FRACKING THE MIND:

ENOCH’S HAMMER, THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING & THE DELPHI TECHNIQUE

We have lost the tools of learning–the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane– that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”

The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy L Sayers (1947)

 

This is a tale of weaving, a tapestry of experience and knowledge; an unravelling and a synthesis; a spinning loom and a tumbling water fall of threatened purety; it is a worsted linen of action and effetism, a tale that ranges along a well-worn path that threads from Nottingham through the hills and valleys of Derbyshire and into the West Riding.It is an exotic silk of fact and metaphor, spun of gossamer threads as fragile as the webs of their weavers.

YESTERDAY afternoon Mel and i went to a meeting of a group concerned with Fracking in Nottinghamshire. The facefook page had stated it was to be a learning session, lasting for four hours with the approach being used that of the Delphi Technique. As far as genuine learning goes, it has limitations: we do not in fact learn collectively, as one mind. So when we turned up an hour after the start of the meeting we were expecting some direct action-planning on how the practice can be stopped by the people.

No such thing was likely. This was the fifth meeting, the diminutive organiser told me. Adults had been divided into 4 groups of 6 people, with each one focusing on particular aspects of Fracking. There was an ‘Action’ group, a ‘Nature’ group, a publicity group etc and each would move round after an allotted time.  The erroneous presumption was that this is such a complex subject and that ‘we’ couldn’t possibly begin to understand it on our own and that the best way to do this was in discussion groups where we all learn together, as one congealed jelly-brained whole.

This deliberately and artificially divides and separates the various strands of the subject ~ it fractures the whole matter, the facts of which can be instantly gleamed from any of a variety of you tube films, into various fragments.

When i asked what action the group was proposing to take over the threat posed by fracking, the woman became a tad belligerent, suggesting that if i were an expert then it wasn’t really the place for me to be … and that if I was interested in actions that could be taken, then i should join the ‘action’ group.

When i asked what instruction people were being given about potential lawsuits against those directly culpable, of ways to stop the lorry convoys, of lessons to be learned from Barton Wood, about tactics for handling false arrests, i was met with the blank stares and timid obfuscations of those with something to hide. The young man who claimed to have organised the group via facefook suggested i might wish to link up with the Notts-Anti-Fracking group as they were more “active”.

ARTIFICIAL ADOLESCENCE

The whole thing was exactly like a primary school classroom: FEMINISED and FROZEN to the point of inaction.  Quite how those men present could sit through it, i no longer care to contemplate.

I informed the woman that i had turned up suitably informed on the subject but in no way was i claiming that there was not more knowledge for me to gleam.

I have sat through interminable sessions like this before ~  the Delphi Technique is a proven divide and rule tactic  whereby a subject is fracked into parts and discussed in fragmentary sections, for 20 minutes at length, the groups then move on until finally we all ‘come together’ and ‘share’ our findings. Whether or not they are factually based is irrelevant for the purposes of the exercise. The Delphi technique is one which reduces individual thinking to that of group thought. it is used by and for a variety of purposes, sometimes in classrooms as a way of generating ‘interactive’ communication skills between the students. Originally, it may well have a valid technique for the dissemination of knowledge and a means by which expert strands could be woven together. But that was not the way it was being employed now.

So, there we were on a Sunday afternoon, tea, coffee and biscuits in a room humming to the chit-chat of its occupants. The only figure missing was the vicar. It had the air of a post-service church meeting. ‘Chit-chat-chit-chat, blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda-yadda,’  the sound of estuary English and politely irrelevant discourse .

Most there were women. The three organisers were one older woman, one younger and a man of around thirty who told me he was the originator of the Facefook group. He also told me he was a member of ‘friends of the earth’. At which point an underwhelming wave of crushing indifference washed over me.

It was undeniably feminised: the techniques, the chat-chit-chat, the sub-grouping approach, and the marked though subtle hostility with which i was greeted.

It was immediately apparent that this FOUR HOUR long session only served as a sop to the consciences of those in attendance and those who organised it. No action, no call to arms, no sense of the urgency and no cognisance of the imminent threat which fracking poses to all on these lands.

It was about as productive as a fart in a colander and it was of the familiar ‘Divide and Rule’ modus operandi ~ a wholly artificial division of the subject into a series of components to be ‘debated/discussed’ in groups… In such circumstances one only need ask what is the cumulative effect on the minds of those participating?

