.  A quick scouting trip into the new country we intend to move to, prior to returning home and beginning the more difficult task of ringing ahead to work out a job and flat, before deciding which pieces of our existing wardrobe we can take with us, and which need to go on Ebay.  In this metaphor, the job is a problematic aspect, the flat is the method, and the wardrobe is one's ideology.  Some of it, if we are doing this correctly, is going on Ebay, and don't tell whoever buys it what a shoddy piece of tat it is.

Having worked on this assumption before, with (as I took it) some success, it was naturally enough the method I took when I began to study Hegel.  It was here that I encountered a crushing brick wall.  There are no pictorial representations of Hegel's system of thought.  I hope here to make it clearer why this was, by reference to Hegel's idea of Vorstellen and Derry's (2013) case for a kind of philosophical method called social epistemology.

1. - Epistemology - Hegel sends no postcards

He never remembers Mothers' Day either

Any enquiry into the way we see the world shouldn't start with what we see.  Instead it should start with what we think we see.  This is the justification for studying epistemology, sometimes called "theory of knowledge". 

Hegel was a philosopher whose work has been taken as a starting point for epistemological enquiry.  Students who encounter Hegel here are struck by his notorious difficulty, a topic he even writes of somewhat boastfully in his Phenomenology of Spirit.

The study of epistemology is not, at least in the first instance, the study of perceptions, but rather of the thought of perceptions.  Hegel calls this the Notion or the Concept.  Given that thoughts may be pictured better in words than in any other form, any study of representations can begin with the study of a manifesto of the ideology which leads us to mistake lines on a page for an idea.  We do not study the marks on the page but rather the type of mind which thinks those marks meaningful.  I think both sides in the above argument could make use of that assertion, so let us leave it there for now.

Get on with it

This seems to run against the grain.  A "Picture is worth 1,000 words".  But for how long?  All delights lose their lustre, and so by Season Six of Mad Men you are no longer drinking in the colours and cinematography but tapping your knees impatiently and making rather more cups of tea.  This is a television series which was sold precisely on its visual aspect, and yet the trick no longer works.  Perhaps then we had better say that a Picture is worth as many words as it replaces, and that this is subject to change.  I know, I'll work on the wording.



The upsetting thing for most of us is that although we have a visual sense and can achieve things with it, including mimesis - the staggering feat of fooling another consciousness into believing they are looking at what we believe we have seen.  It is problematic, then, that we have no real idea how it works.  When it comes to the mind we are all like a one of Arthur C Clarke's space tribes in the Foundation novels.

In these books, Clarke paints a picture of a future which has collapsed and where Science is soley preserved on one planet.  The others are doomed instead to spend their time working the few remaining pieces of "Old Empire" technology.  They do this with centuries old rituals, their original purpose long since forgotten.  So we too are working the levers of rituals which keep us in touch with Reality without understanding how they work.  We might know that what we are doing produces results, in terms of creating our worldview, but whoever dreamt it up is long gone. As was well said, "The half understood sayings of Aristotle became the laws of thought".

My confusion with Hegel came from the fact that I thought I should be able to see a picture of what he was talking about.  To me it made sense that a thinker's work should be open to pictorial abstraction, in order to take a Heuristic starting point.

However, any satisfactory representation of the Dialectic should also include the opposite of itself.  It is not, therefore logically possible to draw a picture of Hegel's system without subsequently erasing the entire picture.  A picture offers us a statement,  "This is that".  The negation of such a statement, "This is not that" it is not possible to represent.  We cannot paint a "not yellow" picture (Vitale), despite this being part of the truth.

The conclusion, that This is both That and Other (Subject and Object) cannot be shown and yet, for Hegel, this is all.  Thus in the "fluid system" (PoS - 327) which is Spirit (in which, for Hegel, Truth is entirely one), there is no abstraction for simplicity's sake but rather a continuing "sequence of movements" or steps. To picture to ourselves the very endlessness of this, as a continual process of revision and doubt, can be seen as a important moment in itself.  Continual 'fluid' revision, as in Heraclitus' "Other and other rivers run", applies here.

For precisely this reason, one cannot head speculatively into Hegel's writing, with a mind to moving there later.  Like a country which does not issue visitors' Visas, Hegel's thought demands we leave our old nations behind if we want to see what happens there; this is not to imply that we may not sit in antechambers and have conversations on the border, even for our entire lifetime if necessary.  However, we do not get to Holiday in Spirit.  We must inhabit it, or else be baffled by it.  One could say the same about Teaching - and indeed Hegel was a teacher for his entire adult life, first as a tutor and then in schools and universities.

