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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 176 million confirmed cases and over 3.8 million confirmed deaths. These numbers are likely dwarfed by the true rates of infection and death, which will remain unknown well into the future and will likely never be fully elucidated.[1] During this time, several countries have vied for the unhappy honour of being the worst affected by the pandemic, including Italy in early 2020, the United States through 2020 and early 2021, and most recently India in April and May of 2021.   The emergence of highly effective vaccines in late 2020 and early 2021 suggested some relief might be on the horizon. The optimism proved to be somewhat short-lived, as questions of vaccination and vaccine availability (not unanticipated, but now real) arose. India provides perhaps the most dramatic example: despite the initiation of vaccination programmes, India suffered a devastating second wave of infection and death in 2021 that eclipsed the relatively mild first wave of 2020.   With this second wave appearing to recede, and other parts of the world cautiously reopening, one of the most pressing questions related to the pandemic is surely whether we can exploit this respite and vaccinate as many individuals as possible, to delay or dampen future waves of SARS-CoV-2 infection. With this in mind, we can consider the total human population as either vaccinated or unvaccinated. Every individual whose status changes from unvaccinated to vaccinated represents a further step in controlling the pandemic. The unvaccinated group can in turn be divided into subpopulations of individuals who are involuntarily unvaccinated (for instance, because of being immunocompromised or lacking access to vaccines) and individuals who remain unvaccinated by choice. The latter group—comprising those unvaccinated by choice—may shortly become the main barrier to achieving the long-awaited herd immunity. The herd immunity threshold for any infectious disease is usually substantially lower than 100% population immunity. If vaccine- hesitant individuals can be persuaded to seek vaccination, it may be possible to acquire some form of herd immunity without needing to engage in the vastly more daunting task of persuading vaccine refusers to seek vaccination.[2]   In this essay I would like to examine some of the sources of vaccine hesitation I have observed amongst friends, family, and acquaintances in India. It would be preposterous to claim to speak ‘for Indians’ or provide a view on ‘the Indian experience’. Rather, I relate some instances—largely from my own experience of the pandemic in India— to illustrate the types of vaccine hesitancy that might be operating in India and elsewhere in the world. My hope is to frame my observations in such a way that they may be amenable to more rigorous survey studies that could elucidate the distribution of these attitudes. My general point is that there are numerous types of vaccine hesitation, and many of these differ quite dramatically (in kind and not just degree) from the beliefs characterising the anti-vaccine movement.   Distinctions between vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine beliefs   Earlier, the phrase ‘vaccine hesitancy’ brought to my mind the image of an angry, ill-informed, unreasonable individual whose refusal to receive a vaccine put others at risk, delayed herd immunity at best, and at worst allowed new and more virulent SARS-CoV-2 variants to evolve. I have since found that such a stereotype is probably fairly common amongst pro-vaccine individuals. Whilst vaccine hesitancy may indeed increase the probability of these outcomes, there is significantly more nuance to the matter of vaccine hesitation than such a narrow stereotype can accommodate. Consequently, my own views on vaccine hesitancy have been broadened by its (at first alarming) frequency amongst friends and family.

Is a judge more like an artist or a scientist? This seems to be a trick question, and yet extreme versions of both perspectives have, at one time or another, been advocated. For instance, James Boyd White, often regarded as the founder of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement, considered lawyers to be artists, and the solving of complex legal problems to be akin to high art.[1] Conversely, Christopher Columbus Langdell, once Dean of Harvard Law School, believed that ‘law is a science, and that all the available materials of that science are contained in printed books’,[2] such that timeless and unchangeable legal principles could be inductively reasoned from the corpus of case law, thereafter providing definitive answers to any legal dispute.   Neither of these viewpoints has garnered widespread support. Nevertheless, the question is of more than purely academic interest: in light of the increasing presence of computation within the professional landscape of law it has a practical application.[3] If judicial decision-making is purely, or even predominantly, a science then it is highly susceptible to automation; on the other hand, if judicial decision-making is closer to an art-form, then it fails to be seen how artificial intelligence can effectively replicate it.   Instead, this article explores the alternative viewpoint that a judge is more appropriately regarded as a craftsperson, with legal judgments being craft-objects rather than ‘high art’ or scientific expositions. The first half of this article defends this view, whilst the second half applies it to the contemporary issue of AI (artificial intelligence) judges.   I. How is a judge like a carpenter?   In perhaps the most sustained comparison of law and craft,[4] Brett G Scharffs identifies four ways in which the law overlaps with distinctive aspects of craftsmanship.[5] First, the products of craft are not mass-produced, but are instead ‘hand-crafted’ to particular briefs—similarly, legal judgments and advocacy are tailored towards specific cases.[6] Second, craft is medium-specific: just as carpenters are those who work with wood, legal practitioners are those who work with rhetoric and law.[7] Third, craft-objects have use-value which supersedes their aesthetic value; although legal judgments may be persuasive, and even artful in their concision and style,[8] their ultimate value is in resolving legal disputes by applying the relevant law to given fact scenarios.[9] Fourth, craft, as a practice, is defined by its strong relationship with tradition (as opposed to pursuing novelty), a characteristic that can be observed in common law jurisdictions, where the legal principle of stare decisis (‘to stand by things decided’) compels courts to abide by legal precedent.[10]   Collectively, these factors undermine the view that law is an art-form. Art is not medium-specific, as it can be sculptural, dramatic, visual, literary, and so on; in contrast, only a legal judgment or statute can be considered law. Similarly, art is not function-focussed as, although certain works of art may perform certain functions (such as social commentary or entertainment), there is no specific or predetermined function which art, as a diverse human activity, must fulfil. Finally, whilst there are certainly artistic traditionalists, art is not solely a backwards-facing phenomenon, since, unlike law, it has no preconceived ties to liberal values like certainty and regularity, and so can permit (and celebrate) iconoclasm and radical experimentation.[11] As such, even though law-making can be seen as a creative act, the nature of its creativity is often counterposed to that of art-making: ‘Law tells. Art shows. Law rationalizes. Art feels. Law renders definitude. Art explores infinity’.[12]

What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living. —Christina Sharpe[1]   A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world. —Frantz Fanon[2]   The fall   On 7 June 2020, amidst anger in the wake of the murder of George Floyd (who suffocated under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin), the statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters before being unceremoniously dragged through the streets and dumped in Bristol harbour.[3] The statue was erected in 1895 to celebrate Colston’s philanthropic contributions—donations to schools and hospitals—to the city of Bristol. These were funded by his involvement in the Royal Africa Company (RAC), which was responsible for shipping up to 84,500 slaves to the United Kingdom from West Africa, and for at least 19,300 fatalities.[4] This monument to Colston was one of many late-Victorian attempts to, quite literally, cast the mythology of British exceptionalism. It should be unsurprising that the commissioning of Colston’s statue coincided with a period of violent corporate-colonial expansion. This was the ‘Scramble for Africa’, which followed the partitioning of the continent during the 1884–85 Berlin Conference by European powers.[5] Empire soldiers attacked kings and chiefs who failed or refused to comply with the attempts of the British Empire to establish commercial monopolies on raw materials. They plundered villages, raped women, and looted artefacts and regalia. In the years immediately before and after the installation of Colston’s statue, the British Empire waged several small wars and punitive expeditions across West Africa,[6] notably the Anglo-Ashanti war of 1895, which established the British Empire protectorate over Ashanti, and the Benin Expedition of 1897, which resulted in the sack of Benin City and theft of the Benin Bronzes. This corporate-colonial expansion was undertaken on ostensibly anti-slavery, humanitarian grounds. It purported to free enslaved Africans from the fetish rule of ritual sacrifice and cannibalism and to establish free trade. It therefore upheld the post-Wilberforce myth that Britain stood for the progressive emancipation of slaves the world over, whilst consolidating material dominance over Black Africans through a racialised capitalism. It was a Victorian ‘war on terror’ comparable to the liberal interventionism of the Major and Blair governments.[7] The paradoxes of post-slavery Britain were thus, literally, and figuratively, embodied in the statue of Colston from the moment it was erected. The statue projected to future generations a euchronia in which colonial exploitation was compatible with charitable goodwill. It stands as an index of the hypocrisy of the British Empire, which, after slavery, cloaked its expansion of imperial power abroad in the language of liberation whilst continuing to celebrate slave owners at home. Therefore, we can say that the end of slavery in 1833 had done nothing to halt the implementation of a state-backed ideology of White supremacy and imperialism. In 1895, three years before the Colston statue was unveiled, this ideology was given a particularly theatrical expression, to much fanfare. Incoming Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, father of future prime minister Neville Chamberlain, said the following:   My career as Secretary of State for the Colonies is given yet to be made; but I will say that no one has ever been wafted into office with more favorable gales. I will venture to claim two qualifications for the great office which I hold, and which, to my mind, without making any invidious distinctions, is one of the most important that can be held by any Englishman. These qualifications are that, I believe in the British Empire and, in the second place, I believe the British race is the greatest of governing races that the world has ever seen. I say that not merely as an idle boast, but as proved and evidenced by the success which we have had in administering the vast dominions which are connected with these small island, and I believe accordingly that there are no limits to its future.[8]   Colston’s statue is now in the Bristol Museum. However, that it ‘swam with the fishes’ is testament to a growing, populist antiracist sentiment in Britain, and to the waning of imperial hagiographies instantiated by Chamberlain and others. Such hagiographies would sustain Frantz Fanon’s manicheistic ‘world of statues’, in which Colston, Robert Milligan, and Cecil Rhodes tower over us, elevated by seven feet of Portland stone. There is something like poetic justice in the rippling of the water as Colston sinks into the harbour. It can be watched and rewatched ad infinitum on the internet, as can the (unfortunately memetic) murder of George Floyd, which sparked the protests. Colston must have thought himself master of this harbour, and his RAC ships, water foaming in their wake, would have docked there. The poetry of Colston’s dememorialisation was only enriched by the fact that, as Saima Nasar has noted in her study of Colston and memory, Colston’s statue was drowned near Pero Bridge. The bridge was named after Pero Jones, a slave transported to Bristol from the Caribbean Island of Nevis by the merchant John Pinney (1740–1818).[9] The ghosts of Jones and slaves like him have not so much been exorcised by the fall of Colston as put to work again. This work is not the kind of work to which they were accustomed hundreds of years ago. It is not kind of work that turns bodies into flesh, it is not the kind of work that makes men and women inhuman, and it is not the kind of work valued only by yield. It is the work of the Black dead, it is the work of haunting which can only be done by spirits, it is the work of the children of slaves, it is the work of undoing the Whiteness of the world.

The application of print privilege (pre-copyright) legislation to Venetian cartography came about by chance.[1] While the Venetian Republic was not the first state in Europe to construct a system of printing privileges, it was the earliest to grant limited monopolies for cartography and artwork. Intended originally for bestowing printed book privileges, the wording of the sixteenth century legislation and printing culture of Early Modern Venice enabled the expansion of the privilegio  from texts to cartography, and, finally, to independent images. Print legislation decreed by the Venetian government did not differentiate between print categories: books, cartography and independent images. These classifications have since been projected onto the then singular medium. The laws only stipulated that compositions eligible for exclusive reproduction rights must be ‘works on paper’. The broad phrasing enabled a legal realist approach to requesting cartographical print privileges; a linguistic loophole. Rather than remain within the confines of the intended material—printed books—the government steadily began to receive an influx of applications for ‘works on paper’ of other types.   Throughout the sixteenth century, mappamondi  (world maps) were often proposed for special protection by the Venetian Republic. In mid-1555, Floriano (d 1560/75) submitted a request to privilege a circular world map.[2] The Mappamondo  (c 1556 or 1555 mv) was greatly inspired by ancient mathematical philosophy and by contemporaneous cartographical designs in an attempt to update the mapping of the globe (fig 1).[3] Although this map is far less well known than its primary source of inspiration, Gerard Mercator’s (1512-94) Orbis Imago  (c 1538, fig 2) printed in Rupelmonde near Antwerp, Floriano’s Mappamondo is significant when examined in the context of Venetian art legal history.[4] Many privileged prints are not currently considered the finest examples produced, nor even the highlights of an individual’s oeuvre . Censorial licenses were mandatory for print circulation, whereas privileges were optional, costly legal procedures. Additional resources required in applying for exclusive reproduction rights meant that printmakers and publishers were selective in their requests for privileges. Mercator did not seek a Venetian privilegio  for Orbis Imago  while Floriano did obtain a limited monopoly for his Mappamondo .[5] Applications for the legally designated privilegio were based on the privilege holder’s speculation regarding which multiples would be successful, or in an effort to prevent others from copying designs from other media that had proven worthwhile. As today, one could not predict with certainty which map styles would sell or influence the next generation of designers. For a privilege in Early Modern Venice, authorship was less imperative than timely bureaucracy. Fig 1. Mappamondo (Antonio Floriano c 1556 (1555 mv), copperplate engraving, 46 x 84cm). Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine, Portland; 263. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine. Fig 2. Orbis Imago (Gerard Mercator c 1538, copperplate engraving, 50.7 x 32.3cm). John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence; 2111. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. In defense of his mid-1555 request for special protection, Floriano posited three main points: (1) the map would aid in the education of cosmography as the entire world had been reduced to a single, spherical plane; (2) the work was entirely new and innovative; and (3) his arduous efforts in advancing cartographical study had taken so much time and effort that he wished to ensure proper recompense in the consumer market.[6] Floriano’s justifications simultaneously employed moral rights and economic arguments to endorse his need for a privilegio . In his petition, Floriano did not name the engraver commissioned to construct the plate, nor stipulate the beneficiaries of successful fraud or counterfeit suits. His sole proviso was that others should neither print, nor publish the Mappamondo  for a period of 20 years.[7]

Introduction An international crime is ‘an act universally recognised as criminal, which is considered a grave matter of international concern and for some valid reason cannot be left within the exclusive jurisdiction of the State that would have control over it under ordinary circumstances’.[1] This essay will firstly examine whether proposed definitions of terrorism as a crime under customary international law should be accepted, and then discuss whether terrorism should fall within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). It will examine the arguments for and against, including the potential to politicise the Court, the effect on the war on terror, the benefits to defendants and the impact on the role of the Security Council. Ultimately, this essay will conclude that whilst adding terrorism to the ICC’s jurisdiction could have an overall benefit, the practical reality renders this difficult to accomplish. Terrorism in Customary International Law To determine whether terrorism should be an international crime, it is important to establish a definition of terrorism. Traditionally, terrorism has been criminalised via a series of transnational treaties, which criminalise the modus operandi used by terrorists.[2] However, these treaties do not provide a general definition of terrorism. Therefore, it is important to focus on treaties which seek to create a general definition of terrorism, as the specific definitions would criminalise that specific act, such as the hijacking of an aeroplane, rather than the broader concept of terrorist acts, which may take many different forms.[3] Therefore, the two most important definitions to consider are found in The Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, as it is the most widely ratified treaty containing a general definition of terrorism, and the Interlocutory Decision on the Applicable Law , as this decision argued that terrorism already existed as a crime under customary international law.[4] The Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism includes a close generic definition of terrorism,[5] however, it only applies in situations of armed conflict, and acts of terrorism can already be categorised as war crimes in this context.[6] It is important to note that this definition did not have widespread consensus at its creation.[7] Instead, most states ratified the Convention in response to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373, which imposed an obligation on states to ratify it following 9/11.[8] Therefore, this definition is unlikely to have strong support from states for the basis of a crime of terrorism in international criminal law. Considering that states opted against including a crime of terrorism in the Rome Statute, it seems unlikely that they would agree on including a definition that they were largely required to ratify. Furthermore, the ICC already has jurisdiction over attacks aimed at civilians during armed conflict.[9] As such, this definition should not be used to form the basis of defining terrorism as an international crime.

In Northern Ireland, one of the most significant human rights instruments resulting from the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998 is Section 75 (s. 75) of the Northern Ireland Act 1998. It legally binds public authorities to not only have due regard to the promotion of equality of opportunity amongst nine protected categories of persons (those of differing religious belief, political opinion, racial group, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, those with dependents and those without, those with a disability and those without) but also to have regard to the desirability of promoting good relations amongst those of differing political opinion, religious belief or racial group. As part of s. 75, public authorities are required to assess through policy screenings and equality impact assessments (EQIAs) whether their policies would have any adverse impact on the protected categories of persons.[1] Whilst s. 75 has been praised for its innovation,[2] the breadth and magnitude of what it seeks to accomplish provides a challenge in terms of its enforceability. Traditionally, s. 75 could only be enforced by its accompanying monitoring body, the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI). However, a recent decision in the case of Re Toner, [3] where a complaint was brought by a blind woman against Lisburn City Council on a number of grounds for failing to consider the needs of blind persons in the development of a Public Realm Scheme (PRS),[4] has changed this. It very significantly opened the door for complaints of ‘substantive’ breaches of s. 75 to be brought under judicial review,[5] an idea put forward in Re Neill’s Application [6] that had previously yet to gain traction. Although not clearly defined in the dicta of Re Toner , a ‘substantive’ breach in this particular case would seem to constitute a failure on the part of public authorities greater than ‘some simple technical omission or procedural failing’ as well as a failure to take action when concerns arose earlier in the implementation of the PRS.[7] Additionally, the court specifies that the breach was longstanding in nature and must be weighed against the benefits there might have been if the proper s. 75 considerations had been made.[8] Allowing complaints of substantive breaches invites questions about the extent to which the court should get involved in determining the legality of a public authority’s decision under Wednesbury unreasonableness.[9] In Re Toner, the issue centred not on the legality of the final decision made by the public authority but rather on whether the correct process had been taken to reach that decision, as the court maintained a pre-existing principle derived from R (Hurley and Moore) v Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills [10] that it is for the public authority to make the final decision.[11] Nevertheless, by giving s. 75 complaints access to judicial review; Re Toner opens the door to the possible scrutiny of decisions under Wednesbury . I foreshadow there will be increased scrutiny of public authorities’ decisions under Wednesbury, given the complexities that arise due to Northern Ireland’s history of conflict. This is because the current principles underpinning ‘due regard’, which I will shortly discuss, largely derive from England and Wales and do not account for the difficulties in ascertaining what adverse impact looks like for the groups of ‘political opinion’ and ‘religious belief’, which require unique considerations in a context such as Northern Ireland. Additionally, it is difficult for public authorities with limited resources to extract the evidence necessary to measure the adverse impact within these groups. This can be attributed in part to a lack of funding for public authorities to carry out meaningful consultations with those from the s. 75 groups on how a policy may impact them.[12] With little evidence to draw on, public authorities are arguably more susceptible to complaints of a ‘substantive breach’ and, therefore, subject to the possibility of both an ECNI investigation and judicial review. Decisions made on ‘political opinion’ and ‘religious belief’ are therefore more likely to be questioned because public authorities will have had to make them on the basis of their own judgement and personal experience due to lack of evidence. Because such decisions would be highly politicised, the courts may need to intervene through Wednesbury to ensure impartiality. To demonstrate how the new possibility of judicial review may influence public authorities, I consider how the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI), Northern Ireland’s leading arts and cultural development agency, may be affected. Although quite a niche public authority, it serves as an interesting example of a public authority that may be more susceptible to committing a ‘substantial’ breach of s. 75, given the complex nature of obtaining evidence and measuring impact in relation to the arts.[13] Before turning to a more detailed discussion of how the issues may play out in practice, I will firstly discuss Re Toner’s facts, issues, and reasoning.