What about the male energy ~ for action?

The men in there were resolutely middle-class and all seemingly content to go along with a overly-feminised-lowest-common-denominator-touchy-feely-dumbed-down approach which, whether intentioned or not, had the effect of creating a right-brained imbalance resulting in apathy and inaction. It was, in the simplest of terms, a meeting more suitable to a knitting group than those seeking to take action in meaningful ways against a cadre of corporate interests whose cause is money and whose workings result in genocidal harm to man and the earth upon which he stands.

My mind immediately switched to the question of how would a meeting like this have been organised 200 hundred years ago?

Enoch made ’em and Enoch’ll break ’em!”

was the rallying cry of the skilled independent workers known as ‘croppers’ whose work was to hand-finish the cloth woven in the cottages and the mills of the West Riding of Yorkshire and who came to be known as the Luddites, a movement that spread from Nottingham (whence it began) to the valleys of the West Riding.

The period 1789 to 1814 after the French revolution was one of unrest and turmoil in Britain, a time of insurgency and counter-insurgency. The threat to the livelihoods of those engaged in the manufacturing of cloth (wool and cotton), the industrial revolution, the movement from country to town, the growth of factories and mills and the burgeoning wealth of their owners ~ were all socio-economic factors at play.

In 1812 the prime minister, Spencer Percival was assassinated by John Bellingham an importer of fabric/materials who, in many ways, came to represent the way the cloth-making regions of northern britain were shafted by the de facto ‘government’ of the fictional ‘United Kingdom’; he was a clothier importer, whose desperate actions were symptomatic of those oppressive times:

“Perceval’s period of power coincided with an economic depression and considerable industrial unrest. This resulted in his government introducing repressive methods against the Luddites. This included the Frame-Breaking Act which made the destruction of machines a capital offence. Perceval held the post until 1812 when he became the only British Prime Minister in history to be assassinated. Spencer Perceval was shot when entering the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, a failed businessman from Liverpool.”  Source: here

 

The illustration at the beginning of this article is worth a thousand words and it represents just that which came to pass and which, in fact, still exists.

200 years ago, a meeting like this would have been largely devoid of female contribution [which is not to say there was no place and never had been for those women who are in possession of those attributes more usually associated with the menfolk] . It would have represented a call to arms for the local men in the face of a real and imminent threat to their lives and those of their families.

Whilst the term Luddite has erroneously come to mean someone who holds on to an antiquated or obsolete belief in a world less technologically advanced, its real meaning is far more potent in both its physical manifestations and its metaphorical and mythological significance. These were times of self help ~ in Huddersfield for instance, there was the rise of the methodist movements, of mechanics institutes, of the Co-operative movement, of the Oddfellows, Sunday schools and various craft and trading guilds or unions. Education was paid on a private contract and a need-for basis, with literacy rates at an impressive level and the classes organised to teach the children how to think, rather than what to think, with the emphasis on the ‘Lost Tools of Learning’ as referenced by Dorothy Sayers:

 

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

 

Yet by the mid 1800s these self-helping organisations were under threat from those at the top of the pyramid who did not want their positions threatened by an intelligent and critically thinking generation of self-realised men who were prepared to take action against those who would terrorise them and force them into poverty.

The paranoia that arose in the controlling classes was palpable: troops totalling 19k and various spies and agent -provocateurs flooded into the Riding, paid for by the profits of the mill owners and the insecurities of the oligarchical manipulators. Mills were fortified and protected by private militia whose raison d’être was masked under the false guise of keeping the peace, of maintaining law and order. If that sounds familiar to now, then so it should.

The reality, then as now, was that the troops/police were a private militia (which has transmorphed into the private limited company police forces of today that pretend to be working for the people and the peace when, in fact, they are there exclusively to prevent justice and to oppress the very people to whom they are related).

The fracking industry may well be a different kind of threat to our lives than the looms were to the croppers: nevertheless, the threat is palpable and we are moving into an epoch when the spirit of the people has to rise up and beyond the lies and deceptions of those who would seek to keep it in the jar, with the cork firmly wedged in.

