Edgeborough Revisited: End of innocence

Back in 2010, I published a piece called ‘Edgeborough: testament to the old school’ (https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1639834-Edgeborough-Testament-2-t... ). It was a fifty year plus reflection on my two years there from the ages of eight to ten and and a discussion of the key legacy it had left me from the perspective of a now ageing man.

However, at the time of writing, I was blithely unaware of the tragic events that presumably (?) occurred after I left the place at the end of the summer term of 1958; i.e., the sexually predatory behavior towards students at the school by the then headmaster, Charles Mitchell, during the early-mid 1960s.

Recently, one of my slightly senior peers while I was at the school alerted me to to the terrible story of the sexual abuse of Marc Sindon, as reported in the Daily Mail in November 2015 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3308747/Dad-sent-school-knew-d-raped-ll-...).

I felt as if Mitchell had posthumously stuck a knife in my back in an act of absolutely unforgivable betrayal, not just of his students, the school, his family, himself and me, but everything that he had ever purported to stand for.

In my original essay, I perhaps rather naively said in reference to to my time at Edgeborough, “It was the only cultural experience I have ever had where the institution I was in was still fully intact, alive, breathing normally and still possessed of its integrity.”

Well, if that were indeed then still the case, it didn’t have long to live…

In my own defense, I also acknowledged in that essay that, ‘By the time I reached the middle of my secondary schooling in Australia into the early mid 1960s, it (the still extant traditional world, whose roots extended back into the classical period) was obviously disintegrating and I found myself becoming orphaned from the world of my forefathers.

The Deputy Headmaster of my Australian secondary grammar school made the mistake one day of talking about ‘turning us into Young Christian Gentlemen’ in a school assembly. There was audible laughter right round the auditorium. It was all over. Of course, the school in its present form could go on for several generations, but it would be just a well-endowed social museum full of mounted corpses and ghosts, playing charades for young tourists.’

What I did not reckon on was that I was not alone in this quandary. I would speculate something possibly snapped inside Charles Mitchell in the early 1960s. His alleged alcoholism and his subsequent egregious sexual delinquency may very well have been emblematic of something that included, but was also much larger than him.

I may have been culturally ‘orphaned’, but I had a lifetime to figure it out. For Mitchell, maybe he had lost faith because he felt that a lifetime of work and commitment had come to nothing, was crumbling under him and left him without a higher moral universe or purpose that would otherwise have contained and restrained his perverse sublunary passions.

For me it meant 3-5 years of debilitating depression and struggle, and then the rest of my life to make sense of what had happened. For him…. he was out of time and relevance towards the end of his life, stranded with nothing to show for it…. going through the motions...maybe.

Even if that were incontestably true, it would only be a pained and sorrowful explanation of his terrible behavior, not a justification. However, I think it is important that one tries to account for it in ways which while most uncertain and speculative, might possibly point us in the general direction of what has happened in the last 60-70 years and where it is driving us.

To do that at all convincingly, one needs to move beyond Mitchell and what may or may not have personally motivated his malfeasance within the institution and the boys he so damaged, to get an overview of why and how, over that period and since, such execrable behavior became pandemic….and/or suddenly much more visible than it has ever been in the past.

I have spent some time thinking and writing about this subject, before I knew about Sindon (and likely related cases) in relation to the Australian Catholic Church and its most senior current leader, Cardinal Pell, who is concurrently (now on leave) Vatican prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy; the third most powerful man in the church.

Pell himself is now back in Australia from the Vatican and facing trial for alleged sexual abuses of his own, which might account for his glacial conduct in relation to the sexual crimes of some of his priests. When I wrote about it, he was begging off on grounds of his health, from coming back to face some hard questions from an Australian Royal Commission, as to why he and others did nothing to prevent sexual abuses of children under his watch….

My article, ‘Children, Sex and Adult Responsibility’ covers many of the bases I want to raise here, but in a much more general and parallel context of what is now possibly the beginnings of a major shift in our attitude to sex and how we deal with it, for good and ill. https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/2076813-Children-Sex-and-Adult-Re... .

It discusses the dynamics of the problem of adult sexual predation on children and why it has been, until this century, almost impossible to deal with. It tries to get some perspective on this phenomenon; i.e., how it may or may not have ebbed and flowed over much longer periods of time and why it is now possible to manage such problems without the prospect of radiating collateral institutional and personal catastrophe overwhelming all other considerations, such as honest and responsible concern for justice and accountability to the law, compassion for the victim(s) and sense of duty to prevent further offending.

Most of all, it addresses the causes of this problem in the context of a libertarian consumer society that has systematically unpicked inhibition and ‘repression’ as positive social attributes. I propose to discuss this aspect more extensively in this essay.

This is not an easy discussion, not just because it demands quite a lot from the reader, but because it is already a very politically contentious matter. It is indicative of not just an alleged decline of the market and social libertarian ideas that have characterized regime ideology since WW2, but a full-on attack; one that has been initially spearheaded by religious fundamentalism and is now beginning to secularize. This attack goes after the humanist apparatchiks who now virtually control our system of social administration, as well as transnational corporatism, that together form the twin pillars of indulgence capitalism; i.e., the Church and Crown duopoly of our age, or what is left of it.