Hegel has a word for the type of mistake which leads us to think that a picture is enough to satisfy.  He calls it Vorstellen, translated by A.V. Miller (no relation to Arthur) in his translation as "picture language".  Derry (2013)  following Brandom renders this as "representation".  In opposition to this Hegel places the Rational or the Actual.  The Actual, Phenomenal world is always represented as a system, because only a system can contain the various moves and countermoves which are relevant to reality.

The constantly shifting theatre of forms, then, is closest to being what Truth is, a constant process of revision and improvement.  This worldview is communicated, says Hegel, to render us "ready to do Science".

3.

For a teacher, this could well seem a long way from offering the kind of straightforward program which is teachable in a rainy INSET day.  How this relates to the classroom, however, is critical.

If a teacher chooses to relate a concept to Dizzy Rascal, it can of course overtake and dominate the entire lesson. One would hate to walk away thinking one had taught them about Verbs when actually the students think they just sat around and talked about Grime getting a "live" but not a "life" lesson.  On top of this, there's nothing sadder than a cool teacher - its like Dads dancing at weddings.  Many teachers with understandable concerns about this could find themselves swayed by demagogic talk of "the collapse of standards".  Recently, the Secretary of State for Education has made this point repeatedly and persuasively.

However, if Hegel is correct and Vorstellen is not interactive with the type of thing that mind is, then calls for Evidence of any teacher's effectiveness which repeat claims for "Data" will not hold water.  "Data" is nothing but another form of representation, it is still not good enough for our purposes, and never can be. Assessment, for example, cannot show what it appears to show. Rather, it must be used as part of an Inferential process which is related to spending time in an environment (and certainly not the requisite OFSTED 20 minutes) in which connections between knowers exist. If we do not stay somewhere with another knower long enough to form a connection, then we have not discovered anything. The challenge of Social Epistemology is levelled at everyone, from the minor damage to knowledge done by teachers who indulge the students a little too long in the picture starter to the potentially far more serious damage done by an educational establishment in thrall to graphs.

This is a picture of a graph.  It is therefore a picture of a picture.

The seductive thing about representations of Rationality, such as the "representationalist paradigm (of awareness understood in representational terms) inaugurated by Descartes and influential in Anglo-Saxon thought ever since" (Derry 2013) is that it appears not to suffer from the flaws of Vorstellen. By these lights and in their terms, this prevents the emergence of the epistemic state of knowing.

"For number is just that completely quiescent, lifeless and indifferent determinateness in which all movement and relation is extinguished, and which has broken the bridge to the living element of instincts, manner of life, and other aspects of sensuous existence."

- Hegel, PoS - 286

4. Conclusions

The objective here is not victory, it is not a zero sum game. What we are doing is in strict conflict with all systems that present simple competition as being universally relevant to the sort of thing Phenomena are. It's like basing your theory of mind on X Factor. These simple, spontaneous systems, especially those parts of them which are knowable, are necessarily known through a process of connection and inference between parties, and moves from one position to the other will always present us with unexpected pictures which explode or efface those preceeding.

However, I would also not wish to repeat the old joke and say that the path for improvement does not "start from here". This is why I say that if you read this on a Sunday night with a Powerpoint slide bursting with "Relevant" images ready to go, don't change a thing. On the other hand, it does indicate that thinking you have connected when there is a moment of recognition in the students' eyes is something of a fool's paradise.

Meanwhile, if you are still on the "other side", and still believe that such things as sides exist, then ask yourself whether the mask of numbers is really that different to a paper plate with a literary character's name on it and eyeholes punched through. Are you on Foundation, or are you a steam priest pulling Aristotelian levers, their meaning long forgotten? And how would you know?

What matters, however, is that all parties concerned have made an effort to connect the subject with the students, and to open up the space to one where Inferences of a conflicting nature about the the new concept can be made.  Of course we cannot doubt first principles and pass a class, and discussions of those kinds are rightly kept for detentions, parent meetings and home tuition at vast cost.   However, if we are not willing to discover what the first principles of others are before we rely on our own, more systematic pictures of Phenomena to explode or be exploded by them, we will educate nobody.

She has inferred incorrectly - that does not make her anti-knowledge

References

Derry, J. (2013) Can Inferentialism Contribute to Social Epistemology? in Journal of Philosophy of Education Volume 47, Issue 2, May 2013

Teacher Jokes Don't Need To Be Funny

Okay, now we've all been taken to school, let's break down what just happened.

