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CHAPTER IX

Evolutionary theory and social engineering: Richard Acland's Common Wealth

“I've neglected to tell you so far about the role stress plays in Fabian evolutionary theory. Just as Hegel taught that history moves faster toward its conclusion by way of warfare, so evolutionary socialists were taught by Hegel to see struggle as the precipitant of evolutionary improvement for the species, a necessary purifier eliminating the weak from the breeding sweepstakes. Society evolves slowly toward ‘social efficiency’ all by itself; society under stress, however, evolves much faster! Thus the deliberate creation of crisis is an important tool of evolutionary socialists. Does that help you understand the government school drama a little better, or the well-publicized doomsday scenarios of environmentalists?”

—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education

At the beginning of World War II, Norman Glaister and his friends joined Common Wealth, the new political party formed by Sir Richard Acland. Acland began as a “junior whip” for the Liberals. His politics apparently changed course and, in 1942, he broke from the Liberals to found Common Wealth with J. B. Priestley, thereby opposing the coalition between the major parties (see Acland, 1981). He helped form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957, of which my grandfather was a cofounder and, according to family history, helped design the famous Peace symbol that would be adopted by the counterculture. Common Wealth's interest in optimizing social organization consistent with its principles also led it to develop close links with the School of Integrative Social Research at Braziers Park.¹ But we know all this.

Of Common Wealth, etc., George Orwell wrote: “I think this movement should be watched with attention. It might develop into the new Socialist party we have all been hoping for, or into something very sinister.” Orwell, like Kitty Bowler, believed that Richard Acland had the potential to become a fascist leader (Simkin, 2014). Richard Acland also wrote a bunch of books, including his homage to Mein Kampf and What it Will Be Like in the New Britain, in which he talks about the need to break down the family unit. It was published by Victor Gollancz in 1942 (Gollancz was another member of the 1941 Committee, and Alec sent him regular donations). Sixty years later, Gollancz, the publishing house, would be part of Orion House Publishing, which is owned by Hachette, one of “The Big Five” publishing houses. In 1992, Hachette merged with Matra, the French automobile and missile building company. Gollancz, a.k.a. Orion, a.k.a. Hachette, a.k.a. Matra, would publish my book Matrix Warrior: Being the One, in 2003, about the need to break down, not just the family but the entire social “unit.” When I was offered the contract with Gollancz in 2002, I had a brief period of conscience-wrestling over the thought of making money for a company that would use it to build weapons of mass destruction. I had no idea how ironic Gollancz's affiliation was, in light of its original alleged ideological goals—or how closely that irony touched upon my own family background.

Yet here we are again. It is all of a piece, even though many of the parts have been lost or concealed to history—and not only my own. Growing up, I never had the slightest idea that socialism not only overlapped with, but was in some sense either a parallel project to or a cover for, social experimentation involving sex, drugs, and strange rituals. I was always under the impression that these areas were worlds apart (at least until the 1960s). A natural assumption, on discovering this strange overlap, is simply that the leftist reformers of my family and beyond were freethinkers and sexual libertines, and that, back in the day, they had to be discreet about it. But how well does this perhaps-too-easy assumption hold up when the sexual experimentation overlaps, not only with social and psychological research, but with the criminal underworld and the sexual exploitation of children for profit?

When it comes to attempting to map the shape of the past, there is always the tendency to try to create a narrative out of the available data and so force it to fit into that context. Ideally, the data reveals the context, and as it does so, the emerging context recontextualizes the data, allowing the two to feed into and support each other until a more or less complete picture emerges. Yet, when what is being explored is by definition incomplete, hidden, and inherently unfamiliar, even controversial, the chances of ever reaching a full picture are slim at best. Knowing and acknowledging the difference between fact and theory is never more crucial than when exploring the realms of hidden history (family or otherwise), since it inevitably overlaps with the phenomenon of conspiracy—that is, of individuals working together in secret, to bring about desired, usually criminal, ends.

I really don't want to theorize about conspiracy, only to lay out the evidence of conspiracy and let it speak for itself. At the same time, without some speculation, there's the danger that the material being presented will be confusing and overwhelming to the reader, raising too many questions for them to process. What does it all mean? What am I suggesting by presenting all of this apparent evidence—and evidence of what? Clearly, even by choosing to write this down, I must have some idea of what it means. So then why be evasive about that, especially when so much of the material seems quite contradictory?