So...very likely, once alerted to Mitchell’s behavior, the Edgeborough board of governors would have seen that the only course was to get rid of him as quickly and quietly as possible, cauterize the institutional wound by restructuring the place completely, maintain absolute silence and hope that the awful and scandalous story (stories) would never surface to destroy the place’s reputation/viability, or, only do so long enough after the event(s) such that the successor school administration could sufficiently distance itself from its history to minimize damage, and enable it to plausibly (and possibly truthfully) deny all present institutional knowledge, responsibility, or suspicions as to its present practices and values.

I would have to admit that had I been in one of the governors’ shoes at the time, I would have probably advocated the same, because if it had come out then, the place would likely not have survived the scandal, or if it had, been forced through a ruinously expensive and reputationally very wounding exercise that would have taken years of rebuilding to overcome. And it would have done a lot of collateral damage to substantial numbers of people who had done nothing to deserve having their lives turned upside down, in the glare of some very unpleasant publicity with which they would be ineluctably associated.

At the time, the fate of Sindon and possibly other victims would have been a ‘deeply regrettable’ and ‘sad’ secondary consideration to the larger picture of institutional preservation and minimization of harm for the greatest number of parties associated with the school.

But of course, the damning sine qua non for getting Mitchell’s ‘co-operation’ to leave ‘quickly and quietly’, was that he would walk away reputationally and legally unscathed with most of his capital intact. And while in his case, being already close to retirement meant it was unlikely that he would have got the opportunity to re-offend, at least in a school context, generally this procedure left offenders free to attack the children in the next institution they moved into, as in the case of the Catholic Church.

That institutional response would have been par for the course. It would not have occurred to any responsible individuals or bodies to have done anything else. And of course, this almost universal institutional and personal behavioral response made it all but impossible to tell empirically whether this predatory pattern of sexually deviant behavior has always been thus and that we just haven’t heard about it before. There were overwhelming forces at play that would make very sure it didn’t, if it were at all conceivably possible.

It must have been the same with ‘Chalky’, our stentorian senior matron who seemed to us to be made of steel, but who just silently patched up the raped Marc Sindon and sent him to bed. Silence, because it was just too hard. How many other kids did she patch up I wonder?

And why didn’t she do ‘the right thing’ either?

The answer to that isn’t as simple as noting that going to the police likely would be personally ruinous to what small portion was left of her career and possibly her pension as well.

I would speculate that Mitchell’s behavior, from the perspective of such a traditionalist pillar of the Old Order as Chalky, was so ‘off the wall’, that even the evidence of her own ears and eyes told her that this was an ‘inoperative statement’ of fact; an overwhelmingly impossible fact that someone like Mitchell, in such a key leadership position, with such immense moral authority, standing and the almost universal respect for it within the school community, could possibly have done something so appallingly at variance with his persona, so calamitously irresponsible and so criminally malign.


It wouldn’t take much casting around to invent possible (fanciful) scenarios as to how the boy might have been ‘making it up’, to cover up nefarious sexual self-experimentation-gone- wrong, or covering for a party or parties unknown who had assaulted him and intimidated him into blaming the headmaster.

‘Knowing’, admitting to ‘knowing’ and not wanting ‘to know’ are slightly different animals. But if one wants to compare these subtle but important distinctions with similar behaviors in other sectors of life, the anthropogenic climate change ‘skepticism’ of market libertarians and their sympathizers tick all the same spurious denial boxes, as to the ‘impossibility’ of market mechanisms being so fatally flawed, because for 250 years they have totally ignored the real cost of environmental ‘services’.

Religious fundamentalist denial of scientific evolutionism is another one. I remember years ago watching an Australian Broadcasting Commission program on the ludicrously named and ideologically fantasist ‘Creationist Museum’ in the US. The program interviewed a spokesman who also happened to be a NASA physicist. He said something to the effect that if there were a clash between the Biblical Word of God and Physics, the word of God would prevail…. That was it; putting the blind into blind faith….

And in that vein, for Chalky, admitting to herself what Mitchell’s had done, likely put into question the value of her world view and faith in it. He led the congregation of that school in almost all its religious services, every night and twice on Sunday, with all the gravity and purposeful concentration on prayer and worship that you would expect, that was required of us to follow and emulate; supposedly communing with our God to make us all better people, as exemplified by the life, teachings, and claimed death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ.

Admitting the terrible truth meant accepting all that had now been turned into a ghastly blasphemous sham.

But it gets worse. Even if she had gone to the police, Marc Sindon may have found the whole business so terrifying that he might well clam up and refuse to corroborate her evidence, for in the event, he may well have been just too cringingly ashamed and upset to speak of the trauma of what had happened to him, even though the evidence of his injuries must have been plain enough. And then, even if he did find the courage to speak to the police, he would have to repeat the whole hideous exercise in a court under cross examination.

Moreover, the police would very likely be just as reluctant as she was to believe ‘the impossible’, which would make her position very precarious. And procedures for dealing with such matters were not even as vaguely protective of third parties, procedurally thorough and scientifically verifiable as they are now, that would coax people out of the culture of silence.

She might well have found herself becoming a victim of the crime and made to look like she was the one with ‘the problem’; of being a dangerously over-suspicious and prurient zealot that did not belong at Edgeborough…. her home...because she was the one who had tried to bring the whole place down on the heads of everyone else.

I do not flatter myself that I would have been more courageous than her, if I had been in her shoes. And when one starts to look around, there are not that many amongst us who are.

Such moral valor has been recently famously brought to light in my Australian home state of Victoria, by a policeman called Dennis Ryan, in relation to an early 1970s case of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. His was a very singular sort of courage. The story is as fascinating as it is sad, for both the child victims whose abuser not only went unpunished and able to move on to commit many more crimes, but Sergeant Ryan himself, who became a victim when he tried to do his job and seek justice. It destroyed his career. See http://www.smh.com.au/national/they-destroyed-denis-ryans-police-career-now-they...

