THE NSW CIVIL AND Administrative Tribunal, which rules on the correctness of decisions made in some lower decision-making bodies, was asked to decide whether a ‘Qanon’ blog, run by a psychiatrist, was itself evidence of mental impairment, for the purposes of deregistration. It decided it was, and with the—extremely, as they say, wild—other behaviours, upheld the decision. ‘Qanon’, for the uninitiated, is an umbrella-term for a set of far-right conspiracy theories largely to do with imagined opponents of President Trump, and range from the banal, to the tediously anti-semitic, to the truly, literarily, strange.

I am personally fascinated by the question of delusions, and where they can be drawn as separate to merely unusual political or religious beliefs. I don’t think it’s possible to easily identify one from the other, at least not permanently. N Hennessy ADCJ, obiter dicta:

60. As to the beliefs about global conspiracy, Dr Wright acknowledged that “a range of people hold these beliefs, and that they do not necessarily indicate mental illness.” Nevertheless, Dr Wright regarded such beliefs as “bizarre and suggestive of impaired reality testing.” Again, we agree with that opinion.

I recall when I was a tutor, talking to a young man who was certain that any computer or telephone he used was thoroughly bugged by the Chinese Communist Party to surveil him—he had every sign of delusional beliefs, but I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him the CCP wouldn’t do that.

It was one of the breakthroughs of mental health as a science to come up with a category for these kinds of weird beliefs that people have—strange, irrational, often offensive, sometimes unwanted beliefs, unsupported by any evidence—without calling it heresy, demonic possession, treason, or error, or crime. But psychology, because it’s a science, also assumes an external reality which we all share, a reality there to be tested and measured, and which can be judged separately from the people relating or listening to the delusion. Exogenous reality is not, needless to say, the world in which political priors or religious faith occur.

Take the famous clauses of the Nicene Creed, to which billions of Christians subscribe, and regularly say, together. Jesus is God; he was crucified; he rose from the dead; he ascended into heaven; he will return to judge the living and the dead. Shorn of the necessary context—two thousand years of Christianity—these are extremely strange beliefs indeed. What makes it familiar and orthodox is the collective experience of it
and agreement (won at sword-point and stake over many of those two thousand years) that it’s a legitimate religious standpoint. Ask the Cathars, the objects of the famous saying ‘kill them all, and let God recognise His own’ how reality testing of statements of faith works.

A GENEALOGY OF THE concept of ‘local character’, as it applies to places, would be like making a family tree for a usurping new monarch: energetic, but short. ‘Local character’ is everywhere in the language of talking about places and planning, though it’s only surprisingly recently that the terms have had meaning. The NSW Department of Planning describes the concept this way:

Character is what makes a neighbourhood distinctive and is the identity of the place. It encompasses the way a place looks and feels. It is created by a combination of land, people, built environment, history, culture and tradition, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, and it looks at how they interact to create an area’s distinctive character.

The NSW Government is committed to ensuring strategic planning recognises and enhances the local character of an area, and that communities share what they value about their area to inform planning and decision making.

It’s really a concept from the late 1970s, and the ecological turn to preserving environments. Modernists in planning—the dominant strain from the early 20th century into the 1980s—would have seen the definition above as tautological, because of course, the way a place looks and feels is the way it looks and feels; but it’s the quality of people’s lives, and the ability of places to economically/physically support those lives, that mattered. In the pre-war, it was aesthetic and hygienic, in the inter-war, suburban and expansive, and in the post-war, an optimistic efficiency exercise in managing growth, and all the problems-you-want-to-have of a society with little unemployment, many babies, and lots of money. That places should be valued in planning wouldn’t have entered into the question, because planning was about making places better: if a place was valued as it was, then it wouldn’t need planning; and in any case, it was up to the experts to decide.

Of course some ideologies and ways of thinking have been fixated on ‘local character’ for a very much longer time, but they thought of places and cities less as locations to cherish as they were, than to fixate on, in irredentism. Where there is a Serb, there is Greater Serbia, as the slogan went, and the nationalists of the 19th and 20thC genuinely believed in using political (and military) power to enforce the local characters, deciding, for instance, whether they would be Roman or Cyrillic.