Fracking’s effects on the flora and fawna, on man, the water table and the land is, as a matter-of-fact, genocidal. This is the enormity of what we are facing. Do people really believe that their ancestors would have been content to sit in female-dominated chit-chat meetings where the talk is talked but no-one bothers to walk the path of action?

To suggest such a thing would have occurred is laughable and an insult to the place held in the hearts of the ancestors of those men who came to be known as the Luddites.

No, the men would have issued a call to arms. Action would have been taken. The Luddites were men of cunning, native wit and guile who saw the threat for what it was: not for them chit-chats about football or endless hours wanking off over video games or pornography or days spent shopping with doll-like women in ridiculous shoes, cuprinol tans and over-sized handbags full of products from China.

The brutal suppression of these men known as the Luddites is illustrated by the hard facts of their ultimate oppression: after a series of show-case kangaroo trials, beset with tyrannical miscarriages of justice, 17 men were hanged at York, the ancient capital of Deira and Bernicia. They were show-pony trials organised for the purpose of setting a brutal example to the unruly people of what would happen if they failed to capitulate to their tyrannical overlords. “Know your fucking place, sunshine!”

The Special Commission appointed to try the Luddites opened at York on the 2nd January 1813. More than sixty men awaited trial in York Castle on a variety of charges and all were to be tried as Luddites, though many of them had no connection with the movement. This was not to be a demonstration of justice so much as a “Show Trial”, by means of which the government intended to warn any other would-be groups of insurrectionists of the penalties to be faced. SOURCE

What many people fail to see is that which is under their very noses: we are currently in a valid and entirely justifiable position to bring to a grinding halt those cogs of injustice as so completely epitomised by the iniquitous feudal system known as a ‘mortgage’. The Mark Duggan miscarriage of justice adds further clarity: we are under a yoke of tyranny and living in an epoch where the image of the boot stamping onto the face is real and known to increasing numbers of mankind who begin to wake up from their slumbers.

The twelve knights of the round table are the 12 signs of the zodiac: the individual components of mankind as represented in the golden round; the procession of the planets, as above, so below. The metaphorical awaking of Arthur and his knights is upon us: the thing is not to wait for a waking hero to rise and save us. No. It is a metaphor as relevant and potent as it ever was: the hero is inside each and every one of us. We are the unique fragments of the whole. I is 1. One is All. Each is cosmic universe, illuminated from within. Our lights shine individually, and together they obliterate all the darkness of Mordor.

The men of old knew what to do: as their ancestors, we know also what is necessary in these times of real threat from treacherous psychopaths operating under Satanic agendas. The fracking must be stopped by the people and that means by whatever means is necessary to defend the lands and the lives of all from actions that are genocidal in their effects.

It is clear that both the Luddites and Dorothy Sayers appreciated and understood the emblematic nature of the hammer: it symbolises the power of man to create and to destroy; to empower and disempower; to threaten and to defend. It was the tool of Thor, the God of thunder, the tool whose image was so beloved of National and International Socialists and Communists and for all these reasons it represents perfectly the times in which we find ourselves. It represents, as it always has, our enslavement and our liberty. In equity and at Law, the corrupt courts, judiciary, the lying lawyers and mafia banksters’ individual hands are as unclean as they remain uncalloused by real toil.

Although They know not how to swing the hammer, they have tricked others by fork-tongued bogus legal structures and via a system of financial control, into swinging the hammer for them. They know not the meaning of physical graft for they are of a parasitic nature, leeches who attach themselves to the feet of man in order that they may gorge themselves upon his energetic creations. They know nothing of Truth for they have had woven a phony [fraudulent] web of financial sleights of hand and legal lies that are so thoroughly ensnaring their minds’ abilities to think critically and creatively that they have totally and individually, each supplicated themselves to the Mammon of usury and feudalism. “Woe unto ye lawyers” and to all those who carry out their criminal deeds for them.

As expressed by Thomas Sheridan on ‘The Velocity of Now” radio show, 19 January 2014:

We are rebel hearts running free as independent conscious warriors, insurgents: the game up, the game is over, the cat is out of the bag and it ain’t going back in.”

To extend the metaphor: the sack has unravelled and its strands lie before us. There is no longer any bag in which to hold the cat and if that realisation doesn’t put a smile on the reader’s face then he is not paying attention and should take up crocheting as a pastime.

Or go and join the F.o.t.E.