The Neanderthal Right [preview 1]

Chapter 5: A Rarer Grace [censored preview segment]

We know now the devastation that trauma can reap on our lives. Every year we lose members of our race to avoidable depression, suicide, psychoses... and, as long as we labour under a Christian values system that turns a blind eye to severe home-life suffering, for reasons of societally-condoned parental awe, or alternatively go on to patch up our deepest wounds – poorly – with the false comforts of a misunderstood stoicism that only leads to further complications in the long run, there seems no end in sight. But is this the all of it? Is there a chance that, for all the pains of repeat suffering, there is yet something to be learned from trauma, some panacea for an otherwise brutalised life – or some obscured bonus even? That is the question I wish to address in this short, reflective chapter.

To begin with, drawing from my own life (as it is here that I have the greatest personal experience, and the most to draw from), I spent long years in psychological misery, first from an unaddressed series of sexual abuses conducted against me in my early childhood and again on the cusp of my teenage years, the former so painful that it was effectively buried in my mind until adulthood (though I had not truly forgotten) – as I too came to repress the full consequences of this external wounding, due to my young age and the horror of it all, and, in truth, have never fully reconciled myself with those distant events, even now – and the latter acting as a major nullifying factor on my self-esteem; a gross humiliation in a life where I was already raised by my parents to be anything but confident. These two sets of events alone did not destroy me though. For that it took the actions of my father concurrent to the earliest abuse (and, passively, of my mother too, for, as with all bullies I faced, she failed to defend me from him), yet stretching all the way up into my adult years, by a certain point overtaking the hurt from outside, replacing it with his own presence, spiteful and venom-tongued, impatient, patronising, and quick to anger, occasionally violent, and never satisfied with me, no matter what I did to try and please him. The System’s pseudo-medical inquisitors inflicted the rest. I have already written my life down in Consumption, from my first memory to my first breath of ‘real life’ at age 29, so I will not repeat myself here. Find the book if you would like to know my story.

It is hard to shift the thought though that, had I not experienced what I did – years on end in bloody psychological hell, close to the point of nothing at times, and indeed beyond it, lying vacant, dissociated on the floor in a pool of tears I no longer recognised as my own, or staring into a mirror perplexed by what I saw, unable anymore to piece together that it was my own haunted face looking back at me, viewing myself as if I were a stranger, and then the thick miles of spurting blood, and the bitten flesh hanging pink and ghastly from my snarling jaws, and then more silence, and screaming at the cold walls, and the endless drab corridors of mental hospitals, as my mind itself betrayed me, and I lapsed steadily into madness, an on-off psychosis that took almost another decade to lift (and I’m still not sure if it’s gone now; I think I’ll never be certain) – would I be me at all?

Though most of my life has been nihilistic decay, interspersed with the briefest flashes of complacency (joy is too strong a term; too naïve an interpretation), degenerate hedonism, or crass consumer groupthink, it is fair to say that, for all this, I have also had much time to reflect. After all, it is only in 2024 that I first exposed the full story of my life to the world, as best as I wished to share it. Before then, I carried it with me, pieced back together, like a shattered vase, by long hours alone – or in the company of the only real friend I have ever made in this country – in a brutal, all-consuming sadness that felt like it would never lift (save for the fresh jolts of psychosis that sent me careering into giddy mania and delusion, and, in aftermath, the deepest sense of embarrassment I have ever known). Mainly though, I was alone.

In his detailed memoirs of his time as a prisoner in the Soviet gulags, compiled now into three non-fiction books known as The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes, in the abridged edition^[1]:

From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: ‘My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me. 

Though it remains a testament to my good luck (!) that I did not have to become a prisoner of the British state on the 16th April, 2025, having until then believed in all likelihood that I would spend at least the next four years in Belmarsh, convicted as I was by then of what I am informed is a heinous terroristic offence (albeit not quite as abysmal for me as the 25 years originally waved at me by my police interrogators in 2021), it is fair to say regardless that I have lost most of my adult life – and just before – to prisons of a different, and I would argue more insidious, variety: those of the institution of psychiatry – prisons in all but name alone, and from which there can be no escape, on good behaviour or on the completion of a sentence. No, the only way to escape psychiatric ‘hospitals’ is to submit, and to obey; to take all the little insults their flawed, barbarous paradigm flings at you, and to suck it up, and say ‘yes doctor, you’re right, my brain is sick, and there is no cure for my unfortunate genetic malady bar your intervention – which you were right to perform, though I didn’t know it at the time – and, without a doubt, you will make me all better, and so I’m willing to abide by your rules, and do everything you say, and I’m sorry to have caused you the trouble...’ even as they continue to deny the truth of what has brought you to this stage, and assault your mind with chemical toxins, and – maybe then – turf you right back out onto the street, washing their hands of all psychological realism, as they continue confidently to provide no care.