Silence…prompted not just by the prospect of institutional and personal catastrophe, not just plaguing self and outsider doubt at the seemingly ‘impossible’, but the potential for really perverse outcomes if witnesses and investigators didn’t do ‘the right thing’ and appropriately corroborate her story, back her up and unflinchingly pursue justice. And you would have to be ‘brave’ to count on all that in the circumstances. Silence….



So... given just how extremely murky and silenced these sexual-political matters have traditionally been, I can only tackle this conundrum on the basis of an article of faith; an unsubstantiable hypothesis of ebb and flow which is at least as arguable and plausible as saying that it has always been a ubiquitous pandemic constant, as libertarian humanists, who wish to discredit the ‘authoritarian’, ‘repressed’ and ‘repressive’ governance of the traditional ancien regime are wont to suggest, to reinforce their own power and legitimacy, by pretending that these qualities generate and then conceal the very things they are meant to prevent.

Just to be clear, I am not for a moment suggesting that there isn’t a baseline constant at work. There will always be evil doers no matter how good the governance of any regime is. All one can say is that while no pretense at guarantees is made or implied, good and firm governance on balance reduces the pool of potential malfeasance. It makes what remains of it more affected by doubt and hesitancy, more layered and denser in that hesitation and doubt, more apprised of guilt and shame, more subterranean, backgrounded, and furtive in the presence of existentially robust, morally trained and vigilant people, armed with well-constructed and vigorously defended social infrastructure, and clear boundaries….whose moral language cuts off excuse and avenues of exploitable weakness within the existential and social fabric.

And that is just on the passive defensive side of the equation. Good governance constructs, models, mentors and constantly reinforces secure, positive, authoritative and virtuous internal and external ‘voices’ about doing the right thing, having the right attitude and constantly practicing it as a lifelong habit.


Good governance only limits evil. Nothing eliminates it, for it is as part of our nature as good. But we are not helpless pawns before the negative vectors of our nature, and good self and social governance throughout the reproductive and social cycle gives that side of us its best chance to prevail in what is a never-ending war that determines what we become and the legacy we leave behind.

And just like history itself, it is a moving feast that sometimes favors one side, or the other….



Our brain is not a single integrated unit, but an evolved and sometimes internally contradictory set of mechanisms. The base of the brain that we share with crocodiles is basic, robust and can only process and construct the simplest behavioral software infrastructure, as in the autonomic nervous system, sexual drives, fight and flight, rage and ecstasy, tenderness and hate; in short, our passions, using powerful hormones to drive them. The consequential reasoning faculties found in the much more recently acquired frontal lobes can be both selfish and other regarding, but they do not have control over hormones that can crash through both virtuous and unscrupulous rational calculation, and disrupt the best laid plans for good and ill.

Hormones can combine with the best and worst of us to amplify the childishly irresponsible and impossible romance of a Romeo and Juliet, to the spontaneous heroic behavior of a VC winner, to the nun who minister to lepers, to the interrogator, who in a spasm of impatient anger and frustration kills a potentially valuable subject, or so injures them they are in no state to give vital time-is-of-the-essence information.

There is nothing simple or unilinear about any of us and how we manage the sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, but always powerful ‘beast in the basement’, which can be at once our truest friend and worst enemy in the same breath. But my proposition is that secure and socially well-trained people who have a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses as characters and an equally clear sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ (whatever they happen to be at the time) within their setting, will on balance, do the ‘right’ thing and effectively discipline disruptive urges, blind egoism and deliberate malfeasance more often and reliably than those not similarly endowed.

My second proposition is that a strong social commons (that tends to produce more morally clear, secure and well-trained populace more often than ones that don’t) armed with powerful institutions give the individual very ‘persuasive’ (if not always pleasant from our point of view) prompts, whether they be driven by the Nazi or Stalinist Communist parties, the military or religious institutions.

One of my most ongoingly consistent studies during my life has been about how well social organisms can, at least for a time, condition and shape human behavior, even against ‘normal’ individual attributes and instincts, whether it be to promote mass murder, heroic sacrifice, saintly love or the capacity to resist overwhelming temptation or barriers to doing the right and equitable thing, especially when it comes to that endlessly potent brew; money, power and sex.

Thus, if a social organism is having obvious and chronic problems with financial corruption, abuse of power and profligate sex, it shouldn’t come as a colossal surprise that it isn’t generally traveling well. That is a truism, but it also happens to be true.

And it is probably also true that the sexual politic of England in the early-mid 1960s was starting to feel the tectonic shift that one might expect just before the earthquake that shook down not just the last of the ‘prudishly respectable’ and straight-laced bourgeois sexual conventions going back centuries, but anything that got in the way of the roll out of corporately and consumer driven indulgence capitalism.

When any institutions are in good shape and doing what they are designed to do on a thorough and consistent basis, they overall likely get reliable and consistent results for the desired behaviors they want. If the paradigm shifts and does so thoroughly, well trained people compliantly switch, like they did in Germany during and after the denazification campaigns. Committed Nazis became committed democrats and instead of dutifully reporting Jews to the Gestapo, they reported recycling laggards to the waste management utility instead.

And if the regime starts to wane, so does the standard of compliance to its dicta. If the discipline, respect and commitment within a military unit deteriorates, as it did in some US units during the Vietnam War, its capacity to work efficiently and reliably to a high standard is reduced and it can become not just ineffective against the enemy, but dangerous to itself and a dysfunctional liability to other friendly forces when it has to go into action with them.

The first sign that things are not going well is if orders and laid down procedures are only being honored in the breach as discipline starts to fracture and unit loyalty factionalizes. It is thus with any regime.

Social libertarians would suggest a form of sexual exceptionalism to this rule of discipline that asserts that particularly in relation to sex (and to a lesser extent money and power) compliance to ‘repressive’ moral norms is necessarily and inherently ‘squeeze here bulge out somewhere else’ exercise on the surface only, which is inevitably sanctimoniously covered by substantial layers of hypocrisy, cant and defensive nominal outward conformity. They would also suggest that by removing those obstacles to freeing up ‘honest and open’ relationships, more ‘natural and wholesome’ social politics would ‘normalize’ sexual negotiation and prevent damn wall breakouts of covert, secretive, unresolved, unedited, unmanaged and probably unpleasant pent-up agenda.

I would answer that by suggesting the liberal view is in deep denial about the value of well trained and disciplined behavior and wildly optimistic about an open (‘liberated’) politic that in the event rapidly became a year round open season sex hunt on women and their sexuality, from first date gimmes, to workplace come-ons, to their iconic display as mindlessly objectified creatures of consumer satisfaction in the public domain, that left them with a cultural status little better than prostitutes...but who would do it for nothing, because if she didn’t, someone else would; in short, not very liberating at all.

As with the military example above, what that dishonest outward conformity beyond a certain point means is a moral/social governance regime starting to internally disintegrate and no longer able to drive its agenda far enough into the ‘hearts and minds’ of its subjects to effectively address and exercise control of their underlying agendas and self discipline. I would further suggest that as the nineteenth century progressed (a period favored by libertarians as one notorious for hypocrisy) and materialist/secular ideology pressed forward, while formal institutional church authority was not noticeably affected, its moral reach likely shortened and weakened. And the extent of hypocrisy within it and the communities it ministered to might be a good measure of that, if one could prove it, which would be hard to determine from a behavior that by definition is covert, during a period when record keeping wasn’t what it is now (which makes what documentation that does exist vulnerable to ideological exaggeration, extrapolation, skewing and editing to either whitewash or blacken the ancien regime).

And that is part of the problem here. Evidence in these matters is to put it mildly, tricky, like quantifying prostitution in the nineteenth century, that for instance might suggest an indicator of the extent of honoring public morality in the breach. The data is all over the place.

To balance that to some extent, the following story, while not stand alone evidence, is illustrative of just how disciplined and robustly hard line the old order was, when still in some semblance of its prime.

My maternal family lost a great uncle of mine just before the turn of the twentieth century. He was discovered stealing apples from a neighbor's orchard and while escaping this predicament, he pierced his leg on a cast iron picket which formed part of the fence he was trying to jump over. He managed to get off it and ran home, bleeding, but not severely.

His father, who was at home, apprised himself of the wound and how it was inflicted, thrashed him mercilessly and frog marched him back to the neighbor's house to personally own up and apologize to him for his behavior, without dressing the wound, to make it perfectly clear to the neighbor that the gravity of the wound was nothing compared with the gravity of the theft….and that he had been appropriately punished.

The boy subsequently died of septicemia.

In those days, such a hardline attitude was commonplace, because the poor behavior of one family member reflected badly on the rest of it. The parents were absolutely responsible for his behavior, values and attitude; in short, his character. His thieving was not his fault. It was theirs. Their ‘failure’ had undermined part of the social structure of their community. The rent in its moral fabric required sufficiently drastic repair work that it would convince everyone how seriously and vigorously it was being managed and restoration made.

For Victorian social mores, it didn’t matter how small the theft was, because it wasn’t just about the value of the property, so much as what was ‘in the miscreant’s heart’ and how that reflected on his development as a character and the competence/rectitude of his parents. The boy had shown himself to be a dishonest thief. Having one of those in the family was intolerable. Its standing in the community would be almost as damaged as if he had stolen a hundred pounds. And while the consequences of the family response turned out to be dire for the boy, the family honor was saved, and his fate became not just a family silence, but mute reminder of the absolute necessity for honest self-governance and reputational integrity.

His death was a punishment not for failing to give him immediate medical assistance, but that his parents had somehow not taught him properly about always doing right. And that is what they blamed themselves for. Had they done the ‘right thing’, he would never have injured himself on the fence in the first place.

The bottom line was, it would not cross the mind of a properly brought up boy to either trespass or steal, because he had been taught the necessary virtues and respect for others that are the mark of a ‘proper’ person.

Fast forward the trend of 60-70 years of moral ‘relaxation’ through two world wars, a depression and then the beginnings of the biggest economic explosion of indulgence in history, then a pandemic of major breaches in the moral wall like Mitchell’s are not such a surprise.

I am suggesting here that what we are talking about is a constantly moving feast, as in under the Chinese empire, when dynasties would go through cycles of energetic dynamism, high levels of accountability and responsible governance, followed by stability, gradual relaxation and then decline. And as that decline intensified from small and furtive bureaucratic peccadillos and corruptions to ever more ambitious and blatant misgovernance big enough to be disastrous, if anything went wrong as a result (like killer floods caused by inadequate maintenance of the dykes), people would start to see the beginnings of a shift in the ‘Mandate of Heaven’; i.e., loss of respect, disorder, rebellion and the prospect of a new dynasty.

