Schizophrenia-The Adults Aren't All Wrong.

One word that we don't hear all that often anymore, is 'Civilisation'.
There was a time when civilisation was recognised as an enormous benefit, an unquestionable 'good', something that could never be doubted.

Anyway, thirty or so years ago there was a bit of a mess, a bit of a scandal, and our good friend 'civilisation' disappeared into obscurity and retirement, presummably leading a quiet life of pained silence and genteel poverty.

What was the essence of the scandal?

Well, after the second Great War, when we were finally sold via state penury into slavery, civilisation was reduced from the state of 'being civilised', ie describing a society worldwide that respected its constituent individuals, to merely being a referent to a degree of non-murderousness that distinguished us from Pol Pot or Ho Chi Min or Mao Tse Tung or Stalin or Hitler.

It was an embarrassed fig-leaf of a word that (according to Captain Kirk) restrained our natural urge to assassinate the good and made us conform to various rules and taboos.

All for the good of these 'individuals', the 'individuals' that English lovers of 'eccentricity' proclaim to be the quintessence of various wholesome-sounding (national/notional) characteristics.

But there are two types of people in positions of power today; thank god.
The first regards the constraints of this forfeit to embarrassment as a resented obligation that yet enables them to compare favourably to monsters of actual murder.
Their murder spills much less blood, and then only through the indirection of 'fairly secret plots', and then only at the insistence of individuals who actually want to be free.
This sets them apart from the plain butchers.
But observe the hypocrisy of the trial of Saddam Hussein, as opposed to the summary justice dealt to the Ceausescus.

The second type of power-monger is genuinely desirous of doing good(and genuinely disappointed when, inevitably, the opposite happens). This person sees in the existence of a reasonably potent State, the possibility of creating defensive organs which can actually survive in the face of the 'fairly secrets', and actually, sometimes, grant protection to those self-same individuals who so love freedom.

At this stage, we rediscover in these statutory remnants that which was- Civilisation.