Part One

I don't know a lot about what happens in London these days. It is almost twenty years since I moved away from the Big City into the Highlands of Scotland, and London seems far far away. This is both physically - amazingly, the distance between London and Inverness is almost the same as that between London and Bordeaux - and also culturally. Aside from a flying visit (pun intentional, excuse me) to Heathrow, I have not visited London properly for many years.

I did, however, come to see that the elections for the mayor of London are coming up shortly, in May of this year. What's more, I read that the current incumbent, one Sadiq Khan, is hot favourite to be elected for a record third term in office.

I duly collapsed onto the floor in astonishment and disbelief. The world almost disintegrated before my very eyes. After a few minutes, I pulled myself up, dusted off my clothes, hit myself hard on the head to make sure that I wasn't just having a bad dream; and then I staggered over to the Carlos Castaneda section on the bookshelves.

I hadn't looked at what I was seeking for years; I wasn't even sure which book the section was in. It didn't take too much finding. It is in one of Castaneda's later and less celebrated works, 'The Fire From Within' - a book which houses a number of significant concepts, in fact, such as the assemblage point.

Leafing through the pages, I found what I was looking for quite near the beginning of the book. The section on 'Los pinches tiranos' - the petty tyrants. 

There is, it seems, a petty tyrant right there in the personal life of Carlos Castaneda. Her name is la Gorda, and she is one of the apprentices under the tutelage of Don Juan. She disturbs and torments Castaneda at every opportunity. She scolds, insults, accuses him all the time; gossips and spreads false rumours; even verbally and physically attacks and abuses him. Anything to make his life a misery.

Don Juan remarks that Carlos is very fortunate to have such a petty tyrant. If none exists, then the apprentice must go to seek one out. "A petty tyrant is a tormentor" he explains. "Someone who either holds the power of life and death over warriors or simply annoys them to distraction."

Don Juan goes on to state that the new seers - his ancestors, you could say - classified tyrants according to their nature. 

Top of the tree is 'the one and only ruler in the universe', who is uniquely tyrannical and who they termed simply the tyrant. In comparison, even 'the most fearsome, tyrannical men are buffoons; consequently, they were classified as petty tyrants, pinches tiranos.' 

These in turn were classified into little petty tyrants, pinches tiranitos; the small-fry petty tyrants, repinches tiranitos; and finally the teensy-weensy petty tyrants, pinches tiranitos chiquititos.

Castaneda finds this classification ludicrous, but Don Juan assures him that he is not making things up. The new seers had a sense of humour about them: "humour was the only means of counteracting the compulsion of human awareness to take inventories and to make cumbersome classifications."

Note: see how Don Juan's view of the Universe, with 'the tyrant' as the ruler, bears striking similarities to the Gnostic and Cathar views which have turned up occasionally on this blog. Plus the more recent views of David Icke, Howdie Mickoski, et al, on the simulated nature of this place, and the nefarious energy behind this monstrous creation. 

 

Part Two

So, back to Sadiq Khan. 

Outside of London, at least, Sadiq Khan is best known (or infamous) for tightening and extending the notorious ULEZ scheme to the outer suburbs of the capital city. 

ULEZ stands for Ultra Low Emissions Zone. Don't believe everything you find on Wikipedia, but this is what it has to say: "The ULEZ is an area in London where an emissions standard based charge is applied to non-compliant road vehicles." 

Just reading this introductory first sentence on Wikipedia, we find ourselves immediately plunged into the mindset of the petty tyrant. Vehicles are 'compliant' or 'non-compliant'. This is the language of the pinches tiranos. Authority acting like a little bully. 'Do as I say - or else.' 

The word ' compliance' first came to the fore in my life during the convid fantasy story. Mask mandates, not leaving your own home, having an untested injection or losing your job. 'Compliance' was the buzzword on the notices and posters all around. 

What does a non-compliant vehicle look like anyway? What does it do? Stick up two fingers as it passes by?

And ULEZ works according to 'an emissions based standard charge.' This mysterious emissions base is decided by type of vehicle and age of vehicle. There is no room for distinctions - the possibility that one ten year old vehicle might actually be in better nick than another. No. Uniformity is the name of the game. Standardisation without a face.

There is an interesting chapter in one of archetypal psychologist James Hillman's later books. In it he considers the nature of evil, and what he concludes is not what most people might imagine.

Evil, according to Hillman, is characterised most centrally by uniformity, administrative and bureaucratic modes of operandi, a hideous abstraction from individual human emotions, a faceless one-size-fits-all way of going about things. It kills the soul and the spirit, reducing the human being to a code and a number. It denies the unique and the individual. It is, literally, heartless. And this, I propose, is the hallmark of the modern petty tyrants, who desperately seek a sense of perverted power amidst their inner weakness and hopelessness.

For the wicked non-compliant, ULEZ demands you pay £12.50 every time you take out your vehicle. To Khan this is nothing, but to many Londoners this amounts to a significant dent in their income, with which they are already struggling to get by.

ULEZ passed relatively trouble-free until August 2023, when its reach was extended to all of Greater London. Then, and quite rightly, the shit hit the proverbial fan. 

 

Part Three

Air quality and pollution can be a big problem in any large city. No debate about that needed. In London, large numbers of people used to die in some winters as a result of the notorious 'smog', a toxic mix of smoke and fog, until they cleaned up their act, quite literally, in the 1950s.