That kind of pattern of growth, stability, wear and tear and disintegration accompanies all living artifacts through time. The modern period, like any other one, has had a beginning, middle and eventually, likely an end. The myth that modern times will beat the ordinary effects of civilizational wear and tear and go on indefinitely is probably nothing more than ideological conceit. But like the old mother church at the beginning of the modern age, it may give itself an extra lease of life by root and branch reform, as a smaller player in a very violently restructured game (wars of toleration).

When the severely corrupted and reputationally very damaged late medieval church was sprung by the rise of Protestantism, it radically cleaned up its act to the point that church functionaries were much less inclined to deviate from the straight and narrow. And if they did, it likely was never more than an agonizingly guilty and shamefaced private fantasy only ever indulged in during the dead of night….and alone...and then confessed and penanced, probably with a self administered whip and/or some thoroughly irksome and costly sacrifice of time and effort, to mollify the outrage of The Almighty and the confessor, and eventually, avoid attracting the ‘interest’ of The Inquisition…..


In my article on Pell and Co I suggested that sexual offenders are impossible to ‘cure’ or alter their behavior through confession, repentance and penance, because that sort of stuff never goes away or leaves its subject alone. But I would gloss that by asserting that there is a quite long journey of peeling away normal defenses and inhibitions that started through inter-generational deterioration in governance and finally, when enough of the chocks that once maintained ‘normal’ behavior had been removed, the trend matured into overtly dangerous social product. By the time ‘at risk’ people become offenders, they have so lost (or never received) a sense of shame, conscience and social consequentiality, and become so accustomed to the idea, fantasy and habit of ravishment, that they do not really want to desist, nor perhaps do they have the moral resources left to resolutely get out of that space where fantasy takes over from reality and denies it to others.

For the ordinary punter however, with sexual tendencies they need to lock up and throw away the key, they can do it and be masters or mistresses of their lives in the same way as anyone else. Almost none of us are absolutely helpless before our desires, contrary to myths put about by Sales & Marketing Inc and its indulgent little libertarian helpers. It may be a requirement of our economy to indulge our fantasies because ‘we owe it to ourselves’, but, “We don’t have to go along with that, do we boys and girls?....”.

“Errrr…..No Miss!”

The effects of the Counter Reformation within the Catholic Church likely went on in slightly less radical and more attenuated form until after WW2. And by the time the likes of Cardinal Pell and his mates arrived on the scene in the 1970s, after Vatican 2 had done away with the strict old regime, as a tidal wave of ‘liberation’ threatened to overrun them, the rats started coming out of their holes in the basement…..and started to occupy the place. The wider economic and social environment was selling temptation, inconsequentiality, egoistic solipsism and giving into it as if there were no tomorrow….

Mitchell and some others of his generation and those after him were not immune to this creeping flood of self indulgence in an indulgence economy armed with an indulgent libertarian social ideology, where restraint and discipline were not just uncool, but ‘repressive’ and ‘authoritarian’...and feeling the pressure of their increasingly disinhibited surroundings, whose moral boundaries were disappearing as fast as any other endangered species.

He and the Catholic Church were just one pair of numerous institutions and individuals, both secular and sacerdotal, that fell foul of the wind that blew in as the consumer and sexual revolutions wound themselves up. Anything that did not conform to the indulgence juggernaut was looking down the barrel of defeat and marginalization as consumer capitalism overwhelmed everything it touched, from natural environments, to balanced and moderate economic management, to secure and stable social behavior and existential grounding.

There are no excuses. There is no such thing as moral exceptionalism (generally bogus special pleading, usually beloved of adolescents and banksters, that asserts present behavior and circumstances are so unique, special and ‘exceptional’, ordinary rules of conduct and judgement no longer apply) .

We all have an overwhelming duty to do right and give succor to the rules of conduct, attitude, mentoring and character development assumed and embodied in our social commons, that ought to be reliably sustaining us, if it were still there and not all but destroyed. Those commons are part of our net worth as individuals and communities, Without them, no matter how much we possess, we are as poor and wretched as beggars. The city of the imagination becomes a slum. Hope in righteousness and virtue is extinguished. Faith becomes ungrounded and blinded. Reason becomes compassless opportunism and rationalization.

I think that what has happened to people like Mitchell and Pell and the awful data that seems to be coming out of the woodwork around them, out of what is left of our social infrastructure and the common decency and mentoring templates that once richly populated it, is that we are reaching a point of no return where we either grasp the nettle of high integrity sustainable practice across all areas of conduct, or face civilizational collapse.

One of the ominous features of the rise of the Nazi and Soviet states was that their citizens became caught in a hopeless cleft between traditional notions of decency that had been locked down and marginalized into the realm of the selectively personal (the apolitical realm of family and friends) on the one side, and on the other, modern totalitarian state demands for absolute conformity that all too often turned the traditional collective virtues and sense of right into their opposite; i.e., egregious crimes against humanity.

The totalitarian states helped morally decapitated all collective notion of right and compelling adherence to it, which made it very easy to subsequently narrowly privatize the whole collective moral edifice into solely individual discretion, which became very vulnerable to colonization by the marketing system, armed with budgets that dwarfed those of the totalitarian dictatorships of the past.

The democratic successor regimes progressively squashed regime production and consumption politics and values into the realm of the individual and the personal, until nearly everyone was reduced to a 24/7 contractor production warrior and shop trooper with a license ‘to kill’ any opportunity to save while they spent, for any satisfaction that they could find, afford (or not), use and throw away, because they ‘owed it’ to themselves and ‘deserved it’...had a right to it.

