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The response of the British leadership to the recent bombings has predictably been "we will defend our way of life, no violence will deterus". All sane people will sympathise with this, and it is why I have never tried violence to draw attention to my own position. Over 20 years ago, gently mocking my millennial notions, friends gave me a copy of Norman Cohn's excellent book "Pursuit of the Millennium" (Paladin), which traces utopian cults throughout christian history and, to my mind, conclusively demonstrates that, the moment that in frustration the utopians tried violence, they delivered themselves into the hands of the prevailing non-millennial powers. Violence is a sure way of drawing attention to even a peace-loving cause, but not of its finding acceptance. Any victory will itself be tainted, and fundamentally no improvement on what went before.

Nevertheless, the claim of territorial governments to the unique right to use violence when they see fit is no longer either logically or practically sustainable. Our species as a whole appears to me, as to many, bent both on self-destruction and on destruction of its life-giving environment. All other previous and contemporary civilisations and human cultures have disintegrated or are visibly disintegrating. For our present western leaders to vow to defend the way of life they represent to the bitter end is in these circumstances blind folly. As a supposedly sapient species, we reveal remarkable pig-headed idiocy with regard to our traditional ways of social thought and behaviour. The image of being unable to see the wood for the trees presents itself: caught up inside our problems, we fail to see the whole affair.

If in these circumstances I maintain that global mayhem will increase, very likely exponentially, until people in general come to terms with their own failure of vision -- and, forgive me, pay attention to the vision vouchsafed in the event to me -- the only vision I have any evidence of offering a logically satisfying solution to the species-wide dilemma, I crave forgiveness and understanding. Recently, to pass the time, I have been reading Bertrand Russell's pamphlet "Political Ideals" (Unwin 1963,though originally published in the USA 1917 -- with conclusions of which I do not incidentally agree), and I was much entertained by his witty remarks inthe fourth chapter on "Individual Liberty and Public Control" -- on the extreme rarity of original thinking, and the near impossibility of such thought finding recognition in the life-time of the thinker. The problem for me has been from the start that, if a visionary of my calibre fails to find recognition until dead, history and logic suggests that his followers will then reconstruct his message to comply with prevailing models, and in the long run nothing much will change. It is therefore both because of the immediate global need, and because when I am dead I shall be unable to arguemy case, that I continue to press for attention, for investigation, here and now. And that is enough for the moment, in response to the London bombings.