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long A simple act of faith, in reason over might To blow up his children will only prove him right History will teach us nothing…[1]   And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.[2]     Introducing turmoil   Reflecting on the ‘atomistic chaos’ of his day, Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out some troubling attributes of the world, which was getting ‘poorer in love and goodness’ the ‘more worldly’ it became.[3]   Individuals , seized by the ‘anxiety of waiting’, grew restless. Pretending to know ‘nothing of these anxieties’, they withdrew into their shells, inside which they could ‘think with an exclusive preoccupation with themselves’ and ‘build and plant for their own day alone’. The urgency surrounding the ‘quest for happiness’ intensified, as though ‘it had to be caught that very day or tomorrow: because perhaps by the day after tomorrow there would be no more hunting at all’. The growing foreboding of the coming ‘winter’s day’ was countered by the ‘greedy exploitation of every minute’, which laid bare ‘all the cowardice and the self-seeking drives of the human soul’. In his later works Nietzsche wondered whether ‘licence and luxury follow when a people approaches destruction, when it degenerates physiologically’, in a manner that could explain ‘craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation’.[4] It seemed as though individuals en masse , akin to the characters of Alexander Pushkin’s Feast in Time of Plague , inadvertently beckoned their impending demise by celebrating it as a form of release—almost as deliverance, rather than confronting menace.   Politicians —‘poor wretches’—feigned ignorance and also pretended not to notice that ‘the spirit of humanity was in great danger’, worsening the situation. Whenever one dared to ‘speak of their weakness and resist their pernicious lying spirit’, they spared no effort to make everyone ‘believe that of all the centuries theirs has borne the prize away’. Well-versed in all ‘types of murder that required neither daggers nor assault; they knew that whatever was said well  would be believed’.[5] They even ‘shook with artificial merriment’ as they fervently embodied their falsehoods day after day, increasingly emboldened by their perceived sense of impunity.   The sciences, together with the arts ,  ‘pursued without any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire ’, inadvertently ‘served the coming barbarism’. The ‘educated classes’ no longer fulfilled the role of ‘lighthouses or refuges’ to safeguard society at large. In silent accord with the ‘physiologically condemned’ potentates, who ascended to the very ‘top of society’ only to direct the proceedings of the cirque diabolique , the ‘cultured wo/man’, in a remarkable feat of self-deception, had no trouble ‘lyingly denying the existence of the universal sickness’, and sybaritically continued ‘obstructing the physicians’.[6]   The economy  was fuelled by the ‘brutal greed for money alone’.[7] The emerging ‘immense conglomerates’ sought to replace isolated capitalists in almost every branch of industry, trade and finance.[8] Uncontrolled private credit creation, fuelled by as well as exacerbating the speculative excesses, played out, for a time, in the ‘stock markets, which fell under the curse that casinos had fallen to earlier’.[9] Powerful individual and institutional economic actors systematically ‘misused politics as an instrument of the stock exchange and both the state and society as mechanisms for their own enrichment’.[10]   The geopolitics  of the day was marred by the escalating rivalry between the ‘Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs’—ie, the ‘English, Americans, and Russians’—jostling for ‘mastery of the world’.[11] This translated into an urgent demand on Europe to come together as ‘One’ in its bid to remain the world’s ‘centre of culture’ and to ‘retain its intellectual influence’.[12] The juxtaposition of antagonistic forces and the play of perceived historical destinies placed Germany in a precarious position: were it not to transcend the customary role of a ‘mediator and broker’—stuck on the crossroads ‘between Mephistopheles and Wagner’—it would risk being thrust from the side-lines of history into the eye of a geopolitical storm not of its making.[13]   Sovereign nation-states , one after another, were ‘swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy’. Gradually, yet inevitably they succumbed to the ‘crudest and most evil forces’, eventually falling into the hands of ‘the money-makers and the military despots’, who came to ‘hold sway over almost everything on earth’. Under their myopic and self-serving leadership, the nations ‘once again drew away from one another in the most hostile fashion and longed to tear one another to pieces’. Until they did. First in 1914 and then again in 1939, Nietzsche’s warning notwithstanding—or possibly, as suggested by some, because of it.   Might Nietzsche’s analysis of his time and his forewarnings of a tumultuous future have summoned it into being, compelling the troublesome flesh of reality to conform to his visions? Could he see something others did not? Before answering these questions, it is important to appreciate one other thing. Nietzsche’s truly disturbing finding was that the psychic architecture of his contemporary society lacked the (agonistic) mechanisms by which the accrued pressure of systemic antagonisms could be safely released without spilling into armed conflict and bloodshed, in order to reset, for a time, the general rules of engagement known under the name of the ‘social contract’. The resulting question, for us, is whether this precipitous design flaw in the system has been rectified by the tragic history of the two world wars, or whether, in Koselleck’s terms, the tension between the ‘different and jarring layers of time’, contingent on the ‘structures of repetition’, is liable to once again erupt in a succession of ‘singular historical events’, whose unfurling would inevitably ‘surprise those who experience them’?[14]   Malign velocities of secularisation   Fast-forwarding Nietzsche’s fever dream some hundred and fifty years, once again—with or without his eyes—it should not be difficult to notice the unfolding play of ‘tremendous forces’ which are ‘savage, primal, and wholly merciless’. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, more frequently these days we fix our inward gaze upon them ‘with a fearful expectation, as though gazing into the cauldron of a witch’s kitchen’, from which ‘at any moment sparks and flashes may herald dreadful apparitions’.[15] Yet, somewhere overhead ‘the Maestro’ keeps on telling us ‘it is Mozart’ and, even though it distinctly ‘sounds like bubble gum’, mesmerised we sit and listen, waiting ‘for the miracle to come’.[16]   In these circumstances, it might be worth having a brief Breaking Dawn  (of The   Twilight Saga , 2008-2012) moment, where Alice Cullen helps the arch-enemy, Aro of the Volturi, to visualise the version of the future he most dreaded. By lifting the Veil of Maya obscuring the deeper workings of History, which presents itself to the naked eye as a vibrant and cacophonous tapestry of events, herded by discrete spatiotemporal logics and compressed by the passage of time into narratives we would later call ‘history’, Alice succeeded in preventing History from actualising its consequences. The tragedy which seemed all but inevitable remained unconsummated.   This example illustrates the intricate and frequently misunderstood relationship between small-h history—the catalogue of discrete events marked by clear beginnings and ends—and capital-H History, the unseen forces driving the perpetual cycles of human existence. Small-h history gives us digestible moments: World War I, World War II, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, all condensed by the passage of time into neatly packaged narratives of what has come to pass. These ‘parcels of the past’—contained, manageable, and imminently manipulable—serve their current masters by framing a blissful ‘before’ and a hopeful ‘after,’ helping us cope with the calamity at hand. The past remains forever unpredictable, enslaved by a present that endlessly mutilates it to justify its own lies, all while chaining itself to an unknowable future—a phantom it weaponizes to sanctify its every misdeed and delusion of progress.   Yet today, as is ever the case with small-h history, these seemingly fragmented and loosely connected ‘past’ events, propelled by some unseen structuring logic, are hurtling toward a collision with capital-H History, which recognizes no isolated wars or crises—only the ongoing, unbroken clash of opposing forces, worldviews, and values. When the small and large arcs of history converge, the wars we fight, the recessions we suffer, and the health crises we endure cease to appear as singular disruptions and instead reveal themselves as manifestations of a deeper, cyclical struggle—one that re-emerges to reshape the course of human destiny.   The growing awareness of impending disaster not only incapacitates but augments the thinking concerning such a possible cataclysm as a form of release from the accrued debris of secular modernity. It stimulates obliviousness of the present. Once again, every one  of the current ‘theories of the state, of the nation, of the economy, trade and justice’ betrays an air of a deeply cynical and, at times, hysterical ‘defence and exculpation of the present before its own bad conscience’.[17] The more obvious it becomes that the ‘constitutive power of the so-called nation state’ only ‘serves to augment the universal insecurity and atmosphere of menace’, the harder the political establishment tries to convince its electorates that, despite stumbling haphazardly from one crisis to the next and oscillating ever more precariously between the two extremes of the ‘deepest of modern inclinations—to collapse or to explode’, they have actually, for almost a century, been diligently ‘preparing for the absolutely fundamental convulsions’ which— today  they tell us—were always inevitable and just a matter of time.[18]   It is not surprising that times such as ours, once described by Nietzsche as times of ‘great danger’ and ‘great exhaustion’, should be characterised by the pervasive corruption of the ruling classes. Spreading from the top down, the ‘corruption’ and ‘paralysis’ of collective reason eventually reaches a critical threshold where it transforms into the collective consciousness of denial, manifesting itself in a steadfast refusal to recognise the ‘mendaciously fabricated world’ for what it is.[19] An equally troubling reckoning is that such corruption and ethical bankruptcy become more likely when the wider society’s communitarian instincts have been systematically weakened, lowering its psychological immunity and making individuals simultaneously more susceptible to a relapse of apathy and the sway of inflammatory and apocalyptic discourses, both ignited by the onset of the crisis.[20]   The closed loop forms where depleted psychic resources and the paralysis of reason reinforce each other, aggravating the trauma of the modern spirit, which Nietzsche conceptualises in terms of the ‘rape of the conscience’.[21] These ‘times of exhaustion’ expose the insanity of continuing to live ‘normally’ in a world which has gone completely mad. Insanity, in this case, is not simply turning a blind eye to the world’s madness, pretending it is not there, that it doesn’t concern and will spare you, or, as Heidegger put it, when ‘people pretend to know what is “happening” but do not surmise what is occurring with themselves’.[22] Insanity runs deeper, as a creeping realisation that by carrying on as though normally—in the vain hope that somehow, if one just tried a little harder and for a little longer, insanity, like a bad dream, would dissipate, or one would peacefully expire before the music stops—one is inevitably contributing to the growing madness and is unable to do otherwise.   As Stiegler insisted, we would only be deluding ourselves if we believed that we could ‘leap across two centuries’ simply ‘by failing to see that an historic struggle is underway and in full swing’.[23] The music will not stop. The world is on the move and the gathering storm is already breaking out in thunderous eruptions. Tremors of once distant earthquakes draw ever nearer. The rousing battle cries resound ever more passionately. Many a volcano hitherto concealed by the thin veneer of modern Western civilisation is no longer dormant. The ‘one size fits all’ corset of the ‘rules-based’ world order is crumbling under the weight of irreconcilable schisms. The relentless assault of mass media-driven hysteria crashes with increasing intensity into the exhausted depths of the public psyche, precariously balanced on the razor-sharp edges of a post-welfare state capitalist dystopia, once shielded by the fleeting semblance of civility. Neo- con -liberalism,[24] the deranged brainchild of laissez-faire , is convulsing under the worktable of history as it awaits an overhaul and re-distribution.   Today’s world— America’s Frankenstein —grows impatient. Not yet near its end, at least according to Heidegger, Americanism—‘the pinnacle of nihilism’—is showing unmistakable signs of getting ‘fed up with its own vacuousness’.[25]   Americanism is the organization of the unconditional meaninglessness of ‘existence’, joined to the prospect of an enhanced ‘standard of living’. Historiologically, the proliferation and entrenchment of machination are visible in various forms: one form is the commercial calculation (covered with a veneer of morality) of the Anglo-American world . The doom hastened by this form does not consist merely in what the form produces but still more in what it cannot perform: it is alienated from every essential spiritual decision and has geared everything toward ‘psychology’ and Logistical reckoning […] without any creative impulse .[26]   As the sun sets over Pax Americana , its creators become increasingly overwhelmed by the inexorable rise of forces they once fostered and contained. The bonds that once firmly held the ‘hostile forces’ in check are breaking one after another, and as the ‘pressure is relaxed’ they do not take long to ‘rebel against one another’.[27] Political histrionics and ideological hysterics have long since merged, precipitating the mutation of collective neurosis into mass psychosis, the logical consequence of a world of ‘massive thoughtlessness’ where everyone ‘interprets’ and ‘no one thinks’.[28] There is something to be said for not making things in one’s own image when one is not God.   The psychic trauma sustained in the 2008 financial crisis, which remains unaddressed and unresolved, has deeply affected Western collective consciousness. Persistent rumours and insinuations of an impending war between ‘good and evil’ have continually activated the deep-seated Judeo-Christian narratives embedded in the Western psyche, progressively steering it towards a more militarized stance. This shift reflects not only in policy and rhetoric but also in public sentiment and media portrayal, marking a subtle yet significant transformation in societal attitudes. [29]   The Hollywood style of propaganda-by-entertainment has mastered the dark art of enchantment over many decades, weaving increasingly apocalyptic visions with enviable consistency. This cinematic tapestry portrays an unchanging narrative: the external villain, the brewing conflict, the prophesied day of reckoning, the epic struggle, and the inevitable triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’—elements etched permanently into the script, gaining more precise contours through time. [30]  The ‘Symbolic’, systematically ostracized and demonized as the foe of virtue, is nearly destined to materialize in the ‘Real’ of war. The puppeteers of these conflicts know too well the potency of spinning a self-fulfilling prophecy—a guaranteed ‘win-win’. This is the sinister psychology now in motion, and the window to halt its manifestation is closing swiftly. The query we revisited with Nietzsche lingers still: is this merely a patchwork of fiction, unmoored from reality, or are the narrators deliberately foretelling our fates, weaving us into the fabric of the Inevitable and making us its flesh and blood?   In vain may one recall Plato’s admonition that despotism and democracy are siblings joined by destiny at the hip.[31] Long possessed of ‘anarchical temper’, the world’s despots, dictators, and other ‘servants of the people’—while posing as ‘friends of democracy’ and calling themselves ‘protectors’—are spiteful jesters (and each other’s carbon copies) competing in the dark arts of tyranny.[32] The methods of delivering the latter and its side effects may differ these days, but its substance remains unaltered. As in the Middle Ages, clown, puppet, and freak shows are the daily staple of entertaining the masses: the meagre price of keeping them at bay, for now.   Heidegger’s prescient warning concerned ‘mechanistic and biological ways of thinking’ as always expressing ‘merely consequences of the hidden interpretation of beings in terms of machination’, where the latter ( Machenschaft ) is taken to mean the ‘domination of making and what is made’.[33] Recently schooled in the harsh forms of compliance, like a child who has just been scolded—half ashamed, half afraid but still yearning to trust, be good, and belong—the credulous masses, fed on undiluted ideology, do not simply lack awareness of the deeds carried out in their name but celebrate the very ignorance that would prove the undoing of the dreamworld they inhabit. As Losurdo surmised on Nietzsche’s behalf, the oblivious ‘egoism of the masses or their representatives’ would not stop short of helping to nurture ‘a horror of war’.[34] The form of social life ‘maintained without entering consciousness’—the complete ‘psychological and moral “loss of self”’ stemming from ‘the fact that the masses are deprived of a ground’ and that this very ‘groundlessness’ is celebrated as the ‘terra firma’ of their ‘sovereignty’—is today’s stark reality.[35] In its bosom, under the shimmering light of Agamben’s ‘vanishing points’, regularly administered to humankind as booster vaccines to keep it unquestioningly partaking in ‘progress’, unsavoury things proliferate unchecked.[36]   The unrestrained pursuit of values deemed universal—liberty, equality, democracy, and dignity—has willed into existence their aberrations, in the shape of deep state, ubiquitous big-data driven surveillance and the rising cross-border tide of marketized ‘wokeness’, which crushes the remnants of healthy sense in its path. The collective and individual reservoirs of internalised cruelty and repressed violence (towards the self)—today’s multiplying echo chambers—are filled to the brim and starting to spill over into society with extraordinary effects. The institutional dams will not withstand the rising pressure much longer: the inhumanity of the current human society is forming into the whirlwind of social chaos and uncivil unrest— the ‘two strifes’ which Hesiod considered unhealthy.   Desperate foraging for identity—a kind of ‘its own essential volition into starvation’—revealed no traces of belonging, no existential anchors for the homeless modern soul, able no longer to either ‘win or lose a war’.[37] Revelling in the ephemeral extremes of diversity, inclusivity, and equality, society ends up gripped in the jaws of indignant uniformity. Our progressive aspirations might lead us to see modern social movements—from BLM to MeToo and the transgender revolution—as forces for emancipation, democratization, social equity, and authenticity. However, we must consider the possibility that these movements may merely represent reactionary outgrowths on the weakened carapace of a sickly patriarchy. This could represent its most ‘insidious entrenchment’ yet—an ‘inversion of patriarchal metaphysics’.[38] This suggests a frenzied scramble to plant as many false flags as possible within our fragile collective consciousness. Such actions aim to dominate the Anthropocene, potentially severing the link between humanity and nature irreparably. Indeed, ‘no one is more solidly fixated on the figure of the father, the male, or on principles, than he who claims to have freed himself from it’ .[39]   The consummation of modernity: in the age of unconditional machination, the gigantism of criminality becomes public under the title of ‘truth’.[40]   At the core of concepts such as ‘build back better’, ‘great reset’, ‘fourth industrial revolution’, ‘stakeholder economy’, and ESG—all surreptitiously legitimized by COVID-19 and now propelled by AI—lies a singular and unassailable objective: to enact the definitive separation of humanity from nature .[41] Underwriting these new ‘battle cries’ of crippled post-modernity is the same old profit logic. As Nietzsche aptly observed, ‘the means employed by the lust for power’ may change overtime, but ‘the same volcano continues to glow underneath’.[42] Dressed up in new seductive slogans, this immoderate monster is gradually prizing humankind out of nature, as it seeks to dismantle the ultimate boundary of human freedom. Removing it would allow to herd a disempowered and hollowed out humanity into the corrals of virtual reality, ushering in the Anthropocene . Clumsily slapped together from the Greek terms for ‘human’ (‘anthropo’) and ‘new’ (‘cene’), the concept is not only controversial but also highly misleading as it provides no disclosure on the meaning of ‘new humans’, once they have been severed from nature and its gifts.   Estrangement from Nature confines us within an increasingly virtual bubble of hollow illusions, where agency is systematically dissolved, the emergence of ‘great’ characters becomes nigh impossible, and history—no longer flowing cyclically or organically—accelerates into a fevered compression of time. This rupture gives rise to ever more violent collisions: unresolved tensions of the past, distant as well as recent, clash with the unbridled ambitions of the future, shattering the present and leaving it trapped in relentless repetition. Re-occurrence of the same at different times is no longer an anomaly but the integral feature of lived reality. In this fractured landscape, there is no space for authentic creation, transcendence, or the kind of greatness that once shaped the course of human destiny. The simple yet overlooked point is that a deepening disconnect between humanity and nature allows for an unprecedented consolidation of control over the human environment , behaviour, and experience in disturbingly small number of clammy and covetous hands trembling at the scent of money and power.   An ever increasing swathe of human existence, ‘reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator’—digitally captured and readily available—presents unlimited opportunities for rewiring society and disciplining the outliers with measures as crude or nuanced as the Anthropocene’s architects’ imagination would allow it.[43] The omniscience of today’s digital profiling dwarfs the confessional of the 19th and statistical tyranny of the 20th century. Every sin, secret, misdeed, mis-speak (and soon ‘mis-think’) is meticulously recorded, processed, and carefully deposited.[44] Turned into series of algorithmic data points, we sway like blades of grass in the ominous winds of data politics, while the deep state builds expedient correlations to support increasingly sinister political, economic, and social agendas. In this fertile soil, the insanity of techno-libertarians like Paul Romer actively spawns conceptions of the neo-colonial incubators of economic growth known to some as ‘charter cities’. These tie the impoverished and underdeveloped pockets of the world into a specific  form of governance, where economy and property rights not only reign supreme but bulldoze the cherished Western concept of the autonomous individual, levelling democratic aspirations down to the ground.   Irrespective of whether she ever truly grasped the ramifications of her favourite phraseology, Thatcher’s infamous ‘TINA’ (‘there is no alternative’) represents one of the clearest articulations of the completeness and unassailability of the monstrous enterprise of lies  which sits at the very core of today’s governing worldview. Akin to Hegel’s ‘bad infinity’, doomed to endlessly seek its own definition and endorsement outside itself, there appears to be no getting to the end of it.[45] The constant striving to overcome or abolish the predicament of ‘bad infinity’ only hatches more perverse turns of it. The impenetrable and (within the Western worldview) incontestable ideological net, cast over the wider world during the past four centuries, presents a significant challenge in the depth of its influence on the modern psyche, which is profound and often debilitating, making it even more difficult to find the ‘starting point of a causal chain’ needed to unravel it:   [W]e are on dangerous ground; in getting too close to it we observe suddenly how our consistency, our positivity, is dissolving itself […] knowledge is marked by a lethal dimension: the subject must pay the approach to it with his own being . In other words, to abolish the misrecognition means at the same time to abolish, to dissolve, the ‘substance’ which was supposed to hide itself behind the form-illusion of misrecognition.[46]   Yet precisely this realisation is necessary to appreciate that there is nothing accidental about billionaires’ fortunes surging throughout the pandemic and the multiplying military conflicts. Likewise, there is nothing accidental about the spectacular rise of Big Tech as the crowning jewel of the US economy’s resilience in the wake of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Something else—at a deeper level, invisible to the eye—always happens in parallel. Under the palatable and outwardly progressive corporate personas, disembodied monsters feed on blood, destruction, misery, and strife. Such are the structural underpinnings of today’s world, in the twilight of which these faceless ‘predators’, agitated by ‘the unpleasantness of hunger’, which, fused with ‘other impulses’, has turned into the ‘rage at the victim’, are once again wide awake and on the prowl for prey.[47]   Today’s geopolitical gambles are not concocted using the anachronistic calculus of land, markets, trading routes, people, resources ( save for energy  and the 17 chemical elements , known as ‘rare earths’, vital to the Big Tech’s domination of the world), or even the latest technological know-how. The real battles of today are waged for tomorrow’s control over the Anthropocene ; the puzzling ‘political homogeneity of the future opponents’ of the existing social order only highlights ‘the hardness of the impending struggle’.[48] The vast, pervasive, borderless (supra-global), and permanently energy-thirsty neo-feudal structures —Apple, Microsoft, Google (‘Alphabet’), Amazon, Netflix, Tesla / Starlink / SpaceX, Facebook (‘Meta Platforms’), Oracle, Adobe, NVIDIA, and AMD—irretrievably embedded in the social fabric and psyche of modern digital society—are busy scoping out Anthropocene’s terrain, from the melting ice-caps of the Arctic to interplanetary dimensions.[49] The energy demands of today’s ‘big tech’ giants are truly boundless, with no limit they won’t exceed, no boundary they won’t cross, and no ‘outdated’, in their view, socio-political structure they won’t seek to dismantle in order to satisfy their insatiable appetite. Drawing on the experience of Germany in the 1930s, Kiesel observed that ideology entwined with the high-tech exhibits a tendency to solidify into an ‘unbending worldview’, which makes history repeating itself all but inevitable.[50]   Fundamentally, neo-feudalism represents an existential condition where one’s life is lived increasingly in the artificial digital environs  created and controlled by a small number of excessively powerful commercial entities, from whom lives as well as livelihoods are effectively rented or loaned to their dependents down the pseudo-corporatist architecture (amongst them the vast web of parasitic commercial suckerfish feeding on ‘cookies’) to the individual human dwellers who are digitally constituted, consumed, and recycled ad infinitum.   Neo-feudalism is a ubiquitous socio-economic environment with a minimal political sphere and a diminished (in size and significance) middle class. The system is predicated on severe inequality in terms of the distribution of power and wealth, which forms a social vacuum : the actual detachment of the tech-elites from the fortunes and concerns of the wider serf-like population. Neo-feudal social relations are maximally reduced to impersonal transactions of rent in the conditions of acutely constrained mobility: individual serfs—fully accounted for (that is, digitised and pervasively surveyed)—rent from the global technological corporate structures only that which these structures present to them as comprising their ‘life’ and to which there is no viable and, increasingly, no legal  ‘off-grid’ alternative.   