These regime characters were altogether stripped of any other moral context, as World War military machine controlled production of ordnance expended onto battlefields was subsumed by marketing machine controlled production war, delivering consumer ordinance fired into market battlefields, where only extremist productivity and indulgently compulsive spending mattered.

And I am suggesting that one was coming home to roost by the 1960s, and then turned into a tsunami during the following decade; i.e., a whole generation of people who became interested in little else except getting its buttons pressed, Domestic infrastructure was stripped of its labor, secure longevity and coherence over a reproduction cycle in order to earn surplus income to pay for it, and borrowing the rest, as the victim’s metaphoric souls died in action, under constant barrages of consumer satisfactions and the cult of me-oh-my-oh-I-oh…..me-oh….

All this was happening as liberty transformed into egoistic disinhibiton and rights became consumer entitlements, as democracies descended into a totalitarian and libertine conformity even more profound than its police state predecessors. And in the process, not only were society, social norms and enforcement of its edicts rendered obsolete, but its surplus to requirements moral software was quietly dumped into the deletion repository of history.

Some people would like us to believe that this has been ‘progress’ and the apotheosis of The Enlightenment that came out of the movement for the deregulatory privatization of the economic and social commons that arose towards the end of the eighteenth century and heralded the industrial revolution. And it is in a perverse kind of way, but if the utilitarian philosophers who kicked it off could have foreseen what would become of their work, with most of the social and moral agency torn out in favor of marketing, I suspect they would have torn up their writings and thrown them in the nearest fire.

The Reformation that heralded the modern age may well be replicated as it approaches its end, as tolerance of corruption closes off, axiomatic non-negotiable ‘no pasaran’ bottom lines get drawn and people start to die to defend them. That is already starting to assemble itself and the fundamentalists that are driving that, whether secular or sacerdotal, won’t be taking no for an answer. They have already seen enough of the effects of deregulation of the commons not to tolerate the feckless decadence that is its legacy to the future.

It is not enough to damn Mitchell and his like. They are the tip of an iceberg of fantasy malpractice and blind, irresponsible and inconsequential attitude that has gone too long unchallenged and is filtering into third and fourth generation of people whose social software either hasn’t been constructed at all, or only just enough to turn them into reliable production warriors and shop troops, trained not by their families, but as heard and seen on...and articulated by the ‘Pied Pipers of Cool’; i.e., abject prisoners who are not constrained by chains and walls, but visions of paradise that tell them it is all about them, brought to them by The Proud Sponsors, who tell them a thousand times a day that if it feels good, it is good….and anything goes because anything does…


It is easy to feel sanctimonious when some wicked pedophilic wretch is caught, tried and given his theatrical comeuppance by an obviously outraged judge. I watched that miserable pedophile Larry Nassar, an ex US gymnastics Olympic team doctor, getting 175 years for his crimes and thinking…. how good is that?... and then thinking, how many people do we have to torture to death to get that kind of sentence?... to thinking that this was a bit like a 1930s show trial of communist apparatchiks who had clearly done all the awful stuff they were accused of, but were also regime fall guys.

What at the time was not articulated was that they had been regime apparatchiks and doing its bidding to the letter, which was now post-facto declared to be a pattern of ‘excesses’ and ‘personal’ malfeasance. For the Soviet regime it was a cleansing catharsis that would shift blame for some particularly nasty regime policies and practices onto its former servants, who would take the ritual condemnation and the rap.

In the case of the trial of Larry Nassar, just like the Soviet trials, it is not that he didn’t do everything that he was accused of, and everything that we know he was not accused of (segue to the litany of distressing stories that occupied the week long sentencing hearing, told by other victims besides the ones for whose crimes against them he was found indisputably guilty).

What was not articulated is that if a social system systematically pulls the plug on decent social governance and infrastructure over a seventy year period, the blame for the very predictable ‘excesses’ and ‘personal malfeasance’ has to go somewhere other than the indulgent and disinhibited humanist-without-constraints regime that made it all possible...and likely.

“Our social libertarian brothers and sisters couldn’t possibly be guilty of perversely undermining the constraints that maintain civil order, respect and responsible governance, because they do good and mean well, don’t they boys and girls?”

“Yes Miss!”

And the team doctor got away with it over 4 Olympics in almost plain sight and the people who looked the other way and became complicit weren’t in the dock with him, because it was too hard; because fifty to seventy years ago, we only thought about the upsides of sexual ‘liberation’ and chose not to think too hard about the down ones; because that wouldn’t serve the interests of social and economic indulgence, and the release from the fuddy duddy repressions and constraints of the past...so necessary for turning citizens into helpless consumers and self-indulgent egoists, who would buy absolutely anything.

Similarly, how do we deal with equally unpleasant and apparently pandemic domestic assault and battery in the context of a sexual politic and reproductive commons that has degenerated into a completely dysfunctional laissez-faire shambles?

“Well of course the cause of the problem is the male perpetrator and his violence, isn’t it children?”

“Yes Miss!”