Whilst ‘inside’, first from the ages of 17-18, and then for regular repeats of that torture and enervating boredom, multiple times a year for almost every year between 29 and now (spanning 11 years all in all!), for three weeks to a month, if I was lucky, but sometimes for much longer, confined to a tiny routine where I would lie on my hard, plastic hospital mattresses with the single deflated pillow and my thin sheet, baking in the airless summer ovens or shivering in winter chill, strolling down the corridors to the concrete gardens, surrounded by CCTV cameras and double-rows of barbed, inward-pointing fencing, often too thick to see into the world beyond (or simply facing another wall), and returning again to the cold comfort of the hard-bolted bed, with those opaque windows looking out onto yet more nothing, and not a thing to do bar go mad again, listening to the howls and whines of the other normie patients, and the clusters of ward staff itching to clock off for the evening, and then just silence, or what would be, save for the rattling of the bolted television in the lounge, playing feminine pop music and BBC news clips 24/7, awaking somewhere later to the news that another patient had hung themselves from their door in the night, or kicked the shit out of their neighbour in the bedroom down the hall, and then these savage orderlies toddling along the corridors in an approximation of haste, and the sharp, loaded needles ready in their hands to subdue him – or me – and the sly insults and the mockery and the patronising babying of us, and the half-hearted calls of ‘medication!’ as the patients lined up like zombies night after night to secure their cerebral destruction, and a slice of burnt toast, and a plastic cup of sickly orange squash, and another dollop of cheapest canteen carbohydrates (with plastic cutlery) and all this again and again until my soul died in me, and all there was then was to wait for the psychiatrist to come, in a one-sided 5 minute meeting a month in, and to be further reprimanded, and drugged, and damaged beyond repair, and then to be released (?). Then only the fear – the nagging fear that, forever unaddressed, the madness would return, and again, in my greatest horror and disappointment, I would be passed like a rag doll in rough hands through those three or more sets of locked double-doors, down the winding polished corridors (clean save for the forever layer of dust at the skirting boards and the nondescript droplets of fresh blood trailing away to the toilet cubicle), back into this liminal hell, a halfway place between dreamless death and limbo; a place one would never wish to be. I think, somehow, through all of that, I came to know – a little – of what Solzhenitsyn meant by those first lines.

Later in the same work, he writes:

Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

In my own life I learnt almost nothing in psychiatric units (bar for the contents of the reading materials I increasingly requested sent to me from home as the years wore on – books of physics, philosophy, biology, and psychiatry itself; counterintelligence, counterinsurgency, and high-level tradecraft in some cases, as they don’t pay attention to you there), but, on broader reflection, even in the outside world, my entire life has been as if in a prison – albeit of my own making, as I remained ill – fraught; damaged in spirit – a long time. I have had time to reflect, and the impetus to also. To get down to the fundamentals of my destructive melancholy, and to seek out the real reasons for my psychoses: to pinpoint the culprits and, at length, even to forgive myself. So many of my friends have dropped away over the years – by which I mean, they are dead; they killed themselves, their hope had expired – and still I have remained, clawing my way back to sanity, when nothing else really had changed (after all, the world is not calibrated for the purposes of satisfying my individual needs off the bat, nor should it be).

I think it has been trauma that has helped me, awful as it sounds given what I have written above in previous chapters: breaking open my psyche, and providing the necessary conditions for an otherwise unavailable introspection – an imposed epoché, in the words of the neurophenomenologists – where all previous petty concerns and distractions were halted, and, finally, I could focus on myself in a world driving me mad, and come to a sense of ownership for my long pain – an understanding that my choices were conditioned into me, and that the responsibility for my suffering was not my own – hence the swift cessation of my dire self-injurious habits – and yet with the fresh self-knowledge to understand that if I did not continue to try and heal myself, it was, as if ironically, my fault entirely, in that I had a chance now to write down as best I could everything that had damaged me (and took it), as otherwise I fear by now I would have lapsed into chronic psychosis, deteriorating as the years went on, and perhaps never recovered.

Though I would wager my suffering was not in any way as great^[2] as that of Solzhenitsyn, his last set of words above resonate with me. Where else is there the chance in our busy, distracted lives to come face to face with our own soul, and to water it? Each new traumatic dislocation brought me more time to reflect in aftermath, vulnerable again suddenly, my social mask fully slipped, and with no way out of this but to acknowledge the truth of what had been done to me, however painful or heretical to my instincts. I sometimes think  on what my life would have been had I never been abused by my parents (the external abuse was simply a background pain; a sordid catalyst perhaps for what would have occurred anyway, even without it). Maybe I would have had a steady job, in a good career, and a nice home of my own, and a swanky car, and yearly vacations, and all the creature comforts of an average middle-class bourgeois lifestyle (and probably more vapid friends). In a word, I would be useless, just another wretched lowest common denominator person slaved to a failing System – as it was not simply my psychological health that I regained by this prolonged  introspection...

[1] The Gulag Archipelago, Abridged Edition, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vintage Arrow, 2018

[2] It was César Tort who encouraged me to have enough confidence in myself to admit, eventually, that I was indubitably incorrect in this timid, deferential statement. He wrote:

Up until now, I hadn’t disagreed with what you say in your book, but at this point, I radically disagree.

Do you remember what I said in the chapter of Whispering Leaves, that the abuse Peter inflicted on his son David was far more devastating than the castration Yakoff suffered?

What you suffered, according to what I read in Consumption, was not only more severe—by several orders of magnitude!—than the eight years Solzhenitsyn endured in the Gulag; but also what I suffered (recounted in Whispering Leaves) and what Yakoff suffered.

Something that regular folk ignore is the level of the circle of hell into which our parents, in their infinite stupidity, plunged us. Conveying that suffering is very difficult unless you recount all the relevant memories and anecdotes (as you did in your previous book).

To them, who can’t imagine it, I’d say: Watch not only Shine (Oscar winner in 1996), which tells what Peter did to David (a real-life case), but also the film of the tragedy of Iphigenia and A.I. (an original idea by Kubrick): very different films that give an idea of family tragedies.

But that’s for most everyday people. An adult would only understand Hell if he reads your previous book.