The critical difference between the feudalism of old and the hatching neo-feudalism of today is that the former, as an existential predicament, was not chosen. Rather, it was a given construct within a rigid social architecture. Neo-feudalism, at least partially, is chosen: we actively exercise our free will to become digital serfs. What this tells us, on a deeper level, is that the vast majority will inadvertently relapse into serfdom. We do not mind being enslaved, provided we are enslaved in the right way. One way or another—reactively, proactively, or perhaps subconsciously—we fall into slavery, albeit that we prefer to be coerced by reason and persuasion than by force and faith. Remember Cypher, the traitorous crewmember of the Nebuchadnezzar, from The Matrix ?   Nietzsche saw clearly the coming of an age which, amid all the ‘raving, especially under scientific disguises, about the conditions of society in which “the exploitative aspect” will be removed’, would only succeed in producing the ‘counter-effect of a despairing boredom of the soul’ and revel in supplying ‘every individual as material for heating the great machines that are an end in themselves’.[51] Today’s colossal digital neo-feudal harvesters are reshaping society from within, driving a deep and deliberate fracture through the dialectic of polarization. On one side, they champion an ever-expanding array of progressive, inclusive, de-colonizing, and ‘un-othering-the-other’ narratives, weaponizing these ‘ideals’ to induce mass conformity and societal complacency. Meanwhile, they counterbalance this by inflaming reactionary forces, gaslighting ‘woke hysteria’ with dangerously far-right, and at times openly neo-fascist, agitation. This calculated manipulation, pitting extremes against each other, sows division while consolidating their own unchecked influence.   In both cases time horizons are shortened, the scope of concerns is narrowed, and discreet agendas are maximally hyped up. Paraphrasing Chomsky, the way to keep people oblivious and obedient is to maximise the amplitude of discussions within the strictly limited spectrums of acceptable opinions.[52] All the while, behind the glittering façade of today’s increasingly fragmented sensibility lurks the spirit of growing lethargy and exhaustion:   To put to sleep or to intoxicate! To silence the conscience, by one means or the other! To help the modern soul to forget its feeling of guilt, not to help it to return to innocence![53]   Simultaneously, by relentlessly controlling communication flows, ruthlessly commoditizing the remnants of human autonomy, and creating inescapable techno-monetary harnesses of increasingly repressive (yet perfectly rational) social control from without, these digital levellers inexorably drive humanity towards the only form of equality thus achievable: the equality of comatose and obsequious digits.   Remember Hegel’s idealistic lament over the statues of Ancient Greece: ‘the statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone’.[54] The same sentiment applies here: the human being systematically reduced to a digit from which all humanity will have flown—‘reduction of the human psyche itself to an object of technological manipulation’—is the goal.[55] Heidegger was not far off in observing the coming of this juncture, as a ‘resultant of the power of machination, which must reduce beings in all spheres into scheduled [ planhafte ] calculation’:[56]   To say that the quantitative becomes quality , therefore, means that re-presentation, in which what is own-most to the quantitative lets be-ing ‘count’ as mainly what is the most general and as what is the emptiest .[57]   Meanwhile, dissentient opinions are systematically eliminated: big-data driven surveillance is married with hystericized emancipatory vernaculars. Squadrons of ‘co-opted activists’ stand ready to carry out executions-by-media in broad daylight.[58] We live in the age when propositions asserting that ‘nothing happens in a vacuum’ and that ‘outbursts of physical violence are, more often than not, outcomes of systemic violence’ have become sackable offences.[59] One may resolutely dismiss the protection of ‘scholastic sanctuary’ à la Pullman’s Dark Materials  as a mere flight of fancy: censorship of academic opinion is near total and reflects the impassioned value absolutism demanded by the unhinged political juggernaut.[60] Even ‘today’s “poets,” ie, pen pushers, have meetings as do the shareholders and directors of a corporation’, while the ‘up-and-coming philosophers are indoctrinated in suitable camps’.[61] Once again, no distinction between philosophy and politics is tolerated.   Forget about Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger, Schmitt, and Arendt: how much longer will Orff’s Carmina Burana  be allowed to be performed on stage?  Rota Fortunae  must certainly stop (at least to catch its breath) at some point soon: tomorrow’s Fahrenheit 451  firefighters will make sure of that. Meanwhile, words— heavy words —like ‘genocide’, ‘fascism / Nazism’, and ‘holocaust’ have been abraded of their cognitive weight, deprived of their contextual grounding. Their historical meaning has been hollowed out: they have become commonplace, cheap trinkets of political expediency and ideological manipulation.[62] And that is just the current  state of value polarisation: the lines are drawn, and all bets are off, as are the gloves. The ideological echo chambers are all but hermetically sealed.   The growing problems humans face in the hyper-technological digital age of big data demonstrate decisively that there is no one ‘human condition’, no one ‘humankind’ or ‘human community’ which could be mobilised to tackle any of these challenges.[63] Schopenhauer’s desolate boatman is as ever adrift in the ‘stormy sea’ of existence—‘boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves’—clutching to the crumbling edges of his ‘frail craft and [still] trusting in the principium individuationis ’.[64] Atomisation and polarisation grow in sync, seemingly reinforcing one another. To think otherwise, in some desperate attempt to grab hold of the ‘right side of history’, exhibits the signs of clinging on to the few remaining ropes hanging off the sides of Noah’s (or should we say Elon’s?) rapidly departing Ark. The troubles and conflicts will continue to proliferate and, as humanity grows ever more fractured and helpless to face them, its devout well-wishers, purporting to see beyond the storm, will continue to rummage enthusiastically around for the last remaining rabbits still taking shelter in the long since unfashionable top hats, with an air of unblemished entitlement and unwavering delusion in their intrinsic self-worth, occasionally mistaken for the innocent, childlike displays of quintessentially English eccentricity.   Those who today speak loudest of reform, advocate tough measures, call for the restoration of truth and respect in public discourse, and defend the need for direct collective action to solve this urgent problem and stop that bloody conflict, like those who champion investing resolutely in the brighter, greener future—the cynical preachers of equality—are tarantulas with revenge in their hearts, wishing ‘that the world become full of the thunderstorms of [their] revenge that we would regard as justice’. As Nietzsche put it, ‘they speak in favour of life, these poisonous spiders, even though they are sitting in their holes and have turned against life, because they want to do harm’.[65]   Make no mistake: the architects of time in their many guises—busy readying the great Halls of the Present to receive the Gift of the Future which is already browning in the ovens of the crumbling social order—are the most rotten ones and the greatest danger. Their corruption is irreversible, as is their task: to introduce the future as the fait accompli . They will unleash the fireworks of chaos to achieve this objective. As Dante remarked, ‘they think not there how much blood it costs’.[66] Their stakes—to become ‘master not over something in life but over life itself’, even if it means destroying it in the process—keep rising; inflation is the only ‘iron law’ they abide by, and they are resolutely prepared to perish in its flames. Only exposure and capture they fear most.[67] This is so, according to Nietzsche, because ‘all power structures of society’ created by them ‘are based on lies’, and ‘in order to maintain a lie’ one ‘has to invent twenty more’.[68] Or, as Lewis Carroll aptly put it, ‘it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place and, if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast’.[69] In the final reckoning, these actors would prefer to engineer the end of the world than risk being caught red-handed.   It should hardly come as a surprise that Europe’s geopolitical predicament, in a world gripped by the all-absorbing ‘encounter between global technology and modern humanity’, has not fundamentally altered and only intensified since Heidegger (stalking Nietzsche) last pondered it in 1953, and since Derrida re-visited Heidegger’s diagnosis in 1989.[70] As Heidegger wrote:   This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man. The situation of Europe is all the more dire because the disempowering of the spirit comes from Europe itself and—though prepared by earlier factors—is determined at last by its own spiritual situation in the first half of the nineteenth century.[71]   When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously ‘experience’ an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein  of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph, then, yes then, there still looms like a spectre over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?[72]   That which is presently obvious to the few will soon become abundantly clear to all. Not, however, as a realisation, but as an inescapable vice of reality. The world is about to be torn asunder: the social pyramid will crumble and split in two. The microscopic top—delirious from having ‘pulled it off’ and wielding the overwhelming power of artificial intelligence—will reign supreme. The vast majority will be commanded and abjectly grateful for their mercy; even the reproduction of human biomass will no longer be contingent on them. Every notion of freedom, equality, and dignity will disappear like a puff of morning mist. Subservience—ennobled with some new, proud, aspirational, and universal name—will run the show. As Schürmann surmised in Broken Hegemonies  (2003), ‘the agony is what those who inhabit the monstrous site  have to keep alive by resolutely placing themselves under the legislative-transgressive diremption’.[73]   Conceptual wreck diving   The symptomatology outlined above exhibits a certain directionality and a degree of correlation. Some form of abuse of the conscience  seems present at every level of society, from the individual (‘ατομική’) to the structures of economic and political power crushing them. A collective consciousness primed for conflict relies on the individual conscience being silenced ‘by one means or another’.[74] The rising levels of internal psychic distress, ‘quelled’ on the inside by the escalating establishmentarian untruths, which only cover up the governments’ inability ‘to do anything towards alleviating the psychic sufferings of the private person’, and the single-minded projection of an external enemy as the cause of all internal problems become positively correlated.[75] This is not a new phenomenon. Although explained painstakingly by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality  (1887), its causal mechanisms still evade our understanding, leaving us incapable of disabling, let alone dismantling, the ‘infernal machine’ ( Höllenmaschine ).[76]   A brief Koselleckean look at the conceptual shifts of the historico-cultural phenomenon of ‘Salem’ may help guide us a little deeper into the issue. Deriving primarily from the Hebrew ‘Shalem’, meaning ‘complete’ or ‘peaceful’, which is echoed in the Arabic ‘Salaam’, ‘Salem’ denotes—etymologically speaking—a process of overcoming internal discord and achieving a state of peace. But, in the realm of puritan imagineering, Salem projects the opposite: the unattainability of such a wholesome and self-sufficient condition. It is as though, once disturbed in some way, perfection can never be restored. And precisely this realisation places an overwhelming emphasis on ‘restitution’, which becomes punishment handed out to the different (or othered) for blighting the hopes of completeness and tainting the dreams of paradise (when really it is rage against oneself, realisation of one’s own ontological incompleteness). Something is already amiss here. Was that which is presumed to have been disturbed, some lost ‘perfection’, really present in the first instance? Sometimes, it is the loss of what we never had in the first place that hurts the most. Could it be that this ‘harmony’ was only the embedding of an ‘idea’—an equation the mind is unable to solve using the existential calculus it can muster—which clogged up the psychic algorithm?   It is in this latter capacity that the collective imagination of the West engages with the concept of Salem. Mr Creakle, the ‘heavy handed’ proprietor of Salem House  in David Copperfield , expressed the meaning of Salem best:   Now, boys, this is a new half. Take care what you’re about, in this new half. Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise you, for I come fresh up to the punishment. I won’t flinch. It will be of no use your rubbing yourselves; you won’t rub the marks out that I shall give you.[77]   The ‘special marks of distinction’ Creakle wholeheartedly handed out to the boys in his care on a daily basis made ‘half the establishment writhe and cry before the day’s work began’, and there was no telling whether any of the establishment did not join in the tears ‘before the day’s work was over’:   I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight in cutting at the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite. I am confident that he couldn’t resist a chubby boy, especially; that there was a fascination in such a subject, which made him restless in his mind, until he had scored and marked him for the day.[78]   This punitive puritan Geist time-travels from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93, through Dickens’s ‘Salem House’ (where David Copperfield is sent after biting his stepfather), over to Miller’s The Crucible  (1953), which allegorises the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1950s, across to Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot  (1975), echoed in Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ (2002) and, more recently, in Fantastic Beasts  (2016), where Mary Lou Barebone of New York’s Second Salem Church , not unlike Mr. Creakle of Salem House , lovingly (mostly through repeated impassioned beatings from the heart’s good intentions) nurtured the destructive ‘Obscurial’ superpowers of Credence Barebone. Mary Lou Barebone, Credence’s foster mother and the leader of the New Salem Philanthropic Society , represents the consummation of Mr Creakle. Possessed of intense hatred—matured through the generations of Scourers—she is unhinged, ruthless, frenzied and unequivocal in her drive to eradicate witchcraft:   Hear my words and heed my warning and laugh if you dare: witches live among us! We have to fight—join us, the Second Salemers, in our fight!   Through these examples—both real and fictional—runs the inextinguishable dark irony of inevitability that once drew the devout puritan community, fleeing religious persecution, to establish a society based on extreme intolerance. Having suffered for their faith and painfully aware of the old world’s pitfalls, their providential mission was to begin history anew. Adamant in their belief that Satan—invisible yet undeniably present—would test their faith, they took his appearance in Salem as proof that the New Englanders were somehow the chosen people. The one thing with which they struggled was the idea that the demonic mastermind was never on the outside. Heidegger aptly captured this socio-psychological predicament:   In the metaphysically machinational domain, all concepts, principles, and axioms are simply ‘expedients’ which according to need can turn into their opposites.[79]   All along, the deeply theological underbelly of ‘Salem’ has contained and concealed the dark otherness of the very ‘peace’ it sought to signify. Multiple passages in the   Testaments, Old and New, combine into a chilling portrayal of justice as a form of disinterested, objectifying indignation, dispensed with an implacable—almost reptilian—unequivocality. The sentiment, conveying the inevitable triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’, dripping with gratuitous imagery, is communicated through a series of grotesque metaphors which conjure up visions of crushing enemies underfoot, making ‘footstools’ out of them, consigning them to a ‘burning lake of sulphur’ for ‘eternal torment’ in ‘second death’, and burning sinners and evildoers in ‘furnaces’ until ‘not a root or branch’ is left of them, to ensure once and for all that all sinners are obliterated and absolutely ‘no future’ is left for the wicked’.[80] Over the centuries, Salem has become a conduit for this particular kind of energy and signifier of a distinctive disposition—a horcrux of sorts, containing a fragment of primordial unhappiness.   Lamenting its inability to delve deep within and find the switch to that hidden, dark part of its being to extinguish the anguish at its source, Salem sustains itself by continually pitting the proverbial Dr Jekyll against Mr Hyde, and draws power from filling the space between them with the thick smoke of fear and ressentiment , from which the villains and the fiery flames of righteous rage can be easily conjured. As anguish grows and rage over the inability to attain purity mounts, the choice on how to survive becomes more pressing.   Unable to reconcile itself to being incompletely and imperfectly constituted, owing precisely to being endowed with the faculties to imagine harmony and perfection, the theological kernel of Salem is faced with the existential—Kierkegaardian — moment: either tear itself to pieces, or  find someone else to blame, someone who robbed Salem of its original innocence and completeness (neither of which ever existed). This ‘choice’ becomes the inception point of every ‘monstrous site’, including Salem. Adorno observed that:   The system in which the sovereign mind imagined itself transfigured, has its primal history in the pre-mental, the animal life of the species. […] In the advance to humanity this is rationalized by projection. The ‘rational animal’ with an appetite for his opponent  […] must find a reason [so that it ‘may devour it without misgivings’] […] The animal to be devoured must be evil […] This justifies the principle of the thought as much as it increases the appetite. The system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism.[81]   Construction of the threatening other is invariably a reflection of the inner deficit of the entity which projects it in the image of a symbolic enemy external to the system. In the final reckoning, however, it is only a projection of a certain hidden part of its own psyche—its internal antagonistic nature. The more fervent such construction becomes, the greater the internal psychic plight. Following the logic of this inverse displacement, when the antagonistic otherness is maximised it also tends to become maximally antagonised, effacing the difference between the demonised (exteriorised evil) and the demonising (internalised violence). In this liminal space where ‘no one is safe’, the demonic comes to reign undivided. Arthur Miller described it as the ‘projection of one’s vileness onto others in order to wipe it out with their blood’.[82] As though crystallising Nietzsche’s curse of having become the monsters it once set out to fight, Salem’s ‘cleansing idea’ ends up preying on itself.[83]   Something else happens within the confines of the vicious circle thus constituted. Salem’s targets—branded as incarnations of evil—are precluded from understanding, let alone realising their identity, which militarises their anguish. And so is Salem: continually denying its own evil by fighting it as images projected onto others, it fails to engage with a critical part of its own genealogical identity in order to learn ways of sublimating it, rather than repressing it to the point where containment becomes impossible, and sparks start to fly.[84] Salem and any one of its countless Others are not separate entities. There is no outside  to any of them, no fixed boundary  by which they are immanently separated; they continually flow into each other. Their seeming mutual exclusivity forms the unbreakable bond by which they remain connected. Nietzsche explained this in the following terms:   One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole ; there nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole .[85]   What, then, are some examples of the recurring ‘real’ of ‘Salem’ as symptom and symbol of the world we live in? In some respects, ‘Salem’ is not so different from what Žižek described in relation to the concentration camps:   What are they if not so many attempts to elude the fact that we are dealing here with the ‘real’ of our civilization which returns as the same traumatic kernel in all social systems? […] We should not forget that concentration camps were an invention of ‘liberal’ England, dating from the Boer War; that they were also used in the US to isolate the Japanese population, and so on.[86]   The indefinite ‘war on terror’, initiated by Bush Junior, is another oft-cited instance. Initiated with a fervent desire to conclude his father’s (and The Father’s) unfinished business, it reflected a personal quest to ‘prove himself to his father’ (and The Father) by defeating the externally constituted evil and establishing his own sense of righteousness, akin to a religious crusade.[87] The evil, as we have subsequently (with considerable delay) come to learn, was not the enemy deemed worthy of obliterating. The re-constitution of ‘good’ remained incomplete because the wrong deficit was targeted, allowing that which needed re-constituting to metamorphose into something else—‘another’ inconspicuous situation. And so the search for the real enemy goes on, all the while only augmenting the darkness and strife inside.   Unabated, Salem’s punitive zest endures in all of today’s conflicts—both external and internal. A symbol of forces obsessed with immortality and the eternal , it strives to reassert or safeguard something ‘sacred’, battered and besieged by the unpredictable fluctuations and occasional upheavals of history’s unfolding events. The prospect of making whole that which never was is resolutely lacking, adding, with each iteration, to the daunting task of salvaging perfection.  Every situation presented as ‘the battle of civilization against barbarism’, where only ‘total victory’ would suffice, invariably reveals traces of the existential predicament where both the victor and the defeated, the offender and the avenger ‘still stand and fall on the level of metaphysics and remain excluded from what is other’.[88]   Waging war against an externally perceived and constituted evil, as a means of removing some internal blockage in the system, does not only work by distorting causal relationships. The guise of an external threat allows one to imperceptibly shift the internal problem into a higher gear or to warehouse it in the different corner of the system. When the searching gaze refocuses on it, it will be invariably surprised to discover a new face, or a different acuteness seemingly disconnected from the original condition, which will have become irretrievable ground, suggesting that moving forward notwithstanding is the only possibility. In this game, from the very beginning, in the end, there was nothing to reclaim: the ‘thief’s treasured money-chest was ever empty’.[89] Žižek points to the deeper issue at stake:   Here we encounter a kind of ‘reflexivity’ which cannot be reduced to philosophical reflection: the very feature which seems to exclude the subject from the Other is already a ‘reflexive determination’ of the Other; precisely as excluded from the Other, we are already part of its game .[90]   That ‘Other’—who you fear, resent or hate—is unavoidably inside you, as one of your many yous. Perhaps as some unresolved echo of the past, or a yet unexplored part of your physiology. But there is more to it. In the act of othering, you don’t just confront an external entity. You are that other who is doing the othering. Meta-narratives like religion fuel this internal strife by resonating with and sometimes exploiting the darker, weaker, and injured aspects of these many selves. They aggregate and command impaired ‘souls’ by offering them to exteriorise if not their suffering than at least the responsibility and blame for it.   To overcome Salem’s predacity and break its vicious circle, we must embrace its demon as our own, instead of making it ‘the other’ and endowing it with a separate reality. This prevents it from becoming fortified and returning to haunt and hunt us, particularly when we are further impaired by the guilt associated with having spilt the blood of those we falsely believed were carriers of Salem’s spectral presence.   Time to end it?   As though paraphrasing Nietzsche with an eye on today’s secular upheaval, Josep Borrell recently lamented that ‘we live in a world where there is more and more confrontation and less co-operation’.[91] If Nietzsche’s dissection of his day should bear any resemblance to our present reality, it is because Nietzsche was correct in his audacious claim to be telling us the ‘history of the next two centuries’ which could ‘no longer come otherwise’.[92] Can we yet thwart Nietzsche’s forecast for the tragic unfolding of modernity as the ‘great drama’ played out ‘in a hundred acts’ across ‘two centuries’?[93] Intoxicated by history, blind to a darkening future, and increasingly ensnared by the ghostly rhythms of History, echoing the beat of inevitable fate—with 90 seconds left on the Doomsday Clock—can we still wake up from the dream, which dreams within a dream, in the nick of time? Can we snatch history from the undiscriminating jaws of History before it once again spits out our present as the indigestible ‘surplus-object, the leftover of the Real eluding symbolization’?[94]   The story of the Titanic offers a compelling parallel. In 1898, a little-known, struggling American author named Morgan Robertson produced a novella about a ‘fabulous Atlantic liner, far larger than any that had ever been built’. Unwittingly articulating the psychic hauntings of his time—‘the Zeitgeist  that a certain age was coming to an end’—the author ‘loaded his ship with rich and complacent people and then wrecked it one cold April night on an iceberg’. This somehow showed the ‘futility of everything’, and in fact, the book was called Futility or the Wreck of the Titan . [95] Most troubling was the inexplicable accuracy and detail with which the author predicted the coming tragedy.   Many subsequent inquiries into the wreck of the Titanic  revealed dozens of meaningful warning signs ahead of the sinking, far more than would have been necessary to prevent the accident from occurring.[96] Despite, or perhaps because of, this ‘psychic foreshadowing’, the real Titanic sunk spectacularly, albeit horrifyingly, on 10 April 1912. The impression is created that the Titanic , for reasons we cannot know, was earmarked by a far greater calamity, already unfolding, as its harbinger, and no amount of pre-cognition would be sufficient to stop it. It was already selected by History as its sacrificial lamb. The Great War, waiting in the wings, produced an obvious symptom, a leading indicator, which would retroactively become its chilling symbol as well. The world at large did not identify with the Titanic as a symptom of its own condition and continued to celebrate it as the highest achievement the tragic sinking notwithstanding. Consequently, only the unfolding of actual catastrophic events on a grander canvas was lagging: the machinations of history lagged behind the inertia of History.   What is the Titanic  of our era, the moment when history once again accelerated beyond the designated cruising pace, to catch a glimpse of History before its descent into the abyss? Could it have been misinterpreted as the collapse of the Soviet Union, inadvertently revealing the iceberg we failed to notice as we rejoiced in slaying the authoritarian monster, consigning it to a fleeting micro-narrative filled to the brim with negative connotations and soon to be written out from history textbooks, except as a scarecrow from the past? Are we presently aboard the Titanic , having barely avoided the tip of the iceberg and convinced ourselves that the vessel escaped the collision entirely (perhaps even strengthened and reinvigorated by the scare it experienced in the process), blindly forging ahead towards the presumed felicitous singularity where history, having finally converged with History, would sign off on a happy note? If so, if the Soviet Union was not the proverbial Titanic  we imagined but merely the tip of the emerging iceberg, and we are not the observers of the sinking ship from afar, but passengers aboard the Titanic  which has hit the iceberg and is starting to sink, then what is underneath the surface? What awaits us just beyond the darkening horizon?   