And while that is incontrovertibly true, that proposition quietly obscures the other facts and consequences of social organ failure that is bound to occur in its wake, as a result of: no structures to ensure stable governance over a reproductive cycle; no coherent adult responsible partnership/gender templates, and no role mentorship, modeling and training procedures (feminist ones would do nicely) to roll them out with; no time and effort investment and maintenance budgets to ensure adequate resourcing of social performance; no social model design and product standards with firm rules and systematic internal enforcement of them; no auditing and accounting procedures to measure performance benchmarks; no enforceable overarching regulatory system to which everyone is externally accountable; and most important of all, no political defense system to prevent the predatory looting of domestic resources by the rest of the economic system; you know, refusing to treat socialization as if it produced the most important ‘industry’ product we make; our children, so that they can reliably and securely carry forward the fundamentals of what it means to be a high integrity and competent man and woman (who aren’t overgrown adolescent with confused gender values), and mother and father (who aren’t just childminders-with-credit-cards), so that that the next generation can pass on those inestimable gender, partnering and parenting qualities in their turn.


The refusal by capitalism to put a concrete value (money) on environmental services meant ecological resources could be looted without apparent cost. Exactly the same thing happened to the domestic production system (our reproductive system), as time, labor and attention were syphoned into the consumer production system. The return of male resources into the sector to replace lost female labor was never on the agenda. And the child care services that were returned not only were not even remotely a substitute for real parenting, but parenting itself increasingly became child care as socialization was farmed out to the Pied Pipers of Cool and the voices in the system of sales and marketing, as seen or heard on...

So... the blame for male violence is regime shifted from the political to the personal. The guy is punished, justice is done, the chaotic social continuum is maintained. The social libertarian apparatchiks who control our system of social administration maintain their legitimacy and lush bureaucratic careers in the education, welfare, health and legal governance systems that they inherited along with their neo-liberal corporate opposite numbers in the economic sector, who spewed out of the humanities and economics departments of the universities in the 1970s and ever bloody since...with whom they quarrel and jostle like cat and dog, much as those church and crown establishment pillars of the medieval world once did.

There are no excuses for rape and violence prone male predators. They are still personally to blame for their crimes and while they need to be held accountable and punished for them, so is the chronic lack of social infrastructure that produces their dysfunctional behavior and lousy attitudes...and then does nothing about them until a crime is committed..

That is why I am enraged not just at the rape and pillage of our planet and a production extremist resource gobbling, waste avalanching and wealth distribution distorted economic system run by corporate libertarians, but the same destructive and irrational evisceration of our social infrastructure, by the social ones.



So here is the rub...If I could, I would dig up Charles Mitchell’s remains, gibbet them, kick his boney arse repeatedly and furiously vent my rage on his corpse until exhaustion. It would make me feel so much better. But, after a suitable rest and a beer or two, I would then tell the wretched bastard that his work was not in vain; that I have taken the best of him and run with it; that the piece of Edgeborough that speared itself into me as child, which I struggled to make sense of over the next sixty years, meant something and produced a coherent answer to the challenge it and he set.

Sure, the roots he carried forward and eventually betrayed have failed and are irretrievably gone. But the lessons I carried away from him were not his particular traditional cultural roots and world view, but rather the absolute necessity to have deep cultural roots of some sort that we can regrow into an existentially robust, appropriate for the times and sustaining tradition designed for high integrity performance, that can be carried forward on a protracted multi-generational basis.

The aggressive emergence of old-time religious fundamentalism within the global firmament since the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the first downfall of a western secular satrap in Iran in favor of theocracy, is amongst other things, a crie de coeur that desperately needs at any price a re-integration of the common weal and private/individual interest, where the latter no longer robs the former of its integrity and necessary role in balancing and guiding both the private and public realms. Sharya, like ecclesiastical law once did, demands accountability across the whole behavior spectrum. And that demand is mounting, not diminishing.

When you look at my region (Australia) of the world, hard line religious conservatism and fundamentalism is on the march, whether we are talking Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and even Christianity, if one cribs a bit into sub saharan Africa.

The Singaporean ‘Straits Times’ reports on Muslim politics in Johor (a Malaysian regional state government immediately adjacent to Singapore) which goes into detail about ‘Johor's Malays tilt towards conservative Islam: Survey’. The findings are sobering take on the spread of traditional Islamic conservatism and the demand for ‘hudud’ (traditional Islamic punishment) out of rural into urban areas that were once more ‘liberal’.
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/johors-malays-tilt-towards-conservative... .

The fact is governance cannot go on being just a matter of licensed disinhibiton and not too obviously injuring others within a very forgiving and loophole rich legal system. That formulation is collapsing under the weight of irresponsible, inconsequential and morally exceptionalist individual/private interest without boundaries, with all the disciplines and mechanisms for generating good social product and responsible behavior removed. That is a toxic formula for a disaster that is already starting to unfold, whether we are talking about the grotesque institutional cannibalism, looting, cheating and fraud that characterized the decision making of financial institutions that led to near catastrophe in 2008, to the wanton street looting and violence by lumpenproletarian scum that followed that year.

Just to demonstrate that nothing much has changed since then, the Australian Commonwealth bank (the largest of ‘the big 4’) has been since then successively caught out cheating its customers and the rest of the system through insurance policy and financial advice scams, manipulating the benchmark interest rate used by the Australian financial market to price loans, and last but not least, money laundering. And in case that weren’t enough, the outrageously scandalous Panama and Paradise Papers tax-holiday bonanza for those who don’t give a damn about anything except the size of their own wealth portfolios, demonstrates that sexual malfeasance is just one of our disappearing governance and moral engagement indicators.

Unconscionably screwing others and the common weal doesn’t stop at either our nether ends and our rape fantasies!


