What ethical basis is there, if any, for espionage and intelligence activities? During the Cold War, and especially after the September 11 attacks, surveillance and espionage has been marketed to us as a necessary activity, even though it may occasionally veer off course. Staffed by bright, dedicated people motivated by the noble desire to protect the nation, spying and intelligence gathering is portrayed as having ethical motivations – to protect us from terrorists, gangsters, violent militias and so on.

But what happens when the intelligence gathering agencies themselves engage in criminal activities? We will answer that question later, but first, let’s examine a recent and parallel example.

The nuclear deterrent is allegedly based on an ethical consensus surrounding MAD – mutually assured destruction. The claim goes that while nuclear weapons are abhorrent, they are a necessary to deter the enemy. Their power and scale of destructiveness undergird the moral imperative of avoiding mutual destruction. Were not the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki morally rationalised as destructive acts which, by shortening the war, saved thousands of lives? At least, that is what we were told by the proponents of nuclear weapons.

The Trident system, marketed as the next technological step in the UK’s nuclear weapons programme, was promoted by the English ruling class and its Tory party allies as a necessary deterrent. News has emerged that the latest test of the Trident, fired from a nuclear capable submarine the HMS Vanguard, embarrassingly failed.

In full view of the UK’s defence minister and senior military figures, the Trident missile launched from the submarine basically fell back into the water. Apparently the booster rockets failed, so the missile landed close to its launch location. The last test of Trident in 2016 also ended in failure.

The incredibly expensive programme’s failure has raised serious questions about the nuclear deterrent policy. Indeed, the case for reinforcing the nuclear nonproliferation treaty has only strengthened. If Trident was supposed to be an expensive yet powerful deterrent, then Moscow and Beijing must be laughing at its ineffectiveness. Combine that with the fact that Ukrainian forces, long supported by Britain and the United States, have had to withdraw in defeat from a strategically important city, and the entire moral argument for the alleged deterrence policy lies in tatters.

It is worthwhile to point out here that, when it comes to nuclear weapons technology, the West has a long history of proliferation. While apartheid South Africa was under sanctions for its racist legislative practices, it was successful in acquiring nuclear technology from sanctions-busting Israel. Pretoria and Tel Aviv, while loudly claiming to uphold international law, repeatedly broke that law to achieve military and economic objectives.

Back to our earlier question – does not espionage and intelligence gathering have a moral basis? I mentioned the defeat of Ukrainian forces earlier in this article, to further discuss this issue. Surely Kyiv has the right to defend itself against the Russian invasion through, among other means, secret operations? