St Anthony of Egypt

detail from:
Hieronymus Bosch (attrib),
Temptation of St Anthony

St Anthony of Egypt is considered to be the first of the ‘Desert Fathers’. These were early Christian hermits, ascetics and monks who lived in and around the Scetis desert beginning about the third century AD.

Anthony was born in Egypt in 251 to wealthy landowner parents. After his parents died when he was a young man, he gave away his wealth and went to a mountain by the Nile, where he lived by himself in an old abandoned Roman fort for about twenty years. While in the fort, his only interactions with the outside world were via a crevice through which food would be passed by local villagers. Those who came to consult him stood outside and listened to his advice.

According to Wikipedia, after passing many years in this state, Anthony one day

emerged from the fort with the help of villagers, who broke down the door. By this time most had expected him to have wasted away or to have gone insane in his solitary confinement. Instead, he emerged healthy, serene, and enlightened. Everyone was amazed that he had been through these trials and emerged spiritually rejuvenated. He was hailed as a hero and from this time forth the legend of Anthony began to spread and grow.

St Antony’s College, Oxford, is said to have been named after him.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position.
I need people to provide moral support both for fund-raising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

‘The over-60s are not worth treating’

A version of this post was first published in 2007. It has been republished in the light of the Gosport hospital case.

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The Daily Mail has reported that half of all GPs say that patients (victims) over the age of sixty are not worth diagnosing or treating. Of course, what GPs say has no necessary relationship to what they actually do. Telling the truth is not, even nominally, part of their remit. But it is likely that what goes on, and has been going on for a long time, is worse than they admit openly.

* * * * *

Some years ago there was a similar article revealing that, in the case of women, fifty-five was the age at which doctors thought them past bothering with.

Taking a short break at Boscombe in a seaside hotel, I was discussing this with a lady in her fifties, sitting opposite me at the breakfast table. She protested at so painful a topic being discussed, so I stopped talking about it. But this may illustrate both how demoralising the immoral power of the medical Mafia is, and why there is no sympathy with those who complain of it.

When this lady went to her doctor she liked, no doubt, to maintain an uneasy fiction that she could trust him, rely on him to exercise his powers in her best interests (as understood by herself), and believe what he said.

She would wish to do this in order to relieve her anxieties about any symptoms she might have. However, doing this in the face of evidence to the contrary is likely to take quite a lot of emotional energy. Taking up emotional energy in this way is essentially decentralising.* Recognising that one is alone in a hostile world is, or may be, eventually liberating (although, no doubt, there are plenty of ways of doing it wrong).

The psychological social contract is what happens when the individual gives up his own drives to self-fulfilment and becomes the willing slave of social oppression, in return for the possibility of oppressing others, or enjoying the spectacle of their being oppressed by the social forces with which he has thrown in his lot.

Once a society has instigated an oppressive regime, such as the modern Welfare (Oppressive) State, there is no real possibility of reversing it, as an increasing number of people wish to believe in the ‘benefits’ they are deriving from it — including in many cases the opportunity to oppress other people — rather than face up to the terrifying nature of the threats to which they are exposed.

* For an explanation of the concept of centralisation, see here.

Taxation and slavery

In the following extract* from a paper, philosopher Thomas Nagel expresses a libertarian attitude to taxation.

Some would describe taxation as a form of theft, and conscription as a form of slavery — in fact some would prefer to describe taxation as slavery too, or at least as forced labour.

It appears Nagel himself disagreed with this position. Nevertheless, the idea that taxation involves the involuntary removal of an individual’s property, and hence is comparable to theft, is a valid one.

Where tax paid amounts to half of a person’s income, that person effectively has to work, involuntarily, as much for the government as for himself.

* 'Ruthlessness in public life', reprinted in Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, 1979.