This is the greatest spontaneous comeback I have ever seen.  As someone who stands in front of an audience every day, an audience which has not always been receptive to what I have to say, I am taking notes.  Here are my thoughts on this moment.

There was a strong chance that at the moments immediately after the heckle he would have needed to leave the stage.  He could have had a few minutes of "thanks for having me", maybe one last punchline, but to all intents and purposes he is done.  Because the heckle is brilliant, and the (clearly sober) heckler's timing is perfect, he can't appeal to the "shut the hell up people are having a good time here" argument, because maybe they'd have a better time with her, whoever she is.  They'd probably tell her to take the mic once he left.  

So he needs to think.  I can tell you the mistake you would probably make in this situation.  You would think, being him, that you need to think fast.  If you are thinking this you aren't a chess player.

The tempo of the gig is actually still his.  Until he speaks, he is the ranking officer in the legions of Funny.  Sure, he's hanging by a thread.  However, he will get one chance to save his skin.  Now watch his right hand.  Four times he flicks it out, each time a signal to the crowd like the hourglass on a screen.  Each flick is meaningful:  working.  He even extends the fingers as if writing, which is exactly what he is doing.  

What makes this moment beautiful is it is completely public creation.  He is literally writing a punchline in front of the audience, and what is more, he is so good he knows he has time not to use the first one he thinks of.  I would guess that each of those four wrist flicks is a discarded possible punchline being written and then trashed.  

Notice that when he has it, he completes the movement and touches his glasses.  Here the signal to the audience is "glasses - nerd", which given what little of the act seen at the beginning of the clip signals his persona is back in control.  And the audience is so smart it intuitively knows this and silences itself to give him his one chance.  

This tells you two important facts about audiences:  they respect power, and they are obedient.   And one more thing:  you don't need to spell it out for them.

If you are a teacher, remember this when a student calls out something which makes you look stupid:  You have time, and when you have something funnier/sharper/more just/more fitting (this all depends on the Values of the room), the class will not only realise, but they will be grateful to receive it because really, do you think they'd RATHER that lady finish the gig?  With her one lucky break?  Hell no.  That's relief you're hearing at the end in their delighted screams. Thus at the moment when you feel the whole room is against you, you are actually in the position of greatest power.  Break the silence too soon though, and they'll be sorry they ever believed in you.  

That's why teacher jokes aren't funny - they don't need to be.  If they are it's just a bonus - what they need to be is witty in the ancient sense of building on what has gone before and that means giving your response some thought.  You need to accept the premises of your opponent and render them absurd through mind judo, and that's going to take a moment.  Relax, you're going to be given that moment; audiences know what's good for them.

Or you could just send the kid out, and look like a sore loser.  It's your call.

2.

So that's timing.  There is one more important element of Teacher humour: Justice.

L-R:  Dr Whiteface and Feste

The other thing which humour does is recognise the absurdity of status and any attempts to impose order.  This is why its targets are so often aristocrats, and why the truly brilliant clown is not the Feste type (Harpo Marx, Coco the Clown) but Dr Whiteface (Groucho Marx, Oliver Hardy).  This is the guy with the plan who despairs of "these idiots I have to work with" but is in fact just as stupid as his contemporaries.  This is, crucially, who the students think we are.  When we fail, it confirms it.  When they fail, they feel like a Feste, slipping on water or being spoinked in the face with a ladder.

Conclusion:  The universe is random, unfair and unjust.

A staffroom, yesterday

Chaplin's genius is to represent the injustices, follies, heartbreak and failure of the world whilst remaining nevertheless pure.  He wears his failure as a badge, but also constantly struggles free of it.  The second category of Teacher joke (and I would put Socrates in the category of clown at times, too) displays the scars of confusion whilst also reassuring us that no matter how inept one is, dumb luck can also save you too.

It's a type of Justice, and there are times when you can use it.

After all, how else to explain an idiot like me ending up in front of a fine bunch of swells like you?

So You Wanna Take A Holiday?

So You Wanna Take a Holiday

 

First, horror beyond imagining:  remember to stare directly at it for as long as you can bear to and try not to look away.  I know that everything in your body will try and convince you to do something, anything else, but it is vital that you do not ignore it if you are to understand, viz. that it works on you BECAUSE you ignore it.