Charles Mitchell may have betrayed his trust, but he taught me that life is a stewardship that is underpinned by fundamental rules of social wellbeing that serve it; that we must conform to them; that there are no excuses for not doing so; that there is no quarter offered to those who break them; and that one must carry that uncompromising hardline sensibility into the next generation.

These are the bottom lines of existence as a person and a species. The fact that in the end Mitchell didn’t observe them is a bitter blow, but he is dead and we the living move on, wrestling with the larger perverse legacy that he and the system that likely helped him undo himself has left us. Without that sense of wanting to protect the integrity of the commons, nothing is secure and it will always be impoverished and wracked with disorder.

Moreover, when one thinks about this beyond being just an enormous current problem, one sees it as an accumulation of damaging ideas and damaged infrastructure that run back not just a few years or a few decades, but centuries. It is a bit like trying to stop a gigantic goods train. Even if one is capable of wresting control of this behemoth from a perverse management and control system going at full tilt with the accelerator on maximum, that does not mean a massive wrestling match with the brakes is going to stop it hitting the end of the line in the mother and father of all pile ups.

There isn’t much time and no one is anywhere near getting even close to the driver’s compartment so that they can apply the brakes. So, if I sound a bit ‘hard line’, impatient and not terribly fussy how it gets done, it shouldn’t come as an overwhelming surprise.

I am not a disciple of The Prophet Mohammed, but I like the way he lays out the rules for a good life, even if they are a bit seventh century patrist and overweening for what remains of my liberal taste. I like the way that mosque and imams dictate to business and industry, not the other way round, which is what happens to us within corporate oligarchies. What appeals to me is that the quality of one’s devotion to the teachings of the prophet is likely a better and more important indicator of well being than money or physical assets.

And it is not just his teachings, but anyone’s that encapsulates a plausible vision of a virtuous, righteous, well lived and disciplined life.

Mitchell taught me about the fundamentals and I am a fundamentalist and a hard liner who has more in common with the theocrats in Tehran than Trump’s America. I maybe a secular, but I am deeply religious. There is salvation to be had, but it is here, not in the hereafter. We may not live forever, but we can still leave a legacy that lasts for generations. Something of our genes and memory will be part of that legacy that is handed on, for good and ill. And whatever it is, it will persist to bless or blight those who follow us. Good or poor stewardship therefore is not temporary, but an intergenerational burden or empowerment, which means no effort or means should be spared to root out evil before it is inherited, and encourage virtue and goodness in its stead.



My above referenced article on Cardinal Pell is introduced by a Youtube presentation in his ‘honor’, written and sung by Australia’s razor's edged and talented Tim Minchin, who does a famous job of cutting the bastard and his church to ribbons. And one day, I hope to have the pleasure of doing the same to him with equally damaging weaponry, in formal debate, where he can’t control and monopolize the mike, the floor or stack the audience.

There were entertainers just as talented as our Tim in Nazi Germany, who would have done an equally devastating job on prominent Jewish bankers accused of collaborating with Germany’s enemies, to wreck the country as part of an international conspiracy of Jewish controlled financial institutions, by parasitically profiting from the country’s misfortunes and then spiriting the mind boggling profits away into their spidery transnational web.

“That does sound so plausible when one puts it like that. Isn’t that right children?”

“Yes Miss!”

“And these days, we can update those sentiments by just dropping the reference to Jews. How little has really changed! Isn’t that right children?”

“Yes Miss!”

Sorting out propaganda from something approximating the truth is like the process of court advocacy and a judge’s summation of the case, before it finally goes to the jury. And part of that is deconstructing the weight of evidence and the agendas driving it. Propaganda is meretricious packaging which looks good and easy to digest until you actually unpack and taste test it. Acolytes always swallow the damned thing whole.

Minchin’s story is only plausible if you stick to his narrative. And the test is checking what he doesn’t tell us…. which is the present regime complicity and collaboration entered into by libertarian institutions of both the market and social/civil varieties, that have laid waste to everything they have touched that does not promote deregulatory desolation in favor of private/individual interests. And therein lies my tale….

https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/2076813-Children-Sex-and-Adult-Re...

Finally, for those of you who haven’t yet found this essay a bit much and turned the feed off long before this, and, no matter how implausible this might seem, are still interested enough to find out what modern fundamentalism might look like, check out my vastly popular opus, unsurprisingly called ‘The Secular Fundamentalist’.

It is organized so that you can digest it in small bits on a dive in/jump out basis. It starts with chapter descriptions that give a reasonable idea of content, followed by an executive summary and introduction, and then separate links to each chapter you want to select.

https://www.writing.com/main/books/item_id/2064958-The-Secular-Fundamentalist


If some of my readers feel like discussing any of this with me personally, or anything else on my writing site ( https://www.writing.com/main/portfolio/view/kiffit ) please feel free to contact me on [e-mail] .

Go therefore in the peace
That is the fruit
Of your love’s labour.
Eat freely of it.
The more that you partake
Of love's repast,
the more it grows
To ripen sweet
Upon the palette's arch.

It can never cost too much.
Its value soars
Beyond its price
In currency most dear
Then stored within the heart
To succour all,
Its inner glow and cheer
To warm all those that come
Just to be near,
That they might pass it on,
Like ripples
'Cross a still
And golden pond

It will enrich us all
While you shall live
And be the better part
That you bequeath
Of your estate
As precious footprint
Compass
And guiding star.
For those who struggle on
And walk beneath.

Bless you.
May the warmth,
Comfort
And solidarity
We give to one another
Steel our hearts,
Conduct our lives
And hold us in good keeping,
Now,
And down the generations.