The main hypothesis, or even deduction, which I think this data demands, is that seemingly unconnected, even disparate, groups and individuals appear to have been collaborating in ways that throw into question their public aims and characters. At which point, everything truly begins to look like a massive conspiracy. This may be a premature deduction. The easiest example that came to my mind while working on this piece was that of a body, human or otherwise, experienced from the inside, for example by a single blood cell. There may be an experience of the heart, the liver, the intestines, and the digestive tract. It may be possible to observe these different organs performing their various tasks, and to notice that certain processes are occurring, for example, that food coming into the stomach via one channel is being processed by a separate system and then conveyed down another channel. From the inside, there is no awareness of being on the inside of anything, because the body is its own internal environment. It's only through noticing the ways in which the various organs seem to be cooperating with each other and assisting with various processes that the idea of a larger body, containing everything, can be inferred.

It may be the same with the various groups and individuals which this work is exploring. The fact they take part in shared processes and seem to collaborate, while serving ostensibly separate, even opposed ends, suggests they are part of a larger system directing them externally. There is no need to assume that the majority of these individuals or groups are aware of being used by a larger governing intelligence, any more than a heart or a liver necessarily knows that it's working for the body. The way to recognize such a controlling intelligence is twofold: to trace the connections between apparently unconnected agencies; and to attempt to deduce from this the processes being implemented through these agencies. This then allows for the hypothesis of a containing body, whatever that might be, without really saying anything about it outside of its methods, means, and apparent aims.

In “The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust,” the psycho-historian Lloyd deMause talks about Weimar culture, the flourishing of the arts and sciences in Germany during the Weimar Republic. This period between Germany's defeat in World War I and Hitler's rise to power, deMause writes,

may have produced “exuberant creativity and experimentation” but also created “anxiety, fear and a rising sense of doom.” By the end of the 1920s, so many reactionary anti-democratic backlash parties had spontaneously sprung up that Weimar was called “a Republic without republicans.” People began to call for “emancipation from emancipation” and “a restoration of authoritarian rule.” (deMause, 2005)

What deMause is describing, in bald terms, is how a period of social and sexual freedom allows for a release of collective unconscious or “id” material in a people, and how this then leads to a corresponding reaction from the controlling ego, that is, to even more “Draconian” social restrictions. It's possible to extrapolate from such observable trends in history—both individual and collective—how such a principle could be consciously applied at the level of social engineering. If the aim, say, is totalitarianism, first promote the opposite ideas pertaining to individual freedom, sexual liberation, artistic expression, human rights, and drug experimentation. Such a form of deep psychosocial engineering could, hypothetically, proceed over generations, propagating a set of values to one generation so as to create an opposing reaction from the next. It could also proceed at a more localized, short-term level, over periods of months, days, and hours, even down to a micro-level, such as when a TV show promotes “radical” or anti-capitalist values while at the same time serving as product placement for corporations.

A very broad example of this might be how the promotion of individualistic, capitalist, consumer values over the second half of the twentieth century led to a supposed dead-end and “environmental crisis” in which individualism is frowned upon and seen as something to be curbed (often via draconian laws) in order to save “the planet” (collective). It also goes the other way, as when the collective “counter-cultural” values of the ’60s, promoting peace and harmony, led to the capitalist feeding frenzy of the ’80s—many of the feeders being former hippies who “wised up.”

It's possible to trace a direct correlation between this kind of social engineering and the psychological and biological model (and possibly agendas) of the Fabians, regarding evolutionary management through stress. Adversity breeds character, necessity is the mother of invention, and so on. The many bohemian artistic communities-cum-survival camps that arose in the 1930s (in tandem with National Socialism), and that combined sexual freedom, self-expression, and back-to-nature primitivism (paganism), may have started with the thinnest end of the wedge being gently inserted into the child-psyche (naked children encouraged to explore their sexuality rather than being shamed about it); but pretty soon, the id monsters were running the show.

From the LSE Vegetarianism thesis quoted previously:

During the twenties the influence of Freud on the progressive school movement—and indeed on progressivism generally—was marked, and Freudian theory was used to underpin the liberation of the child from adult repression and to justify the belief that the natural impulses should have free expression. In certain of the schools this produced a move towards a libertarian and anarchic ideal. The progressivism of the period, however, largely used Freud as a dissolvent of conservative social values, taking up the attack on traditional religion and upon patriarchal authority. It was, however, an essentially selective reading of Freud, one that passed over the darker Hobbesian aspects of his thought, focusing instead on its libertarian potential, which was then grafted on to an essentially non-Freudian model of man and his destiny—one that derived from the older romantic tradition. (Twigg, 1981, emphasis added)