 

 



 

"By keeping parents in a state of chronic anxiety, psychiatry thus frustrates desires that advertising can then claim to satisfy"

-Lasch, the Culture of Narcissism

 

Imagine:  You've accidentally raised children with no inner resources.  You're 45 and relations with your spouse have cooled.  You have no idea what's gone wrong and you are in the process of despairing.  The lack of inner resources means that you are your child's only resource in the absence of screens.  Hence a problem:  you cannot change your aesthetic reality i.e. go on holiday without being treated like an IPhone by your offspring.  Do you want to know what it feels like to be clicked on?  You're about to find out.

 

In other words, you're straight out of a textbook.  The purpose of this advert is to conceal the fact that you are an expected and accounted for byproduct of modern life.  Instead, the entirely predictable development of your way of life and the attendant ennui is, in the course of this advert, presented to you as being a mistake, an accidental wrong turn which Capitalism can correct.  This is a false premise because it is Capitalism which ushered in the reign of this problem.  Why would it rob Peter to pay Paul when Peter and Paul are both at Cannes sipping Cristal?  You think that's Sea Air you're breathing?

 

The problem that this couple have is not a lack of time to "Relax".  They have more time on their hands than any previous generation.  The problem is a lack of inner resources, that is, a lack of those things which make time pass without stimulus.  When the quirky host child holds up a book and says "there's a chance you won't get past the first page", that is an instruction, not a warning.

 

"No time to chill out - what's that all about?"

 

Chilling out is a completely new concept for human beings.  In the past we spoke of reflection, contemplation, meditation, but these were seen as aspects of striving, of living.  This is a new era, where you are expected to empty your mind other than through the performance of repetitive tasks. 

 

It doesn't work. 

 

There are two reasons.  Firstly, instructing yourself not to think is impossible; it's a classic way of inducing the mystic state.  Truly kind masters ask us to perform impossible tasks precisely because they know how spectacularly we will fail, and that THAT is the lesson.  Cruel masters ask us to try and improve ourselves in ways which seem feasible ("finish a novel on holiday") but are more ruinous because, when you achieve it and aren't Enlightened the problem must be you "didn't do it right".  Hence every college student asks his instructor for Frameworks and a generation raised on porn defers to quantitative measures to decide if they enjoyed sex.  Hence lifecoaches.

 

When Jesus told us that anyone who thought adulterously was an adulterer, the point wasn't that you, subjectively, were cheating.  The point was that everyone, objectively, was a hypocrite.  But you only get to say that with any justice if you've honestly tried to stop being a monster.  Protip: you are a monster. 

 

This brings us back to the couple in the advert.  They're not monsters, they're not even adulterers.  That is because they are fictional beings.  Only a lunatic would call for their stoning ever.  "Who Stoned Roger Rabbit?" is self evidently absurd and yet, admit it, you were bearing their feelings in mind weren't you? 

 

However, the double bind is that millions stone themselves every day for their failure to not want to stone themselves.  They know they should aspire to rock hard abs and children who speak Mandarin but honestly, who can be bothered?

 

The answer is nobody.

 

The answer is, also, everybody.

 

That's the only Enlightenment that the 21st Century is offering, take it or leave it.

 



We're All Connected And It's Awful

We're All Connected and It's Awful

You're Telling Me

Darryl Revok

This was a test campaign used in 1947 to market a new product. The product was a drug, a tranquilizer called 'Ephemerol'. It was aimed at pregnant women. If it had worked it would have been marketed all over North America. But the campaign failed and the drug failed, because it had a side effect on the unborn children. An invisible side effect.

Cameron Vale

It created Scanners.

There is a scene in Scanners where Vale (the good scanner) falls in with a bunch of Hippy Scanners.  If you haven't seen the film, Vale is a hapless psychic who is recruited by No 6 from the Prisoner to stop the Bin laden psychic, Darryl Revok, who later lost an arm and cropped up in Starship Troopers telling Denise Richards to put em away, love, we've all seen them.  At this point he is making people die with his mind and warming up for a career in the Space Marines by taking over literally the entire planet, which given that it's a planet imagined by David Cronenberg he is pretty much welcome to, everyone being busy growing teeth out of their eyeballs or whatever.

Revok's name backwards is Kover.  Which means the same thing as Veil/Vale.  We'll return to that.

Brr

What happens is this: Vale forgets the sage advice of No. 6 and goes way off task; he ends up having a hippy love in with the wussy Scanners.  No. 6 said this would happen.  Don't get caught up in that Utopian Bullcrap, he said, just make Revok's head explode then go home.  At least I think that's what he said, I was flicking between this and something on Channel 4.

Anyway, Vale finds himself sat in a circle of gooey love with some people wearing hemp whilst they all chant "We are one - We are one".