There can be little doubt that today we inhabit a ‘monstrous site’—filled with the precipitancy of crisis, extreme ‘diremption’ and ‘terrible warnings’ of every kind—where we ‘dwell dangerously and in poverty’.[97] All the sophistication of academic discourse on conceptualising history and contextualising historical knowledge notwithstanding, we are yet to grasp the relationship between History and history. We remain unable to claim ‘missed’ lessons from the former, to preclude the latter appearing as some inexplicable repetition of itself, becoming increasingly more grotesque with each turn. It may well be, as Žižek claims (building on Marx), that ‘the Symbolic returns in the Real—in the form of hallucinatory phenomena’.[98]   Small-‘h’ history is the semantic debris left at the base of the strainer from which the turbulent waters of History have drained away. Neither ‘history’ nor ‘History’ can definitively delineate the nature of the ‘strainer’, but their modes of entanglement with it reveal much about situating human experience. Through the intricate interplay of History and history, we can discern the contours of the ‘strainer’—those hidden dimensions that underpin and reveal the complexities of human experience. While History emerges from and withdraws into the depths, history often operates under the cover of darkness. It is not, however, to be confused with ‘the owl of Minerva’, which ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’.[99]   The confusing trail left by History becomes known to us as history, documenting and interpreting past events. The Titanic  was an event, a trigger, a history-in-the-making, a symptom of what was already happening, but not yet a symbol of what could not have come otherwise. It was an instrument in the invisible hand of History and, if we could only snatch it from this guiding hand, History, momentarily startled by such Promethean audacity, would retreat into the shadows of a yet undisclosed future. By not revealing itself in the present, it would allow history to run a different course, explore a different narrative and take a different turn instead of repeating itself.   Yet, the unfolding of history-as-events which suspends, erases, or redraws boundaries that just yesterday seemed unshakeable, only exposes the inherent illusoriness of meta-narratives, including the one sketched out here, making them less revealing, relevant, and impactful. The disconnect which arises, explaining some of the high-pitch dissonance in today’s world, is that specific situations, possessed of Titanic -like precipitancy, such as the tragic conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine, still have meta-narratives, which make an appeal to History under the guise of ‘universal human values’, forcibly projected over them through the medium of ideology, in the hands of those busy stitching up history. It is painfully clear that using such ethically bankrupt and outdated discourses in conjunction with the worn and cynically abused ‘values’ of yonder years as filters for understanding the world’s current happenings cannot suffice. Although it may not be entirely as Sting suggested—that our entire ‘written history is a catalogue of crime’ concocted by ‘the sordid and the powerful’—we can certainly no longer ‘seek solace in the prisons of the distant past’, nor trust in the ‘security in human systems we were told would always last’.[100]   Nietzsche, in particular, exposes the ‘counterfeit quality’ within the legitimizing assertions of meta-narratives which lay claim to exclusive insights, supposedly bestowed by History itself, into ‘why humankind is here’.[101] This claim not only serves as the inception point and genesis  of all subsequent historical trajectories but also assumes authority in defining the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Meta-narratives wield this authority as their primary instrument for steering and occasionally ‘correcting’ history’s course, all the while zealously guarding against any disruption to the delicate fabric of History, allowing it to retreat back into the indecipherable depths from whence it emerged, in order to illuminate the farthest reaches of existence but once .   Whichever way we wish to conceptualise the current juncture, it is clear that history is once again knocking more resolutely on the invisibly-present and presently-locked proverbial door, on the other side of which History awaits.[102] Nietzsche and Marx thought that barricading this door from the inside—permanently blocking human imagination, arresting emancipation, and inhibiting becoming—was the totalising creed of Judeo-Christianity. This hegemonic   doctrine continues to make History inaudible to history, as well as antagonising humanity’s relationship with nature. Akin to a deep scratch on the LP of History, it traps the needle of history, causing it to skip, replaying the same line of the song over and over again, seemingly unable to get past it.   Overcoming this creed is not the same as ‘destroying’ it (as in Heidegger). For Nietzsche, Judeo-Christianity is the Manifesto of Slave Morality : an unrepentant articulation of the blighted soul which, held up to an unreachable standard, becomes fragmented in the chaos of secularisation. Deposited in a number of horcruxes, it lives on, causing continual annihilation ( Vernichtung ) of the world and devastation ( Verwüstung ) of the earth:   God makes himself small and pushes his way through the whole world […] also as a demon of annihilation.[103]   Earlier we touched on the cultural trope of Salem, which has become a horcrux domiciling a fragment of the blighted soul. Marx finds the horcrux  of capital—the indigestible ‘surplus-object, the leftover of the Real’, which becomes secular modernity’s absorbing meta-narrative.[104] Capital represents the frontier of intelligibility, which history needs to dismantle in order to unchain human imagination and enable it to see past the end of capitalism to the consummation of History. Marx’s Capital—a particularly protean form of private property—is more than the nexus of capitalistic social relations. Not unlike Salem, it externalises society’s own deeply rooted antagonistic nature. It is unable to deliver humankind from the dregs of psychic disorder, to help it become whole again, on account of it being endowed with the very characteristics of the reactive kernel which it is meant to expel from society’s psyche.   Capital, like Salem, is powered by the very reactive energy it is meant to have removed. As a result, its real impact is to return as the meta-narrative of modernity, which enslaves the dismembered society and precludes it from achieving fuller identity. Not only was the internal antagonism expelled solely in abstract form, but the abstraction itself, re-packaged into a dream, returned to haunt the fractured psyche, exacerbating its predicament within a self-sustaining cycle. This complex metamorphosis conceals the return of the most pernicious component of the Judaeo-Christian creed, hard-wired to the constant expropriation of nature and alienation of human essence. The source of capital’s energy as well as its power is none other than this theological machination, which disables the agonistic reception of the world and replaces it with immanent antagonism.   How can we at least think about preventing the ‘same traumatic kernel’ from returning indefinitely and ‘in all social systems’?[105] Žižek suggests that dismantling of meta-narratives starts by detecting ‘in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility’ and precludes the possibility of discerning, let alone experiencing ‘full identity’. Such exposure, by inverting the ‘causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze’, subverts and splinters it.[106] The danger, however, does not simply dissipate at this point. It lurks in losing sight of the forest for seeing the trees. In their time, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida all warned of this.   We are living through a fundamental fissure in historical time, where the world (humanity) is becoming ever more fractured and polarised, while the earth (nature) is becoming increasingly homogenised. All the while, the world and the earth are pulling away from each other, seemingly unstoppably. The fourth dimension, concealed underneath that phenomenal flux—be it Einstein’s ‘spacetime’, Heidegger’s ‘temporality’, Bergson’s ‘la durée’, or Kant’s ‘transcendental time’ which govern the motions of Emerson’s ‘Oversoul’ and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’—reveals that the world and the earth share the same inescapable direction: both are becoming less controllable and more themselves. Humans can no longer adequately control nature’s power, just as the world is seeking to de-couple from nature in every sense which used to inform the meaning of being-‘human’.[107] This de-coupling may mean both the end of human history  (albeit not of History), understood both physically and metaphorically, and the concealment of the meaning of the Earth:   In some remote corner of the universe poured out into countless flickering solar systems there was once a star on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and most untruthful minute of world history, but still only a minute. When nature had drawn a few breaths the star solidified, and the clever animals died. It was time, too: for although they prided themselves on knowing a lot, they had finally discovered, to their great annoyance, that they knew everything wrongly.[108]   Following in Nietzsche’s footsteps and leaving a few of his own bombshells behind as a parting shot, Heidegger insinuated that ‘only God can help us now’, to which Schürmann retorted: ‘only Proteus ’.[109] The originary sea-god Proteus—symbol of the ‘primordial unconsciousness’ and ‘perfection of the art’ (Khunrath) with ‘power over all things’ (Jung)—is a poignant riposte.[110] Able to foretell the future, unable to lie, and forever changing shapes and colours—he resists capture in the metaphysical nets of meta-narratives and would reveal his prophetic knowledge only to those able to hold him without corrupting the ‘original, non-differentiated unity of the world’.   History, which lays the groundwork of history, weaves its profound, underlying narrative that forms the fabric of our collective consciousness and channels its flow. We can catch but glimpses of the ontological structures that underpin and configure the realm of existence in Nietzsche’s insatiable ‘will to power’, Heidegger’s ‘being in the world’ as Dasein ’s primordial condition, Derrida’s inexhaustible ‘textuality of experience’, and Koselleck’s tapestry of experience and expectation, crafting the temporal frameworks of historical consciousness.   Fundamental  questions, pertaining to history, which track the evolution of key concepts shaping our understanding of the world and defining historical paradigms—‘revolution’, ‘progress’, ‘democracy’, or ‘freedom’, to name but a few—have not yielded satisfactory answers for some time. All fundamental words have long since been used up, recycled and exhausted. Foundational  questions, the remit of History, may well remain beyond our grasp. Stranded between the inexorable fate , as History, and the inevitable fallacy  of history, how do we chart our course? For us there is no way out of history and no way into History: our standpoint is the liminal space between, where the circle of life inevitably forms and spins from the same ‘unseen forces which twist our hearts’.[111] These forces originate well before we are born and continue long after we perish:   Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.[112]   Our vital insight into the vicious circles of history is never that they cannot be broken or stopped, but that this only happens when those undaunted by History itself rise up from the turmoil and step forward to face its constitutional unknowability, prepared to ground themselves in the recognition of the abyss rather than being wrapped in the rags of dubious truths. Interrupting history’s repeating circles is only a matter of who can take the cost of breaking them. Thinking at the end of metaphysics, they have many names.   Whether Plato’s philosopher-kings, Aristotle’s great-souled men, Hegel’s world-historical individuals, or Nietzsche’s Hyperboreans, it is not the name that defines these figures, but their ability to rise above the chaos and bluster of history—the transient, noisy events that mark our times—and harness the untamed forces of History itself. They are not mere instruments of fate but the mercurial declinations of the atom, confounding the Void, weaving from the discordant voices of History a new direction shaped by their will. What truly matters is not their title but that they emerge to lead humanity when it stands on the precipice of disaster. Borrowing from Heidegger, we may even call them ‘grounders of the abyss’.[113] Their true distinguishing quality, however, is repose— capable of calming existential storms and persuading even Proteus to speak. Dmitri Safronov Dmitri Safronov holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Cambridge for research on ‘Nietzsche’s Political Economy’ (2020). Dmitri received an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and Honors BA in Philosophy and Politics from Trent University. Prior to matriculating at Cambridge, he spent over 20 years in the City of London, working for the leading global investment banking franchises. Dmitri’s profile and list of recent publications can be found on < https://philpeople.org/profiles/dmitri-safronov >. [1] Sting, ‘History Will Teach Us Nothing’ [1987] ( Sting ) < https://www.sting.com/discography/lyrics/145 > accessed 1 February 2025. [2] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ [1819] ( Scottish Poetry Library ) < https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/the-masque-of-anarchy/ > accessed 1 February 2025. [3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations  (Cambridge University Press 1997) III §4. Unless indicated otherwise, all subsequent citations in ‘Introducing Turmoil’ are from §4 of Nietzsche’s third untimely meditation, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’. [4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of The Idols, Or How to Philosophise with a Hammer  in Walter Kaufmann (ed), The Portable Nietzsche  (Penguin Classics 1994) Errors §2. [5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science  (Vintage Books 1974) §23. [6] NF-1888:25[1]. NB: This article quotes extensively from Nietzsche’s unpublished notes. These are assembled in the Nachlass  and accessed from < http://www.nietzschesource.org >. Notes in the Nachlass  are organized according to the year, number of the notebook, and number of the notebook entry, eg NF-1885:2[179]. [7] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §4. [8] NF-1870:5[105]; Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits  (Cambridge University Press 1996) I §472. [9] NF-1870:5[105]; Nietzsche (n 8) II The Wanderer and His Shadow [WS] §§209, 285. [10] NF-1871:10[1]. [11] NF-1880:7[205]; NF-1884:25[112], [137]; Nietzsche (n 4) Maxims §23. [12] Nietzsche (n 8) II WS §87; NF-1884:25[112]; NF-1885:37[9]; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil  in Walter Kaufmann (ed), Basic Writings of Nietzsche  (Modern Library 2000) §256. See also Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics  (Princeton University Press 2016) 20, 160-2, 183. [13] NF-1885:37[9]; Nietzsche (n 8) I §408. [14] See Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time  (Stanford University Press 2018) 4-7, 158-77. [15] Nietzsche (n 3) III §4. [16] Leonard Cohen, ‘Waiting for the Miracle’ (1992). Cohen relays the miracle of ‘The Future’ with astonishing prescience. [17] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §6. [18] ibid III §4. [19] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist  in Kaufmann (n 4) §§5-10, 55. [20] Nietzsche (n 5) §23. [21] Nietzsche (n 4) Skirmishes §36; see Nietzsche (n 19) §43. [22] Martin Heidegger, Ponderings XII–XV, Black Notebooks 1939–1941  (Indiana University Press 2017) 153. [23] Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies  vol 1 (Polity Press 2011) 55. [24] See Michael Schwartz, ‘The liberal neocon: The paradox of liberal foreign policy’ (March 2011) 76 International Socialist Review < https://isreview.org/issue/67/liberal-neocon/index.html > accessed 1 February 2025. [25] For reasons never properly explained, Heidegger thought it would take until ‘around the year 2300  at the earliest’ before Americanism fully ‘exhausted itself’. Heidegger (n 22) 177. [26] ibid 89, 176-7, 208-13; my emphasis. For a rebuttal of Heidegger’s views (with reference to Schmitt   and Weber) see Paul Slama, ‘Heidegger on Americanism, After Carl Schmitt and Max Weber: The United States as a Figure of a Historical Transcendental’ in John Rogove and Pietro D’Oriano (eds), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception  (Springer 2022) 311-33. [27] Nietzsche (n 3) III §4. [28] Heidegger (n 22) 218. [29]  The idea of a ‘coming war’ in Judeo-Christian narratives features prominently in the context of apocalyptic literature, in both Old (eg the Book of Daniel) and New (eg the Book of Revelation) Testaments, which describe the end times, involving great battles or wars between the forces of good and evil and the ultimate triumph of God’s kingdom. As far back as 2016, the ‘critically minded’ audiences at the leading UK universities, including Cambridge, welcomed with open arms such dubious ‘masterpieces’ as Richard Shirreff, War with Russia: An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command  (Coronet 2016). [30]  The Hunt for Red October  and Red Phoenix came out in 1990, followed by The Sum of All Fears  in 1991. This particular deeply theological well of fearmongering has never dried up, either on screen or in pop-literature. Ask ChatGPT 3.5 for a list of Hollywood flicks since 1990 portraying Russkis as the baddies and it will respond with at least 62 titles—circa 2.0 notable items per year—adding up, some thirty years later, to our collective astonishment that the self-fulfilling prophecy has fulfilled itself and now  this is really so. For completeness, also run the ‘opposite’ search for the Russian flicks where Americans/Brits are portrayed as antagonists. Let me know if you find anything besides Brother 2 (2000) and War  (2002), both of which I recommend watching before passing judgement. [31] Plato, The Republic  (Penguin 2007) §545b. [32] ibid §§562e, 566b. [33] Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)  (Indiana University Press 1999) 88-92. [34] Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel  (Brill 2019) 133. [35] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality  (Cambridge University Press 1994) III §7; Heidegger (n 22) 160. [36] See Minoli Salgado, ‘Vanishing points/visible fictions: the textual politics of terror’ (2013) 27(2) Textual Practice 207-23. [37] Heidegger (n 22) 213. [38] Heidegger (n 22) 104. [39] Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies  (Indiana University Press 2003) 514. See INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Duke University Press 2017) 21-63; Heidegger (n 22) 104. [40] Heidegger (n 22) 90. [41] Klaus Schwab’s ‘Fourth Industrial revolution’ openly beckons the blurring of boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological worlds, largely driven by new technologies like artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. [42] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak  (Cambridge University Press 1997) §§204, 206; NF-1887:9[173]. [43] Nietzsche (n 5) §373. [44] Heidegger correctly warned that by virtue of its ‘decisive knowing’, ‘modern science’ is structurally complicit in ‘machination’. Heidegger (n 33) 98. [45] See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic  (Cambridge University Press 2010) 192-212, 572-3, 596-613, 733. [46] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology  (Verso 1989) 73. [47] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics  (Continuum 2007) 22. Think also of the allegory portrayed in Venom  (2018), where failed journalist Eddie suddenly gains superpowers after becoming the host of an alien symbiote, Venom, whose species are bent on the destruction of Earth. [48] Heidegger (n 22) 161. [49] See John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism  (Allen Lane 2023) 22-49, 131; Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class  (Encounter Books 2023) 27-41; Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism  (Bodley Head) 58-92; Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure  (Bloomsbury Academic 2023) 161-85. [50] Theodor Kiesel, ‘Heidegger’s Philosophical Geopolitics in the Third Reich’ in Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (eds), A Companion to Heidegger's “Introduction to Metaphysics”  (Yale University Press 2001) 248. [51] Nietzsche (n 12) §259; Nietzsche (n 8) II WS §§218, 220; I §585. [52] Noam Chomsky, The Common Good  (Odonian Press) 29-31. [53] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §6. [54] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit  (Oxford University Press 1977) 455. [55] Žižek (n 49) 38. [56] Quoted in Babette Babich, ‘Heidegger’s Black Night: The Nachlass  and its Wirkungsgeschichte ’ in Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas (eds), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931-1941 (MIT Press 2016) 77. [57] Heidegger (n 33) 95. [58] See Karen Kurczynski, ‘Expression as vandalism: Asger Jorn’s “Modifications”’ (2008) 53/54 RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 295; or, for a more visceral, up-to-date, and less-politically correct description of the same, Urfaust’s ‘New Salem’ (2019). [59] See the thought-provoking discussion in Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections  (Profile Books 2009) 2, 12-14, 80. [60] Ponder the difference between the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, McCarthy’s ‘Red Scare’ trials of the 1950s, and the recent grilling of US academics over the hypothetical on campus consequences of the Israel-Hamas conflict. See also Heidegger on ‘celebrated academic freedom’ in Germany in the 1930s (Martin Heidegger, ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten’ Der Spiegel  (Hamburg, 30 May 1976)). Was not the same impassioned religiosity of righteous fury the real fuel of them all? [61] Heidegger (n 22) 72, 154. [62] Ironically, didn’t Heidegger predict precisely this, when he warned that all ‘fundamental words’ would be used up and the ‘genuine relation to the word’ would be destroyed? See John Sallis, ‘Grounders of the abyss’ in Charles E Scott, Susan Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Arturo Vallega (eds), Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy  (Indiana University Press 2001) 181. [63] See NF-1887:11[226]. [64] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation , vol 1 (Dover 1969) 352. [65] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra  (Random House 1954) III Tarantulas. [66] Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy  (Houghton, Mifflin and Company 1867) 588 [Paradiso XXIX, line 91]. [67] Nietzsche (n 42) §453; Nietzsche (n 35) III §11. [68] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo  in Kaufmann (n 12) Destiny §1; Nietzsche (n 8) II Assorted Opinions and Maxims [AOM] §54. [69] Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass  (Macmillan & Co. 1872) 42. [70] Heidegger’s summation is a clear poke at Nietzsche’s ‘Ending’ ( Schluß ). See NF-1885: 2[207]; 38[13]. For further context see Nietzsche (n 12) §§106, 211, 282. Regarding Derrida see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question  (University of Chicago Press 1989) 45-6. [71] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics  (Yale University Press 2000) 40. [72] ibid 48. [73] Schürmann (n 39) 527; my emphasis. [74] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §6. [75] Nietzsche (n 8) I §472. [76] Nietzsche (n 68) Wise §3. [77] Charles Dickens, David Copperfield  (T.B. Peterson & Brothers 1850) 125. See ibid 113: when David, punished for a ‘misdoing’ during the holiday-time, finds a ‘beautifully written’ plasterboard placard which ‘bore these words: “TAKE CARE OF HIM. HE BITES”, and starts looking for a dangerous dog, hoping that protecting his master might grant him forgiveness for his sins and reinstatement into the ranks of humans, Creakle hurries to clarify: ‘that’s not a dog. That’s a boy. My instructions are, Copperfield, to put this placard on your back ’ (my emphasis). [78] ibid 126. [79] Heidegger (n 22) 88. See Kellner’s criticism of Bush’s war rhetoric in 2001, which, ‘like that of fascism, deploys a mistrust of language, reducing it to manipulative speechifying, speaking in codes, repeating the same phrases over and over. Bush’s discourse displayed Orwellian features of Doublespeak, where war against Iraq is for peace, the occupation of Iraq is its liberation, destroying its food and water supplies enables “humanitarian” action, and the killing of countless Iraqis and destruction of the country will produce “freedom” and “democracy”’. Douglas Kellner, ‘Bushspeak and the politics of lying: presidential rhetoric in the “war on terror”’ (2007) 37(4) Presidential Studies Quarterly 636. [80] See NIV Psalm 37:20; Psalm 37:38; Psalm 92:7; Psalm 110:1-2; Revelation 20:7-15; Peter 3:10; Romans 16:20; 1 Corinthians 15:24-27; Malachi 4:1; Matthew 13:49-50; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Psalm 37:20. [81] Adorno (n 47) 22-3; my emphasis. [82] Arthur Miller, Timebends  (Methuen Books 1987) 337. [83] Nietzsche (n 12) §146. [84] See Žižek (n 46) 143. [85] Nietzsche (n 4) Great Errors §8; my emphasis. [86] Žižek (n 46) 51. [87] Kellner (n 79) 635. [88] Heidegger (n 22) 104. [89] Nietzsche (n 8) I §209. [90] Probing the ontology of antisemitism, Žižek ((n 46) 70-1, 174)) expresses this point exquisitely. Still, one of the most powerful and imperforate explorations of antisemitism, even surpassing Žižek’s analysis, is Shakespeare’s examination of persecuted otherness  in The Merchant of Venice  (1600), inspired by Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone  (‘The Dunce’, 1378-85), which pondered the mind-crushing predicament of ‘not cutting more or less, and shedding no blood ’, when claiming the ‘pound of flesh’ (Ser Giovanni, day iv, 57). [91] Lyse Doucet, ‘Munich security talks marked by global “lose-lose” anxiety’ ( BBC News , 19 February 2024) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68334715 > accessed 8 February 2025. [92] NF-1887:11[411]. [93] Nietzsche (n 35) III §27. [94] Žižek (n 46) 51. [95] I am borrowing from Žižek’s animated recounting of the Titanic lore (ibid 74-77). [96] See George Behe, Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a Tragedy  (Patrick Stephens Ltd 1997). [97] Nietzsche (n 3) III §4; Schürmann (n 39) 515-22. [98] Žižek (n 46) 78. [99] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right  (Oxford University Press 1949) 13. [100] Sting (n 1). [101] NF-1888:15[48]. [102] See Jameson’s proposition that ‘it is easier […] to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism’ and Žižek’s that it is easier to envisage ‘a total catastrophe which ends all life on earth than it is to imagine a real change in capitalist relations’, which delimit our existential vision by the strictly monetary logic of Capital. Frederic Jameson, ‘Future City’ (2003) 21 New Left Review < https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii21/articles/fredric-jameson-future-city > accessed 13 February 2025; Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes  (Verso 2008) 334. [103] NF-1884:26[220]. [104] Žižek (n 46) 50. [105] ibid 51. [106] ibid 143. [107] See discussion in Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press 2022) 2-22. [108] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Pathos of Truth’ in Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, Writings from the Early Notebooks  (Cambridge University Press 2015) §2. [109] Reiner Schürmann, ‘“Only Proteus Can Save Us Now”: On Anarchy and Broken Hegemonies’ (2021) 41(1) Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 1. [110] Carl Jung, The Collected Works  vol. 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton University Press, 1970) 56 [§50], 462 [§660]. [111] The wording is inspired by Cloud Atlas  (2012), a film adapted from David Mitchell’s novel of the same name by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer. See < https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/cloud-atlas-2012.pdf?v=1729114887 > accessed 8 February 2025. [112] ibid. [113] Sallis (n 62) 181, 197.

Edmund Clark uses photography, film, found imagery, and text to explore links between representation and politics. Clark’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Imperial War Museum, London, International Center of Photography Museum, New York, Zephyr, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Mannheim, Huis Marseille Museum, Amsterdam, Houston Center for Photography, Texas, Saatchi Gallery, London, and Imperial War Museum North, Manchester. His work has been acquired for national and international collections, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, and the International Center of Photography Museum. Clark was awarded the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for outstanding photography for public service in 2011 and made an honorary fellow in 2018. He was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Pictet 2013 for his series Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out.  Clark is Reader in the Political Image at the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts London, where he teaches on the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography course. Gabriella Kardos: Before we delve more deeply into the project you did at HMP Grendon, ‘In Place of Hate’, could you talk briefly about your art practice in general?     Edmund Clark : I am interested in linking history, politics, and representation. My work is research-based and combines a range of references and forms including bookmaking, installations, photography, video, documents, text, and found images and material. Projects often take a long time from idea initiation, research, and making, to dissemination in different forms across various platforms. Two broad subject areas are 21st-century conflict and criminal justice and incarceration. Recurring themes are exploring systems of power and control and unseen processes and experiences. Specific conflict subjects have included: the detention camps at the US Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; extraordinary rendition and the CIA secret prison program; and the use of control orders by the UK government. I have made two bodies of work about experiences of incarceration in the UK, including nearly five years as artist-in-residence in HM Prison Grendon, Europe’s only wholly therapeutic prison for violent and sexually violent offenders. Fig 1. End of a Prison Wing © Edmund Clark GK: You spent a number of years as an artist-in-residence at HMP Grendon, known to be very different from other prisons. Men who are already serving time apply to go there to undergo an intense process of group therapy and self-analysis, in an attempt to understand their own past and what led them to the crimes they committed. What brought you to this prison and the decision to dedicate an important part of your life to this work?

Carved into the stone of the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi was the injunction to ‘know thyself’. Without such knowledge we are tossed this way and that by forces we neither suspect nor understand. Knowing ourselves helps explain our predicament; and doing so is greatly aided by understanding an aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world.   I believe we have adopted a limited vision of a very particular type, and precisely because it is limited we cannot see that it is limited. We no longer seem to recognise what it is we do not know, what our way of being in the world is pushing out of our lives and out of our world. To understand what is going on we need a breadth of view that is increasingly rare. It is the possibility of this that I intend to explore here today.   Let me ask you this. Do you think there is a connexion between realism, the appreciation of uniqueness, a capacity for understanding melody and harmony, an aptitude for appreciating time, a sense of humour, the ability to read body language, to sustain attention, and the fight-or-flight mode; or on the other hand between a talent for manipulation, a givenness to literalism, to theory at the expense of experience, unreasonable optimism, and a preoccupation with detail, as well as a loss of a sense of the living body, with in its place a focus on body parts? Perhaps not. Yet I assure you there is such a connexion in either case. It is rooted deep in us, and it is quite coherent once one comes to understand what underlies the pattern.   My reason for starting here is to introduce a body of work generated over three decades and published in two long books, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World ,[1] and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World .[2] In these books, I examine critically and in depth the matter of hemisphere difference, and its important meaning for our lives. As you can see from the deliberately random selection of respectively right and left hemisphere tendencies above, the distinction is not the simple one that many might have heard, and which should be unceremoniously buried. It is not at all the case that the left hemisphere is unemotional and dependable, whereas the right hemisphere is flighty and fanciful. If anything the contrary is the case.   But that a question has been wrongly answered does not invalidate the question. Rather this should, in my opinion, invite further exploration. Consider these facts: the brain, an organ the power of which consists solely in making connexions, is massively divided down the middle—why? Moreover it is asymmetrical in almost everything that can be measured, at many levels, in both its structure and function—why? Not only that, but the band of fibres that connects the hemispheres at their base, the corpus callosum, is getting proportionately smaller, not larger, over evolution—and is, in any case, to a large extent inhibitory in function. Again: why? Could it be that two aspects of brain function are being kept apart ?   Unfortunately I cannot spend time on the evidence here; for one thing, there is a great deal of it, and it requires to be examined at length. It is laid out for that purpose in the two long books I have mentioned. I am going to go straight to a characterisation of some of the core findings, so please forgive me if these are lacking in finesse: to some extent that is inevitable for present purposes, as I’m sure you will understand.   In a nutshell, each hemisphere has evolved, for classical Darwinian reasons, to pay a different kind of attention to the world. When I saw this, I have to admit that the full import of the distinction did not immediately dawn on me, because I had been trained in the cognitive science paradigm that saw attention as simply another cognitive ‘function’. But the nature of the attention we pay is of critical importance. It creates and moulds the only world we can know.   The left hemisphere has evolved to pay narrow-beam attention, focussed on a detail that we already know and desire, and intent on grabbing and getting, whether it be something to eat or to use in some other way. In a word, the left hemisphere exists in the service of manipulation. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, is on the lookout for everything else that is going on while we are manipulating: for mates, conspecifics, offspring—and predators, so as not to be eaten while eating. Its attention is broad, sustained, coherent, vigilant, and uncommitted as to what it may find: the exact opposite of that of the left hemisphere. In brief, the right hemisphere is in the service of understanding the contextual whole, which is nothing less than the world. And context changes everything. The difference, then, is not, as used to be supposed, to do with what each hemisphere ‘does’—as though it were a machine—so much as the manner in which it does it—as though it were part of a person. The hemispheric difference in attention is beyond dispute: indeed, it is universally attested. And since the nature of attention also indisputably changes what it is that comes to our attention, such a difference logically cannot but lead to two different phenomenological worlds. Hence my belief that attention is a moral act. It helps form both us and the world we come to know.   What are these two worlds like?   Very briefly, if crudely, these worlds could be characterised like this. In the case of the left hemisphere, the world is simplified in the service of manipulation: it is made of isolated, static ‘things’; things moreover that are already known, familiar, predetermined, and fixed; they are fragments, that are importantly devoid of context, disembodied, and meaningless; abstract, generic in nature, quantifiable, fungible, mechanical: ultimately bloodless and lifeless. This is indeed not so much a world as a re-presentation of a world, which means a world that is actually no longer present, but reconstructed after the fact: literally two-dimensional, schematic, theoretical. Not in fact a world at all: more like a map. Nothing wrong with a map, of course, unless you mistake it for the world. And here the future is a fantasy that remains under our control. The left hemisphere is unreasonably optimistic and fails to see the dangers that loom.   In the case of the right hemisphere, by contrast, there is a world of flowing processes, not isolated things; one where nothing is simply fixed, entirely certain, exhaustively known or fully predictable, but always changing, and ultimately interconnected with everything else; where context is everything; where what exists are wholes, of which what we call the parts are an artefact of our way of attending; where what really matters is implicit; a world of uniqueness, one where quality is more important than quantity—a world that is essentially animate. Here the future is a product of realism, not denial. This is a world that is fully present, rich and complex, a world of experience, which calls for understanding; not the map at all, but the world that is  mapped. The emotional timbre here is more cautious, and in general more realistic.   We need both of these ‘worlds’ to work together, but also independently: hence the need for connexion and separation. Naturally we are not aware of this disjunct, because these worlds are combined at a level below our awareness. We become aware only after an accident of nature, such as a stroke, tumour or injury; or after commissurotomy, the so-called ‘split-brain’ operation; or if one hemisphere at a time is experimentally suppressed. Then they may become suddenly, vividly, present to us. Yet, because these two worlds have mutually incompatible properties, when we come to reflect self-consciously, and to rationalise about what we find, we are forced, by the requirement for consistency, to choose between the pictures of the world they offer. This is why, as AN Whitehead observed, a culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyse itself.[3] Once our lives become very largely mediated by self-reflexive language and discourse, as in our postmodern world they are, the explicit stands forward and the implicit retires. Yet almost everything that really matters to us—the beauty of nature, poetry, music, art, narrative, drama, myth, ritual, sex, love, the sense of the sacred—must remain implicit if we are not to destroy its nature. The attempt to make the implicit explicit radically alters its nature: we can no longer rely on the wisdom that comes from these all-important but hidden sources, from closeness to the long tradition of a society, to nature and to the sacred, to sophisticate our understanding. In fact we see these not as irreplaceable guides to truths deeper than those that science can encompass, but as lies. Possibly entertaining lies, but lies nonetheless. We begin to see only the self-created, self-referring world according to the left hemisphere. We go for the machine model: reductive materialism. And the consequences are all around us.   Unfortunately the two hemispheres are not equally veridical. In terms of our ability to apprehend —take hold of and use—the world, the left hemisphere is superior; but in terms of our ability to comprehend the world, the right hemisphere is superior. In each of what one might call the portals to understanding—attention, perception, judgment, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence (that is, IQ), and creativity—the right hemisphere is so much superior that the left hemisphere on its own has been repeatedly described as frankly delusional. That is not a rhetorical expression: denial of the facts and delusional beliefs are far commoner in association with damage to the right hemisphere—and consequently dependence on the left hemisphere—than the reverse. On its own the left hemisphere confabulates, makes up stories so as to fit with its beliefs: it will frankly insist that a paralysed limb is unaffected, or if challenged deny that the offending appendage belongs to the subject at all. Unlike the right hemisphere, which sees more than one angle, and has for this reason been called by VS Ramachandran ‘the devil’s advocate’, the left hemisphere never doubts that it is right.[4] It is never wrong and never at fault: someone else is always to blame.   Furthermore, in what I take to be the four important onward paths towards truth—science, reason, intuition, and imagination—though both hemispheres contribute, the crucial part in each case, including in science and reason, is played by the right hemisphere, not the left.   Our predicament is that we now live in a world, the understanding of which is largely limited to that of the inferior left hemisphere. Some signs of this include: our inability to see the broader picture, both in space and in time; the way in which wisdom has been lost, understanding reduced to mere knowledge, and knowledge replaced by information, tokens, or representations; the loss of the concepts of skill and judgment, which are the products of experience; the divorce of mind and matter, resulting in a strong tendency to simultaneous abstraction and the debasement of matter to mere , lumpen matter, there for our exploitation; an exponential growth of bureaucracy and administration; everywhere the proceduralisation of life; the reduction of justice to mere equality; a loss of the sense of the uniqueness of all things; the supplanting of quality by quantity; the abandonment of nuance in favour of simplistic ‘either/or’ positions; the loss of reasonableness, which is replaced by rationalisation; a complete disregard for common sense; the design of systems, not for humans, but to maximise utility; a growth of paranoia and pervasive mistrust—for if all is not under its control, the left hemisphere becomes anxious, and projects its anxiety outwards onto others. Nonetheless, we play the passive victim and abjure responsibility for our own lives. In addition, I might point to the rise of anger and aggression in the public sphere: the destruction of social cohesion, and its replacement by angry warring factions. Like almost everything that used to be said about hemisphere differences the idea that the left hemisphere is unemotional is wrong: the most highly lateralised emotion is anger, and it lateralises to the left hemisphere. And there are more indications, but for today’s purposes I will stop here.   In the second part of The Master and his Emissary , I traced the main turning points in the history of ideas in the West and concluded that three times we have seen enacted a certain pattern. First there is a sudden efflorescence of everything that comes from the proper working together of the two hemispheres in harmony. There then follows a stable period for a few hundred years at most; and soon a decline, after which the civilisation eventually crumbles under its own weight. I trace this pattern beginning in the Greek world around the sixth century BC; in the Roman world around the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire; and in the modern world with the Renaissance. In each case it is apparent that the vitality and harmony of a flourishing culture is lost as in due course it overreaches itself, becomes less creative, more and more sclerotic, unimaginative, over-administered, over-hierarchical—and power-hungry. There is a coarsening of values. Where goodness, beauty, and truth had once been the guiding values, power, the need to control, holds sway.   I am sometimes asked why, if the right hemisphere is more intelligent and by a long way more insightful than the left, this progression is always leftwards. It is a good question. In brief there are a handful of reasons.   First, and most obviously, the left hemisphere view is designed to aid us in grabbing stuff. It controls the right hand with which most of us do the grabbing. As such it is seductive—not to say addictive.   Second, the left hemisphere view sees a very simplified schema of the world and offers simple answers to our questions. Its mode of thinking prizes consistency above all, and offers the same mechanistic model to explain everything that exists. When reductionist thinking encounters a problem in reconciling apparent irreconcilables—for example, matter and consciousness—it simply denies that one element or the other exists. That’s very convenient.   Third, the left hemisphere’s world view is easier to articulate. Though language is shared between hemispheres, speech is almost always confined to the left: the right hemisphere has literally no voice. And the map is ipso facto vastly simpler than the complex terrain that is mapped. Almost everything that really matters cannot be found there or in the banality of discursive prose.   Fourth, importantly there is, or should be, always an appeal from a theory back to the empirical evidence. If you like, the left hemisphere has a theoretical model; the right hemisphere looks out of the window to see if the model corresponds with experience. Since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last fifty years, we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision. What we see around us now—looking out of the metaphorical window—is rectilinear, manmade, utilitarian, each thing ripped from the context in which it alone has meaning. And for many, the two-dimensional representations provided by TV screens and computers have come largely to supplant direct face-to-face experience of three-dimensional life, in all its complexity.   Fifth, built into the relationship between the hemispheres is that they have a different take on everything— including on their own relationship . Essentially the right hemisphere tends to ground experience; the left hemisphere then works on what is offered to clarify, ‘unpack’, and generally render the implicit explicit; and the right hemisphere finally reintegrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding, the explicit once more receding, to produce a new, now enriched, whole. The left hemisphere’s contribution, then, is valuable, but must come at an intermediate stage. Problems arise when this is treated—as it now often is—as the end stage. Analysis is a valuable tool, but breaking things down must  be followed by an attempt to understand the whole once more. Unfortunately the left hemisphere is unaware of what it is missing .  It cannot see the Gestalt , the ultimately indivisible whole. Therefore it thinks it can go it alone.   Sixth, a culture that exemplifies the qualities of the left hemisphere’s world attracts to itself, in positions of influence and authority, those whose natural outlook is similar, especially in the areas of science, technology, and administration which have an undue importance in shaping contemporary life. They then make us more like themselves. My worry is not that machines will become like people—an impossibility—but that people are already becoming more like machines.   Finally, I have already referred to the problem that a civilisation that is increasingly cut off from its intuitive life relies more heavily on exchange of explicit ideas in the public forum. Here, though truth is manifestly complicated and many-layered, an awareness of inherent ambiguities, and a capacity for seeing both sides of a question, is no longer considered a strength. The right hemisphere’s view is multifaceted and already takes into account the left hemisphere’s point of view; this virtue makes it immediately vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency, and it is therefore liable to be dismissed.   I believe it is the left hemispheric view of the world, intellectually jejune and morally bankrupt as it is, that has resulted in what has been called the metacrisis: not just the odd crisis here and there, but the despoliation of the natural world; the decline of species on a colossal scale; the destabilisation of the climate; the destruction of the way of life of indigenous peoples; the fragmentation and polarisation of a once civilised society, with escalating, not diminishing, resentments on all sides; an escalating, not diminishing, gap between rich and poor; a surge in mental illness, not the promised increase in happiness; a proliferation of laws, but a rise in crime; the abandonment of civil discourse; a betrayal of standards in our major institutions—government, the BBC, the police, our hospitals, schools, and universities, once rightly admired all over the world—which have all become vastly overweighted with bureaucracy, inflexible and obsessed with enforcement of a world-view that is in flat contradiction to reality; and the looming menace of totalitarian control through AI. These aspects of the so-called metacrisis have a multitude of proximal causes: economic, political, social, psychological, technological, and so on. But beneath and beyond that, each manifests, within  those realms, aspects of the left hemisphere’s dysfunctional view of the world.   The very thing that originates the problem also militates against seeing the problem. Seeing the wider picture—a necessary prelude to understanding—is now increasingly disfavoured, and as a consequence the crises I have referred to are often seen as isolated pieces of bad luck. But they are not: they could have been, and were by some, predicted. The metacrisis is the predictable outcome of a complete failure to understand what a human being is, what the world is, and what the one has to do with the other. And all this is the sort of thing the right hemisphere is far better able to understand than the left.   The rightful Master, the right hemisphere, has been subjugated by his emissary or servant, the left. In an entirely predictable parallel, we have become enslaved by the machine that should be our servant, as so many have predicted since the time of Goethe: we cannot say we were not warned. Even physics now teaches us that the mechanical model of the universe is mistaken. But because of our success in making machines, we still imagine that the machine is the best model for understanding everything we come across. We ourselves, our brains and minds, our society, and the living world are now supposed to be explained by the metaphor of the machine. Yet only the tiniest handful of things in the entire known universe are at all like a machine: namely the machines we made in the last few hundred years. Machines, unlike life and all complex systems, whether animate or inanimate, are linear and sequential; are put together, part by part, from the ground up; and can be switched on and off at will. Their default status is stasis, not flow; they are not resonantly embroiled with their environment; they have precise boundaries; their parts do not change structure and function as the whole evolves—not least because in a machine the whole does not evolve; and they are utilitarian constructs in service of the power of their maker. None of this applies to life—nor does it to anything else in the universe. The brilliant mathematician and biophysicist Robert Rosen, in his book Life Itself , demonstrates just how unlike machines organisms are.[5] He further argues that the best way to understand all naturally occurring systems—which are never merely complicated, but complex, and therefore never fully predictable—is as organisms, whether we choose to see them as alive or not. And that’s before one gets to consider the neglect of our emotional, moral, and spiritual nature, which is at the core of being human.   We seem to have been seduced into thinking we understand everything, and what’s more can master it and mould it, like a machine, so as to provide a future that will benefit mankind. That this is a malign fantasy becomes plainer with every passing day. Those with grand schemes to improve humanity have caused misery on an almost unimaginable scale by their narcissism, cruelty, and wilful blindness. In psychology there is something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which tells us that the less people know, the more they think they know. It’s hardly rocket science, I admit, but it is worth bearing in mind.   Instead of seeing all things as processes, running organically from the past to the future across time, and spreading out across the world through space, like water finding its way across a landscape, we see ourselves and the world as composed of static slices—here and now—compartmentalised in a way that conforms to the modus operandi  of the left hemisphere. A world of meaningless bits. We owe nothing to, and can learn nothing from, history—or so we believe. We owe nothing to, and need leave nothing to, posterity. We turn a blind eye to the inevitable impact of our rapacity on more humble and more stable ways of life that have stood the test of time better than ours. We neglect the importance of context: we believe we are right, and that one size fits all, justifying the imposition of vast global bureaucratic structures, not to say wars, so as to impose our thinking on cultures far different from our own. Equally we arrogantly critique our ancestors for not sharing the idiosyncratic view of the world we have generated in the last 20 years and which, we believe, must now be forced on all, whatever their reasonable misgivings. And we treat people not as unique living beings but as exemplars of a category.   One aspect of this is the virtual machine known as bureaucracy. Famously Hannah Arendt referred to the banality of evil.[6] One of the most disquieting aspects of the Nazi regime was its chilling bureaucracy: mind-numbing evil was committed by people who were, for the most part, not conventional monsters but were simply following the ordained procedures: real people and real life had been almost wholly obscured by pieces of paper, and the recording of numbers. After the war, Theodor Adorno saw developing around him what he called die verwaltete Welt —the administered world, in which everything was controlled, proceduralised, and devitalised.[7] Inevitably at that point in history this could not be separated from the evil that was Nazism; but Adorno could see that it was much more than that. Nazism was at least as much a symptom  of a new mentality as its cause, a mentality of total control that had taken root in the form of a self-legitimising bureaucracy, the roots of which lay in the past. He quoted the mid-nineteenth-century Austrian writer Ferdinand Kürnberger: ‘life no longer lives ’.[8] Who does not recognise with a chill this diagnosis of the modern predicament? And Adorno points out that it is not even the triumph of the logical—since administration serves to rationalise the irrational: which explains why its workings and outcomes are often deeply unreasonable and deeply damaging.   The cancerous growth of more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, bureaucracies in the worlds I particularly know—hospitals and universities (but the same could be said of government, schools, and the police)—is an inevitable and dangerous consequence of the worldview we have adopted. The other, if possible still more dangerous, expansion is that of AI. Bureaucracy and AI go hand in hand, enlarging the empire of the left hemisphere, and making possible, if not inevitable, in the near future, almost total control of the populace by any regime, however malignant.   As we broaden our view, it becomes apparent how much the metacrisis can best be seen as a war on nature and a war on life. This, my friends, is the reality we face. Why on earth should such a suicidal war come about? There are three reasons that spring to mind. One is that the left hemisphere, which makes us what Benjamin Franklin called the ‘tool-making animal’, thinks like a machine, and has therefore exported machine-like thinking into our environment everywhere. Nature and life are therefore ultimately an impediment. The second is that the left hemisphere really only understands its own representations, what it itself has made, and given to itself. Nature and life are therefore ultimately incomprehensible. And the third, and most important, is the resentfulness of a mind that believes it understands and can—and what’s more should— control all it surveys. Here nature and life are a rebuff to its power, a rebuff which cannot be tolerated. The German artist George Grosz produced a shockingly vivid expression of this mindset as he contemplated Europe before the Second World War, entitled ‘I shall extinguish everything around me that restricts me from being the Master’.   The contemporary fantasy that we can be whatever we want and do whatever we want is a cruel travesty of the truth: this was never true and never could be. It is the product of a culture of narcissistic fragmentation. Ironically we have invented new impediments to its fulfilment. We now live in a world in which you cannot speak or act until you have put each word before a humourless inner tribunal, which is ready to say no to everything you want to say or do. I am of course a boring old stick, but I feel so sorry for young people now—whatever happened to the spontaneous act, the sense of joie de vivre , to the movement of the spirit out of sheer exultation? Even an impulse to visit a gallery soon runs into the need to have booked weeks ago using an app. And that’s just getting into a gallery: what about negotiating the numberless hazards of a date? Life no longer lives.   Wisdom, skill, judgment, intuition, and even understanding—all to be gained only from a life well-lived— have been sidelined in favour of machine-like algorithms that stifle true thought.   The assault on life continues. As far as a mechanical system is concerned, human beings must be dispensable and wholly interchangeable; in fact, despite the rhetoric, true  diversity is not to be tolerated. Imaginative eccentrics lose their jobs. Humans must have no allegiances which might conflict with their duty to fit into their slot. Thus it is that we have seen concerted attacks on the idea that there are differences between men and women; attempts to brainwash children; attacks on family and kinship, with their rightful claims on loyalty; on the professions, whose expertise must be replaced by blind rule-following, and their codes of ethics, which a machine cannot understand and which is therefore replaced by the pretence that teachers, doctors, and priests are just providing a service to consumers, rather than embodying what are ultimately sacred duties. Indeed that anything should be sacred is an affront to the power-hungry left hemisphere-dominated mind: belief in a divine cosmos is seen as standing in the way of whatever society the machine hurtles us towards. Milton saw it all. Lucifer the Bright cannot bear the imputation of anything higher than he. And the very word society reminds us that no properly functioning society is mechanistic. So we see social cohesion dissipate and living traditions erased: in their place fragmentation, the stoking of resentment, and the rise of aggression. This in turn is deemed to require what de Tocqueville presciently described as a ‘network of small complicated rules’ that he foresaw would come to strangle life itself.[9] Once the integrity founded in an intuitive moral sense is lost, a society becomes like a building that has lost its integrity, and needs to be shored up with evermore scaffolding. Now there has to be a law for everything—yet crime escalates.   Why, when we see how devastating this process can be, do we carry on promoting it? The physicist David Bohm reflected on a phenomenon he called ‘sustained incoherence’, characteristic of what he called ‘thought’, the thought processes we now know to be typical of the left hemisphere.[10] What he meant was that on seeing incoherence it would be intelligent to stop, look for the cause, and change tack. But he noticed there was a reflex defensiveness in ‘thought’ that leads instead to obstinate continuation. In other words the left hemisphere, above all else, does not  want to hear why it might have got things wrong.   I see widespread evidence of this sustained incoherence in corporations, governments, health systems, and education—everywhere that management ‘culture’ holds sway—that when things go wrong it is never that we have been travelling in the wrong direction, or have gone too far in what may once have been the right direction; it’s always that we have not gone far enough. This links to the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less you know, the smarter you think you are. But a further finding by Dunning and colleagues reinforces the relationship with the left hemisphere mindset, because of its preference for simple linear algorithms and procedures that, it believes, ‘logically must’ lead to a certain outcome. Those who have bought into such procedures think they must be in the right, even when the outcome ought to compel them to the opposite conclusion. Psychological experiments show that once they are committed to their theory of how things work, drawing attention to its obvious failure in the real world leads not to a flicker of doubt, but to a rise in confidence and redoubled efforts along the same line.   I’m sure we can all think of many such dead ends in the world around us, but I want to refer to just one here: the squandering of trust. This has the distinction of being at the same time supremely important and almost completely ignored. Truth and trust, words which come from the same root, naturally go together. One cannot have trust in a society where there is no truth; and one cannot be true to a society in which there is no trust. As Confucius told his disciple Tzu-kung, for a stable society a ruler needs three things: weapons, food, and trust. If he cannot hold all three, he should forgo weapons first, and food next; for ‘without trust we cannot stand’. Trust costs nothing but the time to build it, and once built it is a fantastically efficient way for any human enterprise, to operate. But it is easy to lose. There is a Dutch proverb: ‘trust arrives on foot, but departs on horseback’. The massive complex of administration and AI do nothing to promote a society of trust, but actively undermine whatever is left of it at every turn.   Being trustworthy is no small thing, and its importance needs to be inculcated at an early age, and then nourished by both individual and society. No one will believe in us  if we cannot believe in ourselves. We need to start believing in ourselves again—and deserving to be believed in. Once people lose pride in being as good as their word, doing the best job they can, and expecting much of themselves, rules have to be enforced from without, and a penal code substitutes for the moral code it helped to destroy. Mediocrity quickly displaces excellence. Boredom replaces vitality. This is not only vastly less effective, but hugely costly in terms of administration and litigation, not to mention time and morale, and leads to a wicked problem: once trust has been lost, it is not easy to remove the scaffolding of rules and procedures which have come to take its place. In the world of capital, older European business practices based on honour have been grossly undermined by a ‘smarter’ paradigm imported from America, in the pursuit of short-term gain by defectors. This was very short-sighted. Trust has also been lost in the world of schools and universities, hospitals, the police, and the army—all of which now have massive recruitment problems, because the perception is that lives of service are no longer respected, or properly rewarded; that the necessary creativity, independence, self-reliance, and initiative required by a skilful professional will be stifled; and that the best candidates will not be supported and promoted because of a patronising agenda based on the ticking of boxes, and militating against excellence. Like civilisations before us, which drifted further and further to the outlook of the left hemisphere, we would appear to be engaged in committing suicide, intellectual and moral—if not indeed literal; for I fear that the Western world may no longer have the will or the skill to defend itself against authoritarian enemies that we cannot just wish away, because in our theory they don’t figure.   We seem sometimes bemused at how so often a path that looks promising leads us somewhere almost opposite to where we intended. But seeing the picture in the round we start to see why the outcome we wished for eluded us. We feel we are beset by paradoxes. In The Matter with Things , I devote a chapter to logical paradox; and explore around 30 of the best-known paradoxes that have intrigued and largely baffled philosophers historically. In every case, I explain why the apparent paradox can be seen as stemming from the different dispositions towards the world offered by the right and left hemispheres. This doesn’t mean, however, that each take is equally valid. In Zeno’s well-known paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, although he purports to prove that Achilles can never catch up with, never mind overtake the tortoise, we know perfectly well that in real life he can overtake the tortoise in a couple of strides.   As a society, we pursue happiness and become measurably less happy over time. Studies of rates of psychopathology in adolescents, relying on serial contemporaneous assessments using the same objective instrument and meeting stringent standards, over the period from 1938 to 2007, show that there were between five and eight times as many students that met a common cut-off for psychopathology in the latest cohort compared with the earliest, and this may be an underestimate because many recent subjects were already stabilised on an antidepressant, a possibility that did not exist for the earliest cohorts. Rates of suicide, which have always been about three times higher in men, are rising most steeply in young women.   We privilege autonomy and end up bound by rules to which we never assented, more spied on than any people since the beginning of time. We pursue leisure through technology and discover that the average working day is longer than ever, and that we have less time than we had before. We also find that the technology places an enormous burden on our time, alienates us from human intercourse, and exposes us to risk from organised criminals—and mind-control by dis organised criminals such as governments. The means to our ends are ever more available, while we have less sense of what our ends should be, or whether there is purpose in anything at all. Economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash: they promptly crash. We are so eager that all scientific research result in ‘positive findings’ that it has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable, and therefore discovers less and less that is a truly significant advance in scientific thinking. We grossly misconceive the nature of study in the humanities as utilitarian, in order to get ‘value for money’, and thus render it pointless and, in this form, certainly a waste of resources. We ‘improve’ education by dictating curricula and focussing on exam results to the point where free-thinking, arguably an overarching goal of true education, is discouraged; in our universities many students are, in any case, so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussions that threaten to examine the model critically; and their teachers, who should know better, in a serious dereliction of duty, collude. We over-sanitise and cause vulnerability to infection; we over-use antibiotics, leading to super-bacteria that no antibiotic can kill; we protect children in such a way that they cannot cope with—let alone relish—uncertainty or risk, and are rendered vulnerable. The left hemisphere’s motivation is control; and its means of achieving it alarmingly linear, as though it could see only one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of interactions at any one time. Which is all it can.   If these paradoxes surprise us, it is because we have not thought far enough ahead in time or broadly enough in space: we take a small part of the complex for the whole. The awareness coming from the right hemisphere can embrace that of the left, but not the other way round. When the hemispheres are working together under the unifying influence of the right hemisphere, the effect is not purely additive, but transformative. However, since the left hemisphere not only ‘takes in’ less, but understands what it does take in less well, our almost exclusive reliance in contemporary Western culture on it, the servant, is a problem of some considerable proportions.   The three things on which human flourishing and well-being most depend are these: belonging to a cohesive social group which one can trust, and with which one can share one’s life; closeness to the natural world; and communion with a divine realm, however conceived. This is not just my opinion, but borne out by a vast and ever-increasing body of research. But none of this accords with our current value: power. It is hardly a surprise, then, when we see that material affluence does not make us happy if accompanied by spiritual poverty.   Let me finally consider the influence of left hemisphere capture on the realm of value. For over two thousand years, in the Platonic, and later the Christian, tradition of Western thought, human life was seen as orientated towards three great values: goodness, beauty, and truth, each of them in turn seen as a manifestation of an aspect of the sacred. During my lifetime, I have seen each of these important values, along with the sacred, repudiated and reviled. A model that favours the machine over the human being, the inanimate over the living, is one that is corrosive of all that is beautiful, good, and true. And has no place in it for the sacred.   The early twentieth century philosopher Max Scheler was much concerned with questions of value. When he died in 1928, Heidegger, who gave his funeral oration, described him as the most potent force in the world of philosophy at the time.[11] Scheler thought there was a hierarchy of values, with those of pleasure and utility—the values of utilitarianism and the left hemisphere—at the lowest level, and rising by stages to that of the holy or sacred, which he considered the highest, a value which I suggest is incomprehensible to the left hemisphere. In between were, first, the Lebenswerte  or values of ‘life’, such as courage, magnanimity, nobility, loyalty, and humility; and then the geistige Werte , the values of mind or spirit, such as beauty, goodness, and truth—which I suggest are better understood by the right hemisphere.[12]   The left hemisphere’s raison d’être being power and control, it naturally puts values of utility and hedonism, those of the lowest rank in Scheler’s pyramid, first. I may be wrong, but it is my distinct impression that there has been a decline in courage, magnanimity, nobility, loyalty, and humility in our society—indeed in all behaviour that carries its costs upfront, rather than concealing its sting in the tail. Speaking the truth takes courage, and it would seem that those in our public institutions would rather conform than confront untruth. And along with the loss of courage to speak the truth, there has been an undeniable withdrawal from the beautiful and the sacred. All of this combines to reinforce a loss of sense of purpose and direction; hence the crisis of meaning that it is, by now, a commonplace that we face.   Scheler calls the human being ens amans , the being that is capable of love; in its place we have homo economicus . In the world we live in, reductionist materialism inverts Scheler’s perception, and in a thoroughly cynical assessment of what it means to be human, we have exalted the individual ego over all else. This has rendered many virtues, including but not confined to beauty, goodness, and truth, obsolete. These values, I believe, far from being human inventions, are ontological primitives, for they are aspects of the ground of Being: our capacity to respond to them and draw them ever further into being is our privilege, and indeed, I argue, our purpose. This is why there is life. We can of course also ignore them, devalue them, and cause them to wither away—at what cost to us personally and to the whole of the living world we can only surmise. The world we are creating is one that ‘computes’ as far as the left hemisphere is concerned, but is grossly impoverished, demoralised, and lacking in meaning. One that is, in sum, more fit for a computer than a human being.   I’m often asked what we need to do about our predicament. This is understandable, of course, but I think that any list of bullet points, though no doubt needed at one level, risks missing the point almost entirely at another. For it is not that we took the wrong decision here or there, but that we have completely lost direction because of the value we have come to espouse. As I get nearer to the end of life, I am more and more convinced that not only is being receptive to the summons offered by values the key to a fulfilling life, the key to a flourishing society and a flourishing natural world at large, but every bit as important as survival itself. What I mean is this: even if we were by a massive effort and a massive stroke of fortune enabled to prevent any further loss of the world’s forests, reverse the pollution of the oceans, reverse the decline of species, and similarly tackle the other aspects of the metacrisis I have mentioned, this would be in vain unless we underwent a complete change of heart and mind. For we would still be the same hubristic, entitled, resentful power-hungry animals that we have become. And this, like the rest, has everything to do with the dominance of the left hemisphere’s mode of being.   So what are we to do? I could list the bullet points, which along the way would inevitably refer to reforming the education system, to a revival of the humanities, a serious reduction in bureaucracy, to the cultivation of meditative or spiritual practices, to abstinence from social media, keeping machines in the background where they can be helpful but away from intercourse with humans, and much more that we all know might help. And of course it goes without saying that we must tirelessly seek to stop, and where possible reverse, the damage to Nature—I will not call it the environment, since the term expresses the separation from Nature that is part of the problem. But these will not in themselves heal a matter of psyche , of soul. There is no quick fix for such problems, alas. As a psychiatrist, I would often know after listening to a patient for an hour or more on their first visit, what it was they needed to do. And when I was inexperienced I used to tell them. That was a mistake. Until a person truly sees for him- or herself, from the inside, what it is they need to do, they will not do it, and once they do see it, they will not need to be told. The work is to get them to that place.   The good news is that we can begin the healing work, each one of us, today. People say: ‘But what can I do? The world is so huge and I am so small’. And sometimes they add ‘and our planet is so small in an incomprehensibly vast universe’. But this is to think in the left hemisphere’s terms, measuring and quantifying. When the lover says ‘my love is as deep as the ocean and as wide as the skies’, how large or small is that? All the important changes happen from in here, not out there. If we could recover some humility in the face of our ignorance; some compassion in dealing with our fellow human beings; and some sense of awe and wonder before the cosmos, we would be already a long way along our journey. It has been said that if we could change radically the hearts and minds of only 3% of people, we would be able to make the changes we need to see in the world around us. For this we need to understand ourselves anew. Gnothi seauton : know thyself. We need every insight we can get into what we are doing to ourselves, to life itself, and to our inexpressibly beautiful and complex world. I hope I may have here offered one such insight, however small. The work is great, but we are capable of greater things than we know. Iain McGilchrist Iain McGilchrist FRSA is a British psychiatrist, philosopher, neuroscientist, and Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His books include The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World  (2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).   The above is an edited version of McGilchrist’s Darwin College Lecture, delivered in Cambridge on 9 February 2024. [1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World  (Yale University Press 2009). [2] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World , 2 vols (Perspectiva 2021). [3] See Lucien Price, ‘The Permanence of Change: Dialogues of Whitehead’ The Atlantic  (Washington DC, April 1954) < https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1954/04/the-permanence-of-change-dialogues-of-whitehead/642948/ > accessed 11 June 2025. [4] See VS Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind  (HarperCollins 2005). [5] See Robert Rosen, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life  (Columbia University Press 1991). [6] See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin 2006). [7]  See eg Theodor Adorno, Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt  (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1972). [8]  See Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben  (Suhrkamp 2019) 20. [9] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America  (Doubleday 1969) 650. [10] See ‘Wholeness, Timelessness and Unfolding Meaning’ ( Beshara Magazine , 2020) < https://besharamagazine.org/metaphysics-spirituality/david-bohm-wholeness-timelessness-and-unfolding-meaning/ > accessed 11 June 2025. [11] Martin Heidegger, ‘In Memory of Max Scheler (1928)’ in Thomas Sheehan (ed), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker  (Precedent Publishing 1981) 159-60. [12]  See Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik  (Meiner 2014).

The purpose of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) was to ‘bring rights home’, allowing people to protect their fundamental human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in domestic courts.[1] For present purposes, the relevant rights are the right to autonomy and dignity, and their control over their body and future (based on Articles 2, 3, and 8). However, the idea that people are able to protect these rights is anathema to the tenor of the salient and contentious judgments in the NI Abortion Case [2] and Nicklinson [3]—cases which restrict these rights—as well as subsequent case law. Such a conclusion can only be reached by a fundamental misconstruction of what the cases stand for. Instead, excessive and overzealous judicial conservatism has failed to demonstrate and realise the potential of the HRA. The damage done to the rights in question by this conservative approach conflicts with the very mandate provided in the HRA. For this potential to be realised, a more ‘radical’ (yet legally and constitutionally sound) approach is necessary, and the apparent fear of issuing an s 4 Declaration of Incompatibility (DOI)—a declaration by the Court that the relevant legislation is incompatible with ECHR rights—must be dispensed with. Such action is not inappropriate, nor radical, but merely performance of the proper constitutional role of the court.   The Northern Ireland Abortion Case   Ducking the issue?   The NI Abortion Case  cannot be posited as a reinforcement of either the autonomy and dignity of citizens, nor the protection of their control over their body and future. The court refuses, by a majority, to even substantively engage with these issues in any consequential way. Instead, Lords Mance, Reed, and Lloyd-Jones and Lady Black duck the issue by judging that the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) did not have standing under HRA s 7 to bring s 4 proceedings, thus allowing them to dispense with any meaningful discussion surrounding Articles 2, 3, 8, and 14. The reasoning used to arrive at this conclusion is self-contradictory and illogical because, as Lords Kerr and Wilson and Lady Hale highlight, the English Equality Commission (the NIHRC’s equivalent) is able to bring proceedings of the same nature. Such is the reticence to engage with fundamental human rights, the majority would rather raise antecedent issues of unfair devolution arrangements and the differing treatment of the UK’s four nations.   The Court dodges a politically contentious, yet still fundamentally legal, question for fear of it being ‘institutionally inappropriate’ (as Lord Sumption describes it in Nicklinson ). One cannot assert, therefore, that the case demonstrates the protective potential of the HRA, as the Court only hypothetically engages with the rights in question on the terms of the HRA. In fact, the opposite result is achieved—the rights under the HRA lose their efficacy as they are rendered unenforceable by a frankly cowardly interpretation of human rights standing. More damning still, the majority decision in this case regarding standing has been superseded by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (EUWA), which explicitly established that the NIHRC has standing to bring such cases, proving the minority right. Following this judgment, it seems even more apparent that ducking the issue on the grounds of standing was a conscious choice.   Engaging (superficially) the substantive rights   Nonetheless, the judges do engage in some discussion around the Article 3 and 8 rights engaged by the NI abortion laws, though this discussion is all obiter dicta.[4] This discussion largely fails to properly protect these rights, and instead offers a confined scope of application that pales in comparison to the comparative application of those rights within other nations of the UK. While the majority (5:2) judge that the law is incompatible, on the basis that it is disproportionate in aiming to protect morals and excessively fetters the autonomy and self-determination of individuals, this is still true in a very qualified sense, with division amongst the majority. Only four of the judges rule that there is a violation of Article 8 regarding abortion in cases of rape, incest, and fatal foetal abnormalities (FFAs). Only Lady Black rules that there is a violation in regard to FFAs but not rape or incest. This does very little to protect a Northern Irish woman’s right to autonomy, dignity, and control over her body and future. As far as Lady Black is concerned, her human rights only allow her to seek abortion where she is carrying a child with an FFA, and she should be made to carry the child to birth if it is the product of rape or incest. Lords Reed and Lloyd-Jones in the minority share this position but extend it to FFAs also. Lady Black’s proposition is frankly astonishing, especially when compared to the rights she would have if she lived in a different region of the same country!   The position of the five judges regarding FFAs was cited in Ewart [5] and subsequently approved in the High Court, which would have issued a s 4 DOI in relation to Article 8 had it not been rendered nugatory by a previous change in legislation. This validated the view of the five judges. However, it still cannot be said that the NI Abortion Case shows the potential of the HRA to protect the rights in   question. Instead, it is Ewart that did so, though in a highly confined and qualified sense.   Even the position of the four majority judges in the NI Abortion Case  is insufficient. The NIHRC itself only sought validation on these terms, but it is not out of the remit for the Court in such a case to issue a general s 4 DOI on anti-abortion laws in relation to relevant rights. As Lady Hale and Lord Kerr highlight in Nicklinson , and Horner J highlights in the NIHC decision of this case (citing Lord Bingham in A v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Belmarsh) ),[6] the idea that this is institutionally inappropriate is anathema to the powers granted by Parliament to the judiciary in s 4 of the HRA itself. The issuing of a DOI does not in itself force a change in the law. It instead forces Parliament to consider the issue, at which point it is an issue of Parliamentary sovereignty as to whether Parliament chooses to amend the law. The notion that citizens living in the same country, but in different nations, should enjoy substantially different rights offends the supposedly universal nature of those rights.     As far as dignity is concerned, only Lords Kerr and Wilson were prepared to say that forcing a woman to travel from NI to England, Wales, or Scotland to obtain an abortion was a violation of Article 3. They also held, more broadly, that forcing a person to carry to term a foetus that has an FFA, or was conceived through rape or incest, constitutes inhuman or degrading treatment. While Lady Hale expresses sympathy with this view, she does not reach the same conclusion in relation to Article 3. She uses this factor to demonstrate the law’s disproportionality in regards to Article 8. However, this should not be a reason why it cannot also constitute an Article 3 violation too. This case fails to respect the dignity of the women concerned by failing to properly enforce their human rights and provide parity with the rights enjoyed by the women of England, Wales, and Scotland.   Though the NI law has been changed since the case to a position that is more acceptable, the position following the NI Abortion Case  did not sufficiently provide for this in respect to either their right to autonomy (Article 8), dignity (Article 3), or choice as to their body and future (Article 8).   Nicklinson  (as developed in Conway  and Newby )   Nicklinson , taken with Conway  and Newby , also cannot properly be said to demonstrate the potential of the HRA in protecting the rights in question, given that all of these cases flatly refuse the applications made.   Ducking the issue (again)?   The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Pretty says that the Suicide Act 1961 (SA) s 2 ban on assisted suicide (AS) engages Article 8. Nicklinson, however, sought to argue that the SA violated his Article 8 right to avoid an undignified and distressing death and his right to choose the manner and timing of his death. Once again, the Court ducks the issue in question and thus does not provide any demonstration that the HRA is a useful mechanism to protect a person’s rights. Seven of the nine judges ruled that it would be ‘institutionally inappropriate’ to make a consideration as to the compatibility of the SA with Article 8, though there is a 4:3 split in reasoning.   The most conservative approach is taken by Lords Clarke, Sumption, Reed, and Hughes, who refuse to engage in any meaningful discussion of whether the SA was incompatible with Article 8. They refuse on the basis that, while the court has jurisdiction to do so, such an analysis turns on issues that Parliament was better suited to decide, meaning it would be ‘institutionally inappropriate’ to make a decision. Once again, the reasoning of Lady Hale and Lord Kerr in the present case, and Lord Bingham in Belmarsh , is prescient. HRA s 4 explicitly invites courts to decide on these issues. It is paradoxical and oxymoronic for the court to say that they cannot use the power that Parliament has given them to declare Parliament’s legislation incompatible, on the grounds of it being ‘institutionally inappropriate’. This is a total abdication of responsibility and is a misguided, cowardly retreat from a contentious issue which has still not been decided on by Parliament over six years later. By not even engaging with the issue of compatibility, the judges neuter the HRA’s ability to protect these rights. It is more inappropriate for them to abstain from this consideration than it is for them to engage in it. The justification given is insufficient and debases the HRA significantly.   A less conservative approach is taken by Lords Neuberger, Mance, and Wilson. They instead judge that it is not institutionally inappropriate, per se, to make a decision on incompatibility. However, they decide that it was in this case because Parliament was currently discussing the issue, essentially giving Parliament one last chance to try and sort  the issue. This is also an insufficient analysis, as it relies on another case making it to the Supreme Court. As we can see, with Conway  and Newby , this has not yet happened. Conway ’s permission to appeal was refused, thus rejecting the opportunity to make an authoritative ruling on the matter. Once again, there is a misplaced and illogical deference to Parliament, which ignores the powers bestowed by  Parliament.   The better approach by far is that of Lady Hale and Lord Kerr, who do not deem it to be institutionally inappropriate to make a consideration on the compatibility of the SA with Article 8. They are the only justices who claim this. This is the only way that the HRA can be used to protect these rights. The court must actually engage in a compatibility analysis for the HRA to even have a chance  of protecting rights. As Lady Hale says in Paragraph 300:   I see little to be gained, and much to be lost, by refraining from making a declaration of incompatibility. Parliament is then free to cure that incompatibility, either by a remedial order under section 10 of the Act or (more probably in a case of this importance and sensitivity) by Act of Parliament, or to do nothing. It may do nothing, either because it does not share our view that the present law is incompatible, or because, as a sovereign Parliament, it considers an incompatible law preferable to any alternative.[7]   This is exactly the point. A declaration of incompatibility is just that—a declaration. It has no binding force and does not compel Parliament to do anything if it does not want to. It has no effect on the law other than to highlight its incompatibility with the relevant Convention Rights. Therefore, pontifications on institutional propriety serve no purpose other than to dilute the rights afforded under the Convention.   Engaging the rights   Lady Hale and Lord Kerr judge the SA to be incompatible with Article 8, and state that they would have issued a s 4 DOI. They consider that the blanket ban imposed is disproportionate under Huang . While accepting that protecting the rights of the vulnerable   is a legitimate aim, they consider that the blanket ban was more than what was necessary to achieve that objective and did not strike a fair balance. They also reject Lord Sumption’s obiter proposition that protecting morals may be another objective (manifested in the sanctity of life), on the basis that morals are not universally shared in this context and are too complex, with respect being needed for autonomy and dignity too. Hence, on the construction of Lady Hale and Lord Kerr, the HRA could well serve to protect these rights. However, the majority, and therefore binding, view in Nicklinson  fails to achieve this.   Post- Nicklinson : Conway  (Article 8) and Newby  (Article 2)   After Nicklinson , Conway  reflects Lady Hale and Lord Kerr’s observation on the lack of strength in the objective of protecting the vulnerable regarding Article 8 infringement. More objectives are imported to the ban such as protecting morals and protecting the doctor–patient relationship. These too are weak. The protection of morals is easily dismissible on the same grounds as Lady Hale and Lord Kerr provide in tackling Lord Sumption on this in Nicklinson , as well as the fact that it simply does not reflect a uniform public consensus, nor reflect the approach taken to other end-of-life contexts such as the capacitous refusal of treatment. Lord Kerr in Nicklinson  also questions whether the sanctity of life can really be   preserved where terrible suffering is being forced on the claimant.   It is not wholly clear that the doctor–patient relationship is a strong objective either. Doctors can already withdraw treatment, even where the patient is incapacitated (see Bland  and Re Y ), and often administer palliative sedation knowing that double effect is certain. This puts the law in a rather perverse situation where, under Bland , a person in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) who may well wish to continue living, but cannot express that, can be subjected to what is essentially involuntary euthanasia. By contrast, where a person gives their fully informed, unvitiated consent, they are unable to access assisted dying. As for palliative sedation, Re B  is authoritative on the fact that where a capacitous person, on the basis of informed consent, wishes to end their life-sustaining treatment, that wish is to be respected, even where death is inevitable. Therefore, the distinction between that and AS seems superficial. Is it really, then, such a Rubicon to cross? Furthermore, polling among the Royal College of Physicians and British Medical Association shows a majority opinion which is at least neutral towards AS. Even the profession does not see a threat to the patient–doctor relationship. The homogeneity that the Court in Conway  implies simply does not exist. Permissive jurisdictions have shown that the discussions involved in arranging AS are actually conducive to building good relationships, and empower patients in the decision-making process.   Therefore, it is not entirely clear that the additional objectives posited in Conway  are valid and legitimate objectives rationally connected with such aims, or fairly balanced where cases such as Conway , Nicklinson , Pretty , and Newby  are concerned. More egregious still is   the fact that Conway  disposes of the analysis in the Canadian case, Carter , on the basis of false distinctions. Supporting this is the fact   that in Pretty , the ECtHR says that Carter  s 7 concerned autonomy, which is parallel to Article 8. Yet again, Conway  fails to allow the HRA to be used to protect the right to autonomy and dignity and control over the body.   Newby  argues that the SA and subsequent jurisprudence was a breach of the positive obligation to protect life under Article 2, on the basis that there was not an effective legal system that protects life. The SA did not deter threats and was in itself a threat. The argument relies on the evidence that the blanket ban on AS resulted in the premature suicide of people before they become incapacitated to avoid the implications of the SA. This is a point illuminated by:  Carter ; the first-hand account in Omid T ; and perhaps put best by Lord Neuberger in Paragraphs 96 of his judgment, saying ‘Section 2 therefore not merely impinges adversely on the personal autonomy of some people with degenerative diseases, but actually, albeit indirectly, may serve to cut short their lives’.   The High Court is dismissive of this argument, dealing with it in one paragraph, which is questionable at best. No material consideration is given to the argument, and the conservative Nicklinson -type approach is taken to avoid discussion of the sanctity of life etc. While they do say that Article 2 engagements in this context would deal with the same considerations as Article 8, they consider these Article 8 issues heavily reliant on Conway, which itself was heavily reliant on Lord Sumption’s reasoning in Nicklinson . Therefore, this Article 2 argument is yet to be properly examined in a court and judged. However, the current line of jurisprudence suggests that an unfavourable approach would be taken to this argument. Therefore, Newby , as with every other case, fails to demonstrate the HRA’s potential to protect the rights of the individual to autonomy and dignity, and control over their body and future.   Conclusion   The overly conservative approach of the courts in relation to assisted dying and abortion results in a failure to properly uphold the rights of claimants under the ECHR. Therefore, one cannot assert that the current state of the law protects a person’s right to autonomy and dignity, and their control over their body and future. Nothing binding in the Northern Ireland Abortion Case , Nicklinson , or any of the subsequent litigation supports the assertion. The only saving graces of these cases, that may possibly be relied on to try and support this proposition, are the minority judgments.   Time and time again, claimants have sought to rely on the HRA to protect their rights to autonomy and dignity under Articles 8 and 3, and their control over their body and future under Articles 2 and 8. However, time and time again, courts have failed to give effect to this. Instead, cowardly and overly conservative judicial approaches have given way to an over-reliance on a de facto decriminalisation based on Crown Prosecution Service discretion that is by no means a watertight guarantee of immunity, and still forces families to endure police investigation.   Courts should embrace the powers they have been conferred by Parliament in the HRA and make s 4 DOIs where that would be appropriate, as it is in the cases considered above. The considerations of the cases above clearly show that where courts duck this on grounds of ‘institutional inappropriateness’, rights are not vindicated, and people are left to suffer. Engagement with these issues would not be an improper judicial power grab but merely a fulfilment of the role and responsibilities given by Parliament in the HRA to declare legislation incompatible where it is. By not fulfilling this role, the checks and balances inherent in our constitution are jeopardised. For as long as the judiciary adopts this unnecessarily conservative jurisdictional approach, the cases that come before them will never demonstrate the true potential of the HRA to protect a person’s right to autonomy and dignity, and control over their body and future. Jack Bailey Jack Bailey is a third-year undergraduate in Law at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, interested in the intersection of law and politics. In autumn 2022 he will begin a training contract with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. He has just stepped down from his role as Pro Bono Coordinator on the Cambridge University Law Society, with the Pro Bono Department having been nominated for the ‘Access to Justice Foundation Award’ at the LawWorks and Attorney General Student Pro Bono Awards 2021. [1] I would like to thank Dr Stevie Martin for her helpful advice in writing this article and reading over my drafts. The considerations and viewpoints she raised were greatly helpful. [2]  Re an application by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission for Judicial Review (Northern Ireland)  [2018] UKSC 27. [3]  R v Nicklinson  [2014] UKSC 38. [4] A comment in obiter dicta is a non-binding part of the judgment. [5]  Re Ewart  [2019] NIQB 88. [6]  A v Secretary of State for the Home Department  [2004] UKHL 56. [7] 7 Nicklinson  [300] Lady Hale.

1. Introduction The criminal law continues to grapple with the concept of ‘deceptive sex’ and struggles to draw the appropriate parameters around the provisions on consent contained within the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (henceforth, ‘the SOA’). Particularly notable in this regard have been cases involving ‘gender fraud’, wherein the defendant (D) is alleged to have deceived the complainant (V) as to their gender in order to procure sexual relations. This was found to be the case in R v McNally [1], where the Court of Appeal held that the sexual nature of the acts was different where the complainant was deliberately deceived by the defendant as to her biological sex; V’s freedom to exercise preference over the gender of their sexual partner was removed.[2] V’s consent was therefore vitiated. The language used in this case effectively characterises D’s failure to disclose gender history as a deliberate deception (writing, inter alia , that D ‘had lied to [V] for four years’[3]), and acutely raises this issue of consent: in what circumstances will D’s inaction be elevated to a finding of deception? As a corollary to this, in what circumstances are deceptions are sufficient to vitiate consent for the purposes of sexual offences? These are the questions with which this article seeks to contend. They will be addressed in several parts. First, it will be found that the conceptual framework deployed by the courts in these cases, namely the distinction between active deception versus non-disclosure, cannot bear the analytical weight imposed upon it by the factual intricacies of the cases that have arisen thus far, and of those that will invariably arise in the future. The inadequacy of this binary is brought to the fore by McNally : the gaps in the court’s reasoning are haphazardly filled with cis-normative prejudices that cannot stand against conceptual scrutiny. It will be argued that the term ‘deception’ (that is, the act of deliberately causing (someone) to believe something that is not true, especially for personal gain) is not only inappropriate when applied to transgender defendants for ontological reasons, but also risks legitimising discrimination towards transgender individuals through the forum of the criminal law. The court’s prejudices are often clouded in repeated references to the need to protect the right to sexual autonomy. It is not disputed that this protection is a valid pursuit, however, the over-prioritisation of V’s sexual autonomy has led to a conflation of two analytically distinct questions, namely: (1) did V consent? and (2) did D possess a reasonable belief in V’s consent? These questions must remain separate such that due weight is given to the competing interests of D in privacy and self-preservation (particularly in cases involving transgender defendants). Having exposed the inadequacies of the current model, Section 3 investigates a new conceptual framework upon which the law on sexual offences may be built. In this regard, the distinctions made by Matthew Gibson when he distinguishes between ‘principal sexual offences’ and ‘deceptive sexual relations’ prove highly instructive.[4] He observes that the latter are often criminalised under ‘principal sexual offences’, namely rape, sexual or indecent assault etc.[5] In his view, however, this poses a problem for fair labelling as, while deceptive sexual relations are equally harmful to a victim’s right to sexual autonomy as the relations proscribed by the principal sexual offences, they represent a different wrong. [6]He therefore advocates for the creation of separate deceptive sexual offences targeting penetrative and non-penetrative sexual relations.[7] Adopting this bifurcation, the model proposed in this article variegates deceptive sexual relations further into a tripartite taxonomy: relations resulting from an active deception, a passive deception, and a unilateral mistake by V. The courts, having already established that the first of these is sufficient to vitiate consent[8], have left the following task for the present enquiry: distinguishing between a passive deception and a unilateral mistake. It is argued that only the former can vitiate consent, arising either when D knowingly exploits a unilateral mistake by V to procure sexual relations, or when D is under an obligation to disclose certain information but fails to do so. As to the former, D’s knowledge and opportunism elevates V’s unilateral mistake to a passive deception. As to the latter, regarding the circumstances in which such an obligation may be generated, several possibilities are canvassed with a brief discussion about how the law may develop in the future. It is suggested that the materiality of certain facts to V’s consent should remain subjectively determined by V, but any obligation to make V aware of facts that may conflict with this materiality is contingent upon D’s actual knowledge, or a reasonable expectation that D have knowledge, of such materiality. This model departs from the court’s current approach in that it ensures that the expectation of D’s knowledge is conditioned not by cis-normative biases, but instead by an objective assessment of the facts and an introduction of the concept of ‘justifiability’.

Motive is traditionally considered to be an unwelcome guest in criminal trials, a bête noire that should only appear at a sentencing. The common law draws an important distinction between mens rea and motive in criminal proceedings. The principle of mens rea, meaning ‘guilty mind’, provides that ‘criminal liability should be imposed only on persons who are sufficiently aware of what they are doing, and of the consequences, it may have’.[1] Motive refers to personal reasons, such as vengeance or financial gain, from which criminal intent may be inferred. While most offences require mens rea to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, the motive is traditionally considered irrelevant to criminal liability.[2] The inclusion of a ‘political, religious or ideological cause’[3] element in the definition of ‘a terrorist act’ in Australia has invited the concept of motive back into criminal liability. In addition to the evidential issues of proving motive beyond reasonable doubt, defining terrorism is commonly regarded as a Sisyphean task due to the political, ideological and jurisprudential questions it raises about the legitimate exercise of violence and the role of criminal law. Rather than viewing anti-terrorism laws as a vanguard in a broader trend towards the inclusion of motive in criminal liability, this article asserts that the unique nature of terrorism as strategically targeted violence necessitates a motive element. Whilst the physical elements of terrorist acts can be covered by existing criminal offences, such as murder or conspiracy, the underlying motive to influence socio-political outcomes through the use of violence adds a distinct layer of criminality. Hacker describes terrorism offences as ‘triadic’[4] because it involves not only the offender and the victim but also the general public through the targeted perpetuation of fear. Premised on the notion that the motive behind terrorism is what creates a moral distinction from other criminal offences, this article presents three central arguments. Firstly, a discrete category of terrorism offences is necessary in accordance with community expectations that political, religious and ideologically oriented violence warrants distinct classification under criminal law as an affront to the democratic process. Secondly, that terrorism offences should be fairly labelled with reference to a motive element in the definition of a ‘terrorist act’ to adequately reflect the nature and extent of an offender’s criminality, particularly when many terrorist offences are inchoate. Thirdly, the inclusion of a motive element in terrorism offences substantially broadens the scope of admissible evidence at trial and thereby heightens the importance of safeguards in criminal procedure to protect the fairness of criminal proceedings. II. The Legal Definition of ‘A Terrorist Act’ The Australian definition of ‘a terrorist act’ under Section 100.1 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code was introduced by the Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act 2002 (Cth) as part of a legislative response to the September 11 attacks. The anti-terrorism laws include a wide range of offences that can only be enlivened once the three limbs of the definition of ‘a terrorist act’ are proven beyond reasonable doubt: ‘the action is done, or the threat is made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause’ (‘the motive element’);[5] ‘the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of: (i) coercing, or influencing by intimidation, the government of the Commonwealth or a State, Territory or foreign country, or of part of a State, Territory or foreign country; or (ii) intimidating the public or a section of the public’[6]; and the ‘action’ falls within subsection (2) and does not fall within subsection (3). Subsection (2) includes actions such as causing a person’s death, serious damage to property and endangering a person’s life. Subsection (3) provides that advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action are not terrorist acts.[7] This definition blurs the legal distinction between intention and motive by focusing on the reasons why the accused engaged in the prohibited conduct (for advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause) rather than an intention to commit the act itself. Thus, the ‘motive element’ under subsection (1)(b) presents a departure from intent as the cornerstone of criminal liability[8] and ventures into the hearts and minds of the accused. III. The Role of Motive in Criminal Responsibility Criminal offences ordinarily comprise a physical element ( actus reus ) and subjective fault element ( mens rea ). The fault element is based on intention, whereby criminal liability is restricted to ‘those who, from a subjective perspective, intended, knew or at least were aware of the risk of a particular harm occurring’.[9] However, what is the difference between motive and intention? In Hyam v Director of Public Prosecutions (Cth) [1974] UKHL 2 , Lord Halisham explained that ‘motive is entirely distinct from intention or purpose. It is the emotion that gives rise to an intention, and it is the latter and not the former which converts an actus reus into a criminal act’.[10] By considering the emotional and subjective reasons why someone intended to commit an offence, criminal liability becomes perilously intermixed with moral and political judgments. Norrie argues that it is the link between social conflicts and individual motives that drives the exclusion of motive from criminal responsibility.[11] For example, the mental element of larceny is the intention to steal rather than motivating factors or emotions such as hunger or poverty. The primacy of intent over motivation protects the criminal law from ‘moral infection’[12] and attributes fault to the autonomous individual rather than the broader structural and societal issues that contribute to crime. Notwithstanding this, Horder claims that a ‘privileged class’ of offences permit motive into criminal liability.[13] For example, the motive is important for offences where there is no prima facie wrong.[14] In the case of terrorism, a significant portion of terrorist offences are constituted by preparatory acts whereby the criminality of the offence is unclear without the motive. Furthermore, it is the motivation behind the intention—to advance a political, religious or ideological cause through coercion or intimidation—that captures the ‘wrongfulness’ of the offence. For example, terrorism prosecutions in Australia have included the possession of a magazine published by Al-Qaeda[15] and attempting to seek a fatwa against an army base.[16] In these cases, the criminality of possessing a magazine or seeking a religious declaration is not adequately understood until the motive behind these acts is established. There is indeed merit to the longstanding view that motive should be excluded from criminal liability to keep the offender’s political, religious, or ideological orientations outside of the courtroom and thereby reducing the risk of bias. However, in the case of terrorism, it is these very motivations that differentiate terrorism from other serious offences. As noted by former Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock, ‘it would be short signed to divorce these motivational contexts from the crimes themselves when they directly inform the gravity of the conduct’.[17] The incorporation of a motive element to advance political, religious, or ideological causes into the statutory definition of a ‘terrorist act’ ensures that the essential characteristics and criminality of terrorism is sufficiently particularised within the legislation. IV. The Moral Distinction between Terrorism and Other Offences ‘Terrorism’ is a politically and ideologically contentious term that incites extreme moral outrage and public indignation. But what makes terrorism distinct from other offences which are also considered morally wrong? Offences that are violent, indiscriminate, or otherwise evoke widespread terror will inevitably provoke media attention and emotive public response. However, on a deeper level, terrorism is an attack on the fundamental principles of a peaceful and democratic society. It was expressed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that ‘terrorism poses a severe challenge to democracy, civil society and the rule of law’.[18] While arguably all criminal offending may inadvertently undermine the rule of law, Ben Saul asserts that terrorism ‘should be specifically criminalised because it strikes at the constitutional framework of deliberative public institutions which make the existence of all other human rights possible’.[19] By replacing politics and dialogue with intimidation and violence, terrorism represents an affront to the Western liberal ideal of the peaceful democratic process. Ultimately, it is the public-oriented motive that most clearly reflects the core normative judgments about the wrongfulness of terrorism and distinguishes it from other offences. One of the main criticisms of the inclusion of a motive in the definition of ‘a terrorist act’ is that terrorist offences can be prohibited through existing criminal offences. Roach argues that ‘although anti-terrorism laws have been enacted on the basis that existing criminal law is inadequate, we should not lightly assume that the existing criminal law is not up to the task’.[20] Roach asserts that offences of murder, conspiracy, incitement and attempt can be applied to apprehended acts of terrorist violence and ‘from the perspective of public safety, it should not matter why someone explodes a bomb’.[21] In contrast, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security stated that ‘terrorism is qualitatively different from other types of serious crime’ because it is typically directed toward the public to create fear and promote political, religious or ideological goals.[22] This distinction between public and private motives is illustrated in the case of R v Mallah .[23] Mallah was indicted on two counts of preparation for a terrorist act and a third count of recklessly making a threat to cause serious harm to a Commonwealth public official . [24] The alleged facts were that Mallah applied for a passport which was subsequently refused by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Following an appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, police executed a search warrant in his house and located a rifle, ammunition, a document entitled ‘ How can I prepare myself for Jihad ’, and a manifesto setting out his grievances and identifying DFAT as his target. During a covert phone call, Mallah admitted to an undercover operative that he was planning an attack on a government building and made threats to kill ASIO and DFAT officers. After a trial by jury, he was acquitted of Counts 1 and 2 and convicted of Count 3. Despite the facts of the case having the hallmarks of a terrorist offence, such as the targeting a government institution, possession of religious manuscripts and references to ‘jihad’, the sentencing Judge remarked that ‘by its verdict, it is clear that the jury was not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt…having regard to the definition of a “terrorist act”’.[25] Chief Justice Wood found that Mallah did not possess a publicly-oriented motive to advance a political, religious or ideological cause but rather was an ‘embittered young man’ who ‘personally felt that he had been the subject of an injustice’ as a result of his passport refusal.[26] While the physical elements of the charge appeared to be terrorist in nature, Mallah’s motive was considered to be a personal one. This case illustrates the important distinction between public and private motives in signifying the unique wrongfulness of terrorism, whereby a threat to a government institution out of personal frustration cannot be considered a terrorist attack. V. Terrorism and the Declaratory Function of the Law Ashworth outlines the three key functions of criminal law: to declare that certain conduct is a public wrong, to institute the threat of punishment as a deterrent, and to censure those who nevertheless commit the offence.[27] These three functions are not equally applicable to every offence. In the case of terrorism, it is unlikely that criminalisation and the risk of censure will significantly deter terrorists from committing a terrorist act. Anti-terrorism laws have ‘marginal deterrent value’[28] because criminal sanctions are not believed to dissuade terrorists from their political, religious or ideological cause, particularly if they are willing to die in pursuit of their motive or reject the legitimacy of the legal system, to begin with. Adopting this view, the enactment of anti-terrorism laws serves a declaratory rather than punitive function to publicly condemn acts of terrorism, satisfy public indignation and placate demands for justice. The declaratory function of anti-terrorism laws is supported by the Sheller Committee’s Parliamentary Review of Security Legislation. The Committee noted that ‘Parliament intended that the definition of a ‘terrorist act’ reflect contemporary use of that term in political and public discourse to stigmatise certain political acts…’ and that the motive element under subsection (1)(b) ‘appropriately emphases a publicly understood quality of terrorism’.[29] From this review, it is apparent that Parliament’s primary focus on the motive element in the definition of ‘a terrorist act’ is an alignment with community expectations and popular understandings of terrorism. However, there is a fine balance between legitimating criminal laws by aligning offences with community standards and moral values and exercising penal populism to satisfy public demands for vengeance. VI. The Terrorist Label and Fair Labelling Despite its evolving definition, the concept of terrorism has retained significant political and moral currency. From the ‘Reign of Terror’ during the French Revolution to radical Islamic terrorism after the September 11 attacks, the ‘terrorist’ label has endured a longstanding capacity to stigmatise and de-humanise those upon whom the label is imposed. The moral potency of the terrorist label beyond its legal signification has rendered the term ‘slippery and much-abused’.[30] It has been deployed to censure various manifestations of violence, from revolutions, and political protests to State terrorism. This debate over how violence is represented and defined becomes a struggle over its legitimacy.[31] In the absence of a clear definition, the label of terrorism becomes more vulnerable to misappropriation. Borradori argues that this ‘semantic instability’ and ‘conceptual chaos in public or political language’ privileges dominant powers to de-legitimise or criminalise conduct according to prevailing political interests.[32] Given the strong moral and political stigma attached to the term ‘terrorist’, careful attention must be given to the principle of fair labelling when defining terrorism offences. Labelling, in its literal sense, as the process of classifying, describing, and identifying, plays a significant role in criminal law. Criminal offences are defined and categorised into a statutory framework that demarcates degrees of wrongdoing and sentencing options depending on the seriousness of the offence. Chalmers and Leverick argue that labels are important in describing the offences to the general public and differentiating the offending behaviour for those working within the criminal justice system.[33] This process of labelling is a declaratory enterprise whereby the label of an offence communicates the nature of a crime and the degree of condemnation that should be attributed to an offender by the general public and criminal justice system. Ashworth notes that one of the primary aims of criminal law is to ensure a proportionate response to law-breaking and that fairness demands that offenders be labelled and punished commensurate with their wrongdoing.[34] In the context of terrorism, it must first be asked who the intended audience of the label is? The legal definition of terrorism is intended for the offender, operatives of the criminal justice system and the community at large. In terms of the offender, labelling is important in communicating what constitutes a terrorist offence and how the commission of such an offence will impact findings of guilt, sentencing, and the offender’s criminal record. While it is argued that anti-terrorism laws have a minimal deterrent effect, it remains essential that acts of terrorism are clearly defined due to the harsh penalties involved (maximum penalty of life imprisonment) and strong social stigma. This is particularly pertinent in the prosecution of inchoate offences, such as the possession of documents or financing of groups with terrorist affiliations. These preparatory acts carry heavy sanctions and stigma under the wide umbrella of ‘terrorism’. Agents of the criminal justice system, such as judges, lawyers and parole officers, also rely on the labelling of offences. Prior to conviction, the labelling of offences dictates the elements that need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, plea negotiations and jurisdiction of the court. After conviction, labels also affect the sentencing outcome, notations on criminal records and classifications within prisons. The labelling of an offence as an act of terrorism can have a significant impact on an offender’s prospects of bail, procedural implications such as control orders and the length of detention without charge, as well as the level of media and political attention. In addition to the practical implications of labelling, offence labels also convey to the community the seriousness of an offence and the extent of the offender’s wrongdoing. Labels may draw upon existing social values and signify the degree of moral condemnation and ‘othering’ to be imposed on an offender. Accepting that labels play an essential role in criminal law, consideration must then turn to how terrorism offences can be fairly labelled. Ashworth notes that fair labelling has a more direct connection with common patterns of thought in society, and ‘where people generally regard two types of conduct as different, the law should try and reflect that difference’.[35] The distinguishing feature of a terrorist act (as opposed to existing offences such as murder or conspiracy) is the motive element to advance a political, religious or ideological cause. Simester and Sullivan note that ‘the criminal law speaks to society as well as the wrongdoers when it convicts them, and it should communicate its judgement with precision, by accurately naming the crime of which they are convicted’.[36] Under the Australian Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995 , the category of terrorism offences is far-reaching, ranging from large-scale terrorist acts causing significant casualties[37] to ‘possessing things connected with terrorist acts’.[38] Despite the significant variation of harm caused by such actions, the strong stigma of the ‘terrorist’ label remains constant. In light of the severe moral stigma attached to terrorism, liberal use of the term would dilute its declaratory function and cause unfairness to an accused due to the lack of certainty regarding what constitutes a terrorist offence. Given the broad ambit of conduct that may be considered terrorist in nature, the inclusion of a motive element under statute provides greater legal clarity to criminal justice practitioners and accused persons. From a declaratory standpoint, the legislature has defined a terrorist motive to publicly declare that the use or threatened use of violence for a political, religious or ideological cause is considered distinctly wrongful and will attract distinct legal sanctions. The inclusion of a motive element ensures that the ‘terrorist’ label is appropriately directed towards offenders who intend to use violence to advance their political, religious or ideological causes and safeguards offenders who do not harbour such public-oriented motives, as in the case of Mallah above.[39] Terrorism offences often attract media attention that draws upon popular preconceptions of terrorism rather than its legal definition. As a result, many accused persons are branded with the ‘terrorist’ label without being proven to have committed ‘a terrorist act’ to the requisite legal standard. An example is the ‘2019 Sydney CBD Stabbings’, which was initially reported in the media as a terrorist attack but was ultimately prosecuted under non-terrorism offences. In this case, Mert Ney stabbed one woman to death, stabbed a second woman indiscriminately and then proceeded to run through the Sydney CBD yelling ‘ Allahu Akbar ’. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the offender possessed the requisite intent to kill, partly informed by his mental disorder, but did not have a terrorist motive: ‘The evidence indicates that the Offender had no commitment to any faith and was not a religious zealot. He had become obsessed with the Christchurch massacre, but not because he was adherent to radical and extremist beliefs himself. On 13 August 2019, he took on the trappings, gestures and language of a terrorist in the apartment after murdering Ms Dunn and in the streets of Sydney. All who saw him would be forgiven for concluding that he was a fixated person with a commitment to a terrorist cause involving violent jihad. However, the evidence does not support such a conclusion’.[40] Bhatia notes that ‘rarely is the combatant’s decision attributed to a complex array of factors and events’[41], such as mental illness or discrimination, and media outlets often focus solely on the terrorist motive ‘in the belief that simplicity is a stronger pull than context’.[42] This gives rise to the argument that a statutory distinction between terrorism and non-terrorism offences through a motive element does not necessarily translate into a practical distinction. Conduct which bears the hallmarks of a terrorist offence, such as indiscriminate public violence, may result in a person being labelled a terrorist without possessing a legally defined motive. VII. Proving Motive at Law: Prejudice, Evidential Difficulties, and the Importance of Procedural Safeguards The inclusion of a ‘political, religious or ideological cause’ in the definition of ‘a terrorist act’ raises evidential difficulties and a risk of prejudice against the accused. Accordingly, evidence of motive in proving an element of the offence must be adduced cautiously in criminal trials and longstanding procedural safeguards, such as the exclusion of unfairly prejudicial evidence under section 137 of the Evidence Act 1995 (NSW) , carries great importance. This section will consider the practical application of the ‘motive element’ in a number of terrorism prosecutions and analyse the evidential implications of proving a political, religious or ideological motive beyond a reasonable doubt. Counter-terrorism policies have placed a strong emphasis on preventative strategies and the containment of risk.[43] This is understandable given the threat of large-scale casualties and destruction inflicted by previous terrorist attacks. Section 137 of the Evidence Act 1995 provides that a court must refuse to admit evidence if its probative value is outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice against the defendant. Unfair prejudice refers to the risk that evidence may be used to make a decision on an improper, perhaps emotional, basis, such that it ‘appeals to the fact-finder’s sympathies, arouses a sense of horror, or provokes an instinct to punish’.[44] This can present difficulties in the prosecution of terrorism offences where proving that an accused sought to advance a political, religious or ideological cause can require the admission of prejudicial or highly subjective evidence, such as extremist religious views or anti-nationalistic sentiments. The use of prejudicial evidence to prove the mental element of a terrorist act was considered by the NSW Supreme Court of Criminal Appeal (CCA) in the case of Elomar .[45] Five co-offenders were convicted of conspiracy to do an act in preparation for a terrorist act. One ground of appeal was that the trial judge erred in admitting evidence that the co-offenders were associated with a group of Islamic fundamentalists who were convicted of terrorism offences in Melbourne. It was argued that there was a real risk that the appellants would be prejudiced by the evidence of their association with the Melbourne group, and the jury would conflate their criminality with that of the Islamic fundamentalist group. The CCA ruled that the expressed attitudes of the leader of a terrorist group with whom the appellants associated and allegedly took religious guidance ‘had the capacity to significantly affect the assessment of the probability of the existence of that fact. The evidence, therefore, had probative value to a significant degree’.[46] Whilst it is peculiar to tender the violent extremist views of one person to evince the state of mind of another, the legal threshold of the probative value outweighing the prejudicial effect means that such evidence is often admissible in terrorism trials. In Elomar , there was also an objection to the tendering of ‘gruesome imagery’, including video footage of beheadings, photographs depicting dead bodies and footage of the September 11 attacks.[47] The trial judge permitted the admission of this evidence due to its high probative value, stating ‘it will enable the jury to see, according to the Crown case, that the state of mind of the accused, both individually and as a group, has gone well beyond mere anger and outrage, beyond jubilation at the success of the 2001 destruction, to a point where it exults in the cruel humiliation and gross murder of innocent persons’.[48] While the inclusion of a motive element significantly increases the probative value of evidence which would have otherwise been excluded, the Courts retain an important discretion to mitigate the prejudicial effect of admissible evidence through procedural rulings and judicial directions. In this case, the quantity of material was restricted to playing only one of six executions, without the actual beheading and audio track to minimise unfair prejudice contrary to s.137 of the Evidence Act 1995 and distress to the jury.[49] Furthermore, the judge gave directions to the jury as to how this evidence could be appropriately used in their deliberations and that its relevance was contained to assessing the state of mind of the accused. In the case of Fattal ,[50] the appellant was convicted of conspiring to do acts in preparation for a terrorist act. The proposed terrorist act was to attack the Holsworthy Army Barracks by shooting as many soldiers as possible, and Fattal’s involvement was to assess the susceptibility of the target. In support of the motive element, there was a substantial body of evidence, mostly intercepted telephone calls, proving that Fattal possessed a hatred for Australian ‘kuffars’ (non-believers) and institutions, particularly Australia’s military involvement in the Middle East. Generally, the admission of evidence indicating an accused’s hatred for a country and its citizens would be highly prejudicial as it can evoke an emotional response from the jury or sentencing judge. However, for terrorism offences, the evidence goes directly to an element of the offence. As with the Elomar case, the inclusion of this evidence is indeed prejudicial; however, not unfairly, so it warrants exclusion under Section 137 due to its high probative value in proving motive. It is argued that the addition of a motive element to the definition of ‘a terrorist act’ creates a further hurdle for the prosecution, which can be difficult to prove because of its subjective nature. In the case of AB [51], the accused faced two charges of doing an act in preparation for a terrorist act and using a telecommunications network with the intention to commit an offence. The accused was seventeen years of age and was diagnosed with an intellectual disability and Asperger’s syndrome. The Crown alleged that AB published a series of posts on a website stating he intended to kill members of the public with a knife in a suicidal attack in a crowded area in Sydney. The Crown did not allege that AB planned his attack in association with any religious or political affiliation but rather wanted to make a statement about the mistreatment of persons with mental illness. In AB’s bail application, Justice Beech-Jones considered the Crown case, noting, ‘I have great difficulty in accepting that that material is capable of demonstrating an intention to advance a ‘political, religious or ideological cause’.[52] While AB’s plan displayed the physical hallmarks of a terrorist act, namely indiscriminate violence on members of the public to advance a cause, it did not meet the legislative requirement that the cause is ‘political, religious or ideological’. Whilst it may be arguable that raising awareness of mental health issues is a political issue, a broad interpretation of the motive element carries inherent dangers in the misuse of terrorism offences and disproportionate labelling, as discussed above. VIII. Constitutional Challenges The constitutional validity of the inclusion of a ‘political, religious or ideological cause’ in the definition of ‘a terrorist act’ has been challenged in Australia and abroad. Returning to the Fattal case, one ground of appeal was that the appellant El-Sayed had a constitutional right to freedom of religion under s.116 of the Commonwealth Constitution and thus was free to seek an Islamic fatwa to carry out a planned attack on the Holsworthy Army Barracks. It was held by the Victorian Supreme Court that s.116 of the Constitution does not confer absolute freedom of religion, and Parliament is acting within its constitutional authority to enact laws prohibiting the violent practice of religion if reasonably necessary for the protection of the community and the interests of social order.[53] This reasoning is echoed by the Canadian Supreme Court in the case of Khawaja .[54] Under the Canadian Criminal Code , section 83.01(1)(b)(i)(A) provides that terrorist activity must be ‘for a political, religious, ideological purpose, objective or cause’.[55] It was argued that this motive clause was an infringement of the freedom of expression encoded in s.2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms . The Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the motive clause ruling that, while the prohibited terrorist activities are in a sense expressive, threats and acts of violence fall outside the protection of s.2(b) of the Charter.[56] A purposive interpretation of the actus reus and mens rea requirements of the terrorism legislation excludes liability for non-violent conduct that a reasonable person would view as capable of facilitating terrorist activity.[57] Furthermore, the secondary argument that the motive clause would encourage unfair profiling on the basis of ethnicity or religious belief was rejected by the Court. It was held that improper conduct by State actors and law enforcement agencies ‘cannot render what is otherwise constitutional legislation unconstitutional’,[58] and the provision is clearly drafted in a manner respectful of diversity, allowing for the non-violent expression of political, religious, or ideological views. IX. Conclusion This article presents a discussion on the role of motive in terrorism offences and whether the definition of a ‘terrorist act’ under section 100.1 of the Criminal Code should include the intention to advance a political, religious or ideological cause. Contrary to the longstanding principle that motive is irrelevant in criminal liability, it is argued that the motive element behind terrorism offences is what makes it distinctly wrongful. By delineating a moral distinction between terrorism offences and other crimes which share the same actus reus (such as murder), it is argued that the exclusion of motive would defeat the declaratory function of the criminal law to signify the use of violence for political, religious or ideological purposes as a discrete public wrong. However, in light of the strong social stigma and legal sanctions attached to the terrorist label, careful consideration must be given to the principle of fair labelling when defining ‘a terrorist act’. Fair labelling demands that offenders be labelled and punished in proportion to the degree of wrongdoing. In order to fairly label terrorism offences, the inclusion of a motive provides a clear indication of the degree of wrongdoing and, consequently, the level of legal and social sanctions which should be imposed on the offender. Furthermore, the strong political and moral judgment attached to the ‘terrorist’ label means that the term can be subject to misuse. The added specificity of a motive element in the definition of a terrorist act can prevent the misappropriation of the label. Whilst this article ultimately supports the inclusion of a motive in the definition of ‘a terrorist attack’, there are clear evidential issues arising from the onus on the prosecution to prove the accused intended to advance a political, religious or ideological cause beyond a reasonable doubt. The motive element significantly broadens the scope of admissible evidence that would otherwise be impermissible, such as the accused’s religious beliefs or hatred for their country. Consequently, the admission of evidence to establish motive must be balanced against conventional safeguards in criminal procedure to protect the fairness of the trial and integrity of the criminal trial, such as the exclusion of prejudicial evidence under Section 137 of the Evidence Act . Finally, the motive element under section 100.1 is constitutionally valid as it does not violate the freedom of religion under section 116 of the Commonwealth Constitution and only prohibits the advancement of a religious cause through violent means. Ultimately, it is imperative that terrorism is carefully defined with reference to a clear motive element to accurately distinguish it from other types of offences and serve the criminal law’s declaratory function of communicating to offenders and society what makes terrorism distinctively wrongful. Deborah White Deborah White is a criminal prosecutor from New South Wales, Australia. She completed an MPhil in Criminological Research from the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and served as President of the Cambridge Graduate Law Society. Deborah holds a Bachelor of Law and International Relations from the University of Sydney. [1] Andrew Ashworth and Jeremy Horder, Principles of Criminal Law (Oxford University Press 2013) 155. [2] De Gruchy v The Queen [2002] HCA 33 [28] per Gaudron J, McHugh J and Hayne J. [3] Criminal Code 1995, (Cth) s. 100.1. [4] Frederick J Hacker, ‘Terror and Terrorism: Modern Growth Industry and Mass Entertainment’ (1980) 4 Terrorism: An International Journal 143. [5] Criminal Code (n 3) 100.1(1)(b). [6] ibid 100.1(1)(c). [7] ibid 100.1(1)(a). [8] The requirement for proof of mens rea is described by the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department as ‘one of the most fundamental protections in criminal law’ (Attorney-General’s Department (Cth), A Guide to Framing Commonwealth Offences, Infringement Notices and Enforcement Powers (2011) [2.26]). The principle of mens rea is confirmed in the Australian High Court case of He Kaw The v The Queen (1985) 157 CLR 523, 582. [9] Bernadette McSherry, ‘Terrorism Offences in the Criminal Code: Broadening the Boundaries of Australian Criminal Laws’ (2004) 27 UNSW Law Journal 354, 360. [10] Hyam v Director of Public Prosecutions (Cth) [1974] UKHL 2 [73]. [11] Alan Norrie, Law and the Beautiful Soul (The Glasshouse Press 2005) 37. [12] ibid 67. [13] Jeremy Horder, ‘On the Irrelevance of Motive in Criminal Law’ in Jeremy Horder (ed), Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, (4th edn, Oxford University Press 2000) 114. [14] ibid. [15] DPP v Karabegovic (2013) 41 VR 319. [16] Director of Public Prosecutions (Cth) v Fattal [2013] VSCA 276. [17] Phillip Ruddock, ‘Law as a Preventative Weapon Against Terrorism’ in Andrew Lynch, Edwina MacDonald, and George Williams (eds) Law and Libery in the War on Terror (The Federation Press 2007) 5. [18] United Nations Human Rights Commission, UNComHR Res 2001/37: Human Rights and Terrorism (2001) Preamble. [19] Ben Saul, Defining Terrorism in International Law (Oxford University Press 2006) 36. [20] Kent Roach, ‘The Case for Defining Terrorism with Restraint and Without Reference to Political or Religious Motive’ in Lynch, MacDonald, and Williams (n 17) 39. [21] ibid. [22] Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Review of Security and Counter Terror Legislation (December 2006) 5.25. [23] R v Mallah [2005] NSWSC 317. [24] Criminal Code (n 3) s. 147.2. [25] Mallah [2005] NSWSC 317 [26]. [26] ibid 317 [38]. [27] Ashworth and Horder (n 1) 22. [28] Saul (n 19) 16. [29] Security Legislation Review Committee (Sheller Committee), Parliament of Australia, Report of the Security Legislation Review Committee (Australian Parliament House, 2006) 6.22. [30] Paul Wilkinson, Terrorism and the Liberal State (Macmillan 1977) 47. [31] Michael V Bhatia, ‘Fighting Words: Naming Terrorists, Rebels and Other Violent Actors’ (2005) 26(1) The World Quarterly 13. [32] Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press 2013) 105. [33] James Chalmers and Fiona Leverick , ‘Fair Labelling in Criminal Law’ (2008) 71(2) MLR 217-46. [34] Ashworth and Horder (n 1) 77. [35] ibid 79. [36] Andrew Simester and G R Sullivan, Criminal Law: Theory and Doctrine (3rd edn, Hart Publishing 2007) 30. [37] Criminal Code (n 3) s. 101.1. [38] ibid s. 101.4. [39] Saul (n 19) 5. [40] R v Ney [2021] NSWSC 529[166-167] per Johnson J. [41] Bhatia (n 31) 18. [42] ibid 19. [43] Commonwealth of Australia, National Counter-Terrorism Plan (4th edn, Australia and New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, 2017) 10. [44] Papakosmas v The Queen (1999) 196 CLR 297[97]. [45] Elomar v R; Hasan v R; Cheikho v R; Cheikho v R; Jamal v R [2014] NSWCCA 303. [46] ibid 248. [47] ibid 156. [48] ibid 419. [49] ibid 409. [50] Fattal [2013] VSCA 276. [51] AB v Director of Public Prosecutions (Cth) [2016] NSWSC 1042. [52] AB [2016] NSWSC 104 [226]. [53] Fattal [2013] VSCA 276 [126] – [127]. [54] Khawaja v The Queen, 2012 SCC 69. [55] Criminal Code (Canada), RSC 1985, s. 83.01(1)(b)(i)(A). [56] Khawaja (n 54) 7. [57] ibid 6. [58] ibid 47.