I Can See Through You:Invisble Forces That Control Your Life.

It was the second Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub talk in six days but Dr Lawrence Patihis's My journey through beliefs in invisible forces:repression and oppression (at Davy's Wine Vaults) wasn't as much fun as Dr Brian Sharpless's Monsters on the Couch:The real psychological disorders behind your favourite horror movies (at the much cheaper, and friendlier, Star of Greenwich) and nor was it quite as well attended.

That's probably because horror films are a 'sexy' subject and invisible forms of repression and oppression not so much. That didn't mean Patihis's talk was dull though it was possibly a little too academic for some tastes. It took him a while to get into the swing of things but once he hit his stride I started to find it quite fascinating. Even if I didn't agree with everything he said.

In fact,. as a speaker, Patihis regularly explained it was very possible he'd change his mind on some of his ideas should he be presented with new and compelling evidence. That seems apt as the talk was actually based around how he'd changed his mind in the past. He took us back over thirty years to when he was a student at university in Bristol.

At Bristol, he joined a debating society called Praxis and fell into Marxism and far left politics. He moved so far to the left that by the time of 9/11 he was almost celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers (despite the fact that Al-Qaeda are anything but left wing Marxists). His political extremism led to problems moving on in his career and to a very long estrangement from his parents.

The far right have been, and still are, far more dangerous than the far left in my view but having expressed some doubts, a few years back, at Jeremy Corbyn's lukewarm support for remaining in the EU (which I interpreted as tacit support for Brexit) I found myself at the end of some very unpleasant comments from Corybnistas. A tribe who regularly suggest people should "fuck off and vote Tory" and then act outraged when people do "fuck off and vote Tory".

One particular character, a former acquaintance from Basingstoke who thinks wearing a Clash patch on your denim jacket makes you Che Guevara, even tried to start his own conspiracy theory in which Keir Starmer is bankrolled by the Daily Mail. What I don't get with all this is if there are Tory entryists hiding in the Labour party so they can sneak into power - why haven't they just joined the Conservative Party who have now been in power for thirteen years?

Nobody can seem to answer that one. But, anyway, I digress. Via his far left friends and the far left groups he joined, Patihis became interested in postmodernism and the teachings of Sigmund Freud and he became a believer in invisible forms of repression and oppression. While (at least I believe) there are forms of repression (I can think of a man I know who is clearly repressing his homosexuality and it's doing horrible things to him - turning him into a seething ball of hate) and there are definitely forms of oppression (Patihis cited very extreme examples from slavery and the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide and the treatment of the Uyghurs in China right now) it seems he has, over the last decade or so, moved away from believing in invisible versions of both.

While there are definitely invisible things in the world (radio waves for example), Patihis feels that invisible forms of repression and oppression don't exist and the reason he thinks they don't exist is that the writings about them (often by Freud, Marx, or Alfred Adler) are so vague as to not be falsifiable. Taking as his inspiration the writings of Karl Popper, Patihis has reached the conclusion that these writings are intentionally vague so as they can offer entire world views that cannot be questioned or disproved.

In that they are much like religions and as religion is possibly the most evil thing on the planet (if you don't believe that, switch on the news and watch the Israelis and Palestinians killing each other by the thousand) it's not good for a philosophical idea to dress up in the clothes of religion. Some of the advocates act as true believers and everything, absolutely everything, can be proved or disproved using the teachings of Marx and Freud.

Now this was quite tricky for me as I'd always had a lot of sympathy for both men and their ideas (while not being some born again convert). Patihis made it even more difficult when he cited Jordan Peterson as writer he enjoyed but it would be wrong to tar Patihis with an alt-right brush because he clearly isn't that and isn't likely to become that soon. I'll put the mention of Peterson down as a regretful aberration and try and focus more on the rest of the talk.

Much of which was focused on university administrators and how lecturers like him are, these days, only ever one step away from being cancelled. He told us some examples of colleagues who had been cancelled, or come close to being cancelled, for what seemed like very minor things. One lecturer made a joke about Homer Simpson being a typical man. When a student was asked how he felt about this he said he didn't agree but he felt the lecturer was well within his rights to say it. The administrator, however, felt the lecturer had gone too far and he was given a stern reprimand.

Patihis's main message was that we need to lean more into empiricism, rationalism, and critical thinking and move away from postmodernism and critical social justice. Now he didn't really go into it but I don't think he's saying there should be no social justice. I think quite the opposite. What he was saying is that those who entertain and advance notions of critical social justice often look to make the most innocent things problematic.

Examples given included ones he'd got an AI chatbot to write (which I felt was cheating a bit but Patihis swore that they're virtually identical to texts written by those who practice critical social justice). There were screeds on how it is wrong to feel nourished by the love of your mother, how it is wrong (in multiple ways) to tell your toddler grandchildren that they're cute, and how it is wrong to give teddy bears to small children to comfort them.

It seems a pretty bleak and joyless world that these people inhabit and that's perhaps why they become attached to ideas so extreme they begin to look like conspiracy theories. I felt that the speaker himself had used some fairly extreme examples to make his point and I came away thinking that surely there's a middle ground between full on oppression and trauma and made up oppression but when it came to repression I agreed more.

While people may repress their sexuality and their desires, the idea that people repress sexual abuse as a child doesn't carry any weight at all. People who have been sexually abused would perhaps like to forget that it happened tp them but the problem is they can't. Many of them become obsessed by it. There is no evidence whatsoever in all the millions of cases of 'recovered sexual abuse' cases (usually implanted in to the supposed victim's mind using hypnotherapy) but there is evidence that in planting these false memories into patient's heads one hell of a lot of damage is being done to them.

Repressing the abuse you have suffered wouldn't even work as a protection device as you need to remember which people hurt you so you can try to ensure you're not alone with them ever again. Obviously, there are disturbing and complicated cases where people react in what may seem like very unusual ways towards their abuser but there are, said Patihis - and I agreed with him here, many other mechanisms known to scientific thought that explain those behaviours far better than the concept of invisible repression.

Some things are genuinely invisible and some things, like the Emperor's New Clothes, are invisible because they were never there in the first place. The talk had given me a lot to think about and, as I wrote earlier, I didn't agree with all of it but I agreed with a fair bit of it. Further study required. Thanks to Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, thanks to Professor Chris French for hosting, and thanks to Dr Lawrence Patihis for a thoughtful, compelling, and challenging talk.