In other words, he goes on Twitter and stays there.

To Find Out What Happens Next, Click Here

Couldn't be bothered to watch?  I'll tell you what happens, they all die from Shotguns.  The ones who don't die are rendered catatonic or idiotic from the shock of being inside another's mind when they died.  Why? Because being connected into a beautiful overarching consciousness of fragile intersubjective Scanning super shamans is horrible, and Revok is the wrath of a disconcerted universe.

"Lose yourself to the group will" - you're damn right I'm frightened to do that.  Every time anyone tells you to open your mind it's probably just so they can put something in it.  What on earth is wrong with these people?  Why do they never listen to No. 6, he beat the Combine once, sort of.

We're all out here looking for kicks, but what happens whenever a decent fun starts?  I'll tell you, an elderly buffoon who barely survived the last Revok convinces you that this time it's different, that Voldemort doesn't have his old power or whatever, and that you need to hook into the overmind to commune with the infiniverse.

Enough!  Harry thinks Vodemort's Thoughts and he's going to lead him right to you and then it's shotgun time.  That's the coded message: that connection to other people will destroy you utterly.  In this sense it's missing something: connection to The Other is compulsory:  for the Other.  The choice already go made for it, by you, when you were asleep, or drunk, or high.  In other words, you got sarged so hard by your Unconscious that you barely know how to get back to complaining about stuff.

Do you start to see what the Vale Kovers?

That's right:  You ARE Revok/Voldemort, and everyone else is plotting your downfall.  The only comfort I can offer is that they are plotting their own as well.  The only thing left to do is unKoveR the conspiracy, you'd better hope your telepowers are good and limber.  Sincerely, I wish you luck, I'll be hunting for you as much as the next patsy.

What was the name of that drug again?  And what was it supposed to do?  Surprise: the only reason to tranquilise you is so that you stop trying to impose morality on something horrible, so that it can be the most horrible it can possibly be:  Listen to No. 6, he needs to debrief you:

be honest, you found him funny too

Ahhh, No. 6 was playing the long con (never mind that this is a different film, that's so far from the point right now).  Let your petty little ego be swallowed up, it will only hurt for a second.  Repeat after me: I am not a number oh wait I always was.

"Safety" in Numbers

Numbers are the most effective way of distancing ourselves from the universe, thanks Hegel.  We will do anything to avoid reality and the first priority is always going to be to shut down the senses.  The problem is that people know there's something missing and now you've got a workplace full of frightened neurotics who won't shut up about banal nonsense.  Congratulations, you killed their minds and turned them all into parrots who are really good at repeating the last soundbite they heard in a frantic bid to fill the silence that they intuitively know is the opposite of comfortable.

The cure definitely isn't to cut them off from their numbers.  They think they need those now and if you tell them they can't have them best case is catatonia worst case is you end up like the Tsars.  Plus, you don't even exist, this is a conversation I'm having with myself and the imaginary spokesperson for a conspiracy of secondary minds which really run the show.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague apparently works EIGHTEEN HOURS a day.  What does he do?  I'll bet my own face that what he doesn't do is fix international affairs.  The person I want to get at is his organ grinder, and unfortunately for everyone but most of all for Hague they share a body.  So there are two William Hagues, Earth 1 Hague and Earth 2 Hague or "Anti-Hague".  What are we doing about this?  Nothing, Earth 2 has been running the show ever since people first started feeling bad about stuff they couldn't change, i.e. when we started telling ourselves that slaves had it good.  Slaves have it appalling, and the clear priority for anyone who isn't retching their own lungs out in a sanatorium is to avoid that outcome.  

Hold on, did Number 6 just say that Christ was a psychiatrist?

What Number 6 wants is for you to give him your National Insurance number, it's the same old scam, but just like all cults this one has a new twist otherwise nobody would join.  The twist with this one is that you laugh at people who use the word "Individual" like it matters.  This is a great idea because I do that too, so now I feel like I have a pass.  This cult has co-opted irony and the best thing about it is it doesn't even exist, so the gap in the market is there for anyone who wants to go full L Ron on it.

Except there isn't a gap, the market IS this cult.  We are all of us living under two sets of masters, the real ones and the symbolic ones.  The real masters can sack us or blacklist us, nobody is afraid of them, they're good peoples and you'd go to their barbeques.  The ultimate badasses don't even exist, they wear the invisible mask of logic and you're so scared of them you won't even give them names.  If I tell you there are Sixteen of them and their secret faces look like insects I do it because I want to help but I think I might be making it worse.