Go out into parts of 'Greater London', however, and it's a different story. I know, since I lived in the southern suburbs of London for seven years before leaving for Highland Scotland. Leafy, spacious suburbs are typical, and the quality of the air is not bad at all. This is not a purely subjective view, since I have read reports which confirm this.

Extending ULEZ into places such as Croydon and Sutton, Bromley, Romford, and Enfield makes no sense. Many of the people who live in such areas do not identify themselves primarily as 'Londoners' anyway.

It is, of course, a nice little earner. Enormous quantities of money come in to finance Sadiq Khan's other pet projects, while he sits on his chair with a characteristic smirk painted across his face. People protest, and in large numbers, even covering up or destroying the tell-tale cameras littered all over the boroughs in order to catch the dirty-car criminals. Khan remains stubborn in his fixation. 

It makes sense only when the reality sinks in. It's not about 'making London a green and clean place'. Not really. Instead, it comes straight out of the playbook of various global programmes, concocted by unelected and unaccountable remote bureaucracies (and remember what Hillman had to say about 'evil').

Most noteworthy are the United Nations' Agenda 2030 and Agenda 21, and the ludicrous 'Net Zero' programme. It is ludicrous because it is unattainable, and the creators of this piece of propaganda will know that well. However, it serves as a perfect focus around which to rally the well-meaning but uncritical and highly-programmed masses, who hope and desperately pray for a better world.

One lesson to be learnt from 20th century history is this: the obviously bad guys don't win. Wear your true nature on your sleeve, and you will inevitably fail in the end. Those who immediately spring to mind for most people as 'dictators' and 'tyrants' all ended in ignominious defeat.

The modern petty tyrant, therefore, has to appear in different guise. He or she has to give the impression of being a good guy, or a good gal. Control of the masses has to be hidden - the cover is increasingly obvious to see through nowadays, but nevertheless many people still fall for the ruse.

So your efforts to curtail freedoms have to be presented as 'noble causes'. Safeguarding the rights of minorities; protecting the public from 'misinformation' (excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor again); looking after children; making the city a cleaner and greener place; saving the planet. All of which in reality are designed to tighten the grip on the overall population, reducing individual freedoms while increasing the pressure to conform or else.

 

Part Four    

There is a special characteristic of today's petty tyrants. They do not seem to have their own ideas. In fact, they appear to be pretty devoid of individuality and personal character. They seem far more like identikit mouthpieces for policies and programmes that come from elsewhere. So preoccupied are they with these come-from-somewhere-else agendas that they rarely do anything which is to the direct benefit of their own countrymen and women. Instead, their focus is on other more important matters, which are to mysteriously save the world.

The political stage of the western world is packed with such petty tyrants. Take the UK. There is Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer (with a slightly more exaggerated vapid empty-space of a mind), Yousaf in Scotland (currently being ridiculed for the new 'hate crime' law in Scotland), Khan in London. Elsewhere we find Trudeau, Macron, Rutte in the Netherlands, super-slave Zelensky, and Biden, who is in a category (and a world) of his own. The antipodes gave us a number of particularly nasty convid petty tyrants, thankfully now disappeared (to somewhere or other): Ardern in New Zealand, Dan Andrews, Scott Morrison, and others.

Who or what lurks behind the mask is an interesting question, and difficult to answer. What is it like to be Keir Starmer or Justin Trudeau? But the petty tyrants all come over in similar vein. When they speak, it is not 'they' who speak. It's not even as if they are reading a script. It is more as if a script is being few directly into their brain, and they are repeating it mindlessly, oblivious to what they are really doing.

Their role is, as Don Juan noted of the petty tyrant, to make people's lives a misery. To torment endlessly, and drive people to distraction. Just like Sadiq Khan to countless Londoners. The game seems to be that of diminishing the individual. Anything to extinguish the magical uniqueness of being, instead moulding lookalikes, tiny fragments living and working in homage to a monstrous hive-mind in the making. 

The seers, continues Don Juan, were decimated by the 'conquistadors', the Spanish on arrival in Central and South America. They were petty tyrants, but it demonstrates the destruction that they can wreak. Nevertheless, the seers learnt in time to really benefit from the existence of these monsters. In particular, the petty tyrants are important in aiding the warrior in the art of losing self-importance, an energetic necessity for any warrior serious about the business.

Four qualities are required in order to defeat the petty tyrant, according to Don Juan: control discipline, forbearance, and timing. Mess up in any one of these four areas, and your mission will inevitably fail. And, when the moment of truth truly arrives, a fifth quality is required, that of will. 

Petty tyrants are everywhere. The attitude trickles down from 'the tyrant' itself through the unseen entities manipulating human events, past the politicians, into local authority and the self-important bureaucrats who administer 'fact-checking', censoring, and the rest. They populate school classrooms, middle management, police stations, the high street, where they don yellow traffic control jackets. They are there as your neighbour, maybe even one of your family, even your mum, dad, husband, wife, partner.

They are all around us. Plenty of opportunity for practicing control, discipline, forbearance, and timing; and for simultaneously working at losing our self-importance, or so we are told.

 

OK, there may be a bit of a longer break before my next blog piece. But I will be back..... 

 

Images: The book; the petty tyrant mayor; ULEZ camera; interesting quote