Last week the huge diggers and other heavy plant in Clissold park were mysteriously silent. No contractors were working anywhere in the park. The reason for the hiatus?  Pressure on the Council and Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) after repeated damage to magnificent trees. Specifically the insane decision to do major works to exclude roots of the ornamental Dawn Redwoods from the West pond (Beckmere) has resulted in one redwood entering severe decline. The wit of consultants and contractors from HLF did not extend to realising that removing a tree's primary water supply might actually have an adverse effect on the tree. Whether the two redwoods will survive or not remains to be seen. Mature trees (they are about 50 years old) struggle to adapt to rapid change and having been drinking from the pond for all their lives the trees are unlikely to have created a large water collecting root system elsewhere.
 

It is perhaps fortunate the Dawn redwood reacted so quickly to the HLF vandalism. Elsewhere in the park other trees are being brutalised but since most trees respond slowly to damage the consequences of HLF's ignorance and violence will take many years to develop. Soil compacted under trees by heavy machinery kills tree roots. The trees then go into gradual decline. Some recover but others succumb to disease brought on by the stress. These problems are well known on construction sites and there is very clear and detailed guidance to prevent such problems. Unfortunately the HLF consultants and Hackney project managers decided not to follow that guidance or to employ an arboriculture expert. After all its only a £9m construction project in a prestige park full of valuable trees.

The banner outside the park proudly (but completely inaccurately) declares it to be a Considerate Construction site.  The spin and greed continue as people blindly destroy priceless trees and habitat.
 

Those familiar with Heritage Lottery Projects in urban parks will know they have more to do with job creation for overpaid consultants and contractors than improving green space. Abstract notions of 'historic landscape' might have some relevance in the grand estates of the aristocracy but applying such ideas to complex cityscapes is largely idiotic. The return of the St. John's Churhyard at Hackney to a 1793 landscape was a recent local example. Seventy trees were felled in a built up area just off the Narrow Way desperately short of greenery. The cherries, apples and thorns were deemed historically inaccurate. The equally inaccurate buildings and roads remain.  Fortunately pressure from Tree Musketeers did result in some trees being saved.  Alas tow of the replacement trees planted for the HLF project are already dead.

HLF should rebrand itself – 'bringing destruction to the inner city' or maybe 'taking from the poor to give to the rich'.

Reclaiming the Collective Super-ego

To Escape the Asylum of New World Order Ideology

[These notes are somewhat condensed (rich?). I hope to develop the text to aid interactive understanding.]

Capital and the State quickly incorporated Freud's ideas and psychoanalysis. Consequently the 20^th century saw the evolution of a constructed, synthesised ideology of self. Capitalism is not just a system of production, it is also a class based social structure and, lately, an ideology of alienated, atomised consumerism. Whereas when Marx was writing in the mid 19^th century bourgeois ingenuity and historic philanthropy mitigated some of early Capital's destruction, by the 20^th century decades of mass slaughter of ordinary people by the millions set the material context for a New World ideology that would infect the globe. Earlier, and on going, colonial wars against 1^st Nation peoples and their civilisations erased original, located, Pagan learning. Onto the blank canvasses of the minds of the affluent masses destined for alienated consumption Freud's cousin Edward Bernays (the creator of Public Relations) and others grafted their prescription of ignorance and passivity. By using psychoanalysis the public relations advisers to Corporations, Presidents and the CIA crafted an insane fear based notion of popular inadequacy and threat. Accurately informed by a semi conscious realisation that the masses (aka working classes) were a threat to the established Corporate/Imperialist order Bernays and his acolytes set about justifying their power and that of their paymasters by reference to everyone else's unconscious id. Their desires are dangerous so they must be satiated and sublimated lest they revolt. What better way than to sell them trinkets that make them feel important. We now live in the age of generations brought up without true spiritual or social guidance beyond the mass vomit of corporate and State propaganda.

As a consequence we live in a post capitalist age of ever increasing mass production (now exported to places like Brazil, Indian and China) and consumption (now infecting even poorer third world societies). The global system is insane. Precious, irreplaceable natural resources are being raped from the planet to enable millions to change their car or mobile each year. The only equality permissible is that of consumption so the insatiable hunger of a soulless elite dictates all must seek to emulate their nihilistic orgy of meaningless destruction (aka the cult of the celebrity). So the planet and everything on it and in it are sacrificed to the insane drive for 'economic growth', i.e. the alien we have created called Capital.

The ideology required to sustain such madness is necessarily mad. However given the complexity of a global economy and the resources devoted to advertising and propaganda (including remember a huge dose of psychoanalysis) this madness is very sophisticated. So not only are ideas constructed to pacify and confuse, even unconscious feelings are exploited to sustain power relations as they are. How else could populations except such control and still absorb more stupidity (public service cuts to pay for bankers corruption, wars to create more terror, work till you're 70, Nuclear power to cut CO2 emissions)?  De constructing this ideology of ignorance requires far more than just learning. The accumulation of knowledge is insufficient since the world is run by a division of labour, production and thinking on a vast scale. Any amount of knowledge is of limited assistance in challenging such a knowledge controlling structure with its practise in emitting consciousness viruses. Disinformation clouds an already overwhelming array of evidence.

It is significant that the super-ego, or das Uber Ich, is less debated than Id or Ego. The New World Order has defined our collective consciousness. Ours is a consciousness of ignorance and stupidity because we are considered too dangerous to be permitted into their society. Their inadequacy, fear and alienation goes on to define ours much in their image only we remain ignorant of the manipulation. The challenge is to (re-)create a collective memory of wisdom. Collective, embedded, wisdom capable of scrutiny and owned by all is necessary if we are to live beyond the fearful self. Indeed our very survival now depends upon it since now almost no individual can exist outside of global capitalist insanity. Individual or collective autonomy has been eradicated lest it set an example. Collectively we must over come our fear and ignorance in order to be that example.