It is notable that the NSW law with which we make decisions about places, the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 makes no mention of place-character, only ‘character’ as it relates to specific buildings, leaving the drafters of Local Environmental Plans (LEPs) to use the concept of ‘local character’ in Humpty-Dumpty style, no more and no less than what they want it to mean. In practice it isn’t preserved, so much as brought into being by ideology, by the preservation of specific things that people value, quite literally value in the cases of real property, and by forbidding alternative futures. This blog entry has been in part inspired by the relentless real estate ads in the letterbox of my [rented] house, listing the [colossal] sale prices of the locally-characterful local housing stock.

‘Local character’ is now the infinitely malleable definition to suit any possible argument about place, no matter how cynically self-serving. We’ve come to the understanding that conserving things that work and are communally valued about places is important—and it is—but we’ve also allowed, through elision of language, people to slip in their own pleading for self-interest and fuck-you-got-mine. Who likes ‘local character’ the best, but the local characters?

In Newtown, NSW, where my office is, there is a mural in the tradition of ‘Keep [location] Weird’, an individualist aesthetic pioneered by Austin, Texas, but now reproduced identically by bourgeois enclaves around the world, which has what I think is the mascot of discussions about local character. It is an anthropomorphic drum, forever beating its own head.

'"Collapsologie", constructing an idea of how things fall apart'. Harrison Stetler, New York Review of Books.

But if one delves into the texts of these writers, and listens to their castigation of the modern world, it’s hard not to get the impression that a lingering form of anticipation—not to say, outright excitement—lies beneath their prophecies of collapse...

'How "Big Law" Makes Big Money'. Adam Tooze, New York Review Of Books.

On the one hand, the law codes the original violence of enclosure, such that something that was everyone’s becomes one person’s legally protected private property in perpetuity. On the other hand, the law is the conjurer of a delusion. By creating securities out of debt, the law preys on our desire to believe that something is ours that is not real at all, that value can be created ex nihilo.

'College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics'. Eitan Hersh, The Atlantic.

...political hobbyists have harmed American democracy and would do better by redirecting their political energy toward serving the material and emotional needs of their neighbors. People who have a personal stake in the outcome of politics often have a better understanding of how power can and should be exercised—not just at the polls, once every four years, but person to person, day in and day out.

I HAVE LONG BEEN fascinated not by American politics—the most tedious of hobbies—but by one of its characters in particular: John Bolton. If you were an adult during the time of the leadup to the 2003 Iraq War you’ll remember him for his part in war-cheerleading, if you’re younger you’ll know him as the most foreign-policy aggressive of the current President’s constantly rotating staff, but if, like me, you’re a connoisseur of the worst people in the world, you’ll know Bolton simply as the most hawkish person ever to haunt Washington DC.

A logical process works in John Bolton’s head, and it’s extremely simple:

1. the whole point of policy is to advance interests (as argued by Clausewitz), therefore,
2. America, in the end, only advances its interests through force, or the threat of force. Multilateralism and cooperation are figleaves over power, and,
3. America has weapons that work, therefore,
4. We should use those weapons.

Bolton has never looked at a world map or globe without seeing little crosshairs. The list of the countries he’s advocated bombing is longer than your grocery list at the end of the holidays. He doesn’t seem to be driven by any of the sordid motives shared by the rest of the upper echelons of American politics: avarice, personal gain, self-promotion, hatred of a minority group, vanity, self-esteem, or any of the weirder psycho-sexual motives that seem to prevail in the world’s oldest democracy. There are no sleazy trails to follow, and no obscure files marked with code words or dollar signs. He’s obviously intelligent, honest and ethical, well-read, sincere in his beliefs, and has a capacity for self-reflection. He is a being of pure, disinterested, incorruptible malevolence, and in any situation only wants what is worst for everyone.

The urge to do the worst isn’t just a politics thing. Every field of human endeavour has its beings of pure ill-will, in every situation in every era. Australia soccer fans know Kevin Muscat for one of these rare people, the dirtiest professional footballer in Australia, and possibly the world. Muscat’s wikipedia page, which includes an extensive (and hilarious) section on ‘Reputation’, is evidence that Boltonian urges operate on the football field, at the expense of other people’s tibias and fibias.

You’ve probably met people like it, you’ve probably had a boss or a client like that. Maybe you’ve even heard John Bolton’s or Kevin Muscat’s voice urging you, in your ear, when making a decision, to go in hard, slide in studs-up, make that tackle. Break that leg. Withdraw from that treaty. What are Tomahawk missiles for, if not for launching?

Graham Wood who wrote this Atlantic profile on Bolton, from shortly before he began his term as National Security Adviser, also wrote this shorter wryer article on Bolton’s potential testimony in the US Senate:

My colleague David Frum appealed to Bolton’s patriotism a few months ago, asking him to speak freely about Trump. Frum is Bolton’s former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, so I suspect he knew that appealing to Bolton’s selfless, wholly unremunerated goodwill is about as likely to be successful as asking him for a foot massage.

I suggest that’s not quite right. If there is an inverse altruism, a sense of doing a bad turn for no other reason than the ill virtue of the act itself, that is Bolton. Don’t appeal to his patriotism. Don’t offer him cash. Don’t suggest a mutually advantageous arrangement; there is no deal that will satisfy him. If you want to motivate John Bolton, suggest a way in which he can be, as Wood says, ‘an asshole’, that, by itself, will do fine. I fully expect Boltonian testimony at the impeachment hearing to be hilarious, and devastating.

This is what fascinates me about John Bolton, this part of human nature that we all have—the H.L. Mencken urge, in any situation, to spit on your hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats—unrestrained, unmitigated, and unapologetic.

[The image at the top of this post is a detail of Crossing The Swamp, by the profoundly weird right-wing American painter Jon McNaughton.]

ONCE, THE NSW GOVERNMENT tried to run a State Bakery. As readers may know, the Party card of the NSW Labor Party, to which every member signs a pledge, are partially as follows:

...I will actively support the Constitution, Platform and Principles of the Australian Labor Party including the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other antisocial features in these fields...

They're compromised words, and the paragraph shows not only tinkering and negotiation (especially in a big Conference stink in 1922), and a sense of the Party's leitmotif, grand decadent tragedy, but a real ambiguity about what any of those things are. In 2020 you could point to each of the four realms to be socialised and say—well that's just what Facebook does, isn't it?—Which would lead you nowhere useful. But a little more than a hundred years ago the Labor experiment took the words deadly seriously and launched on an earnest and odd project to rig a market in the people's favour, and established the State Bakery, Stanmore.

The State Bakery, with equivalents in other areas (trawlers, forestry) was the State Government buying or establishing enterprises to compete and set market terms for the other private operators, and bears more in common with the ABC or public childcare than it does with any concept of wartime rationing or Government Bread. Still, in today's terms the attempt seems brave, even odd.

In late 1913 or early 1914 the property was purchased by the NSW Government and became the State Bakery, with Joseph Boss remaining as manager. The purchase price was £8,200 and additions to plant and vehicles brought the price to nearly £12,000. (Argus, 2 March 1916, p. 6) The State Bakery was a successful venture and in the 1915-1916 financial year made a net profit of £3,172. It joined a growing collection of state enterprises, including the State Abattoir, State Brickworks, State Timber Depot and (in 1915) State Trawlers. Though some of these enterprises had begun under conservative governments, the first NSW Labor administration of James McGowen in 1911 had accelerated this trend. The Labor Party’s aim was probably not the nationalisation of industry, but the use of State enterprises to regulate the market and prevent profiteering. A staple like bread was an obvious candidate for this kind of intervention.

The building remains, has been converted into units, and is commemorated in Cultural Heritage form, with a fancy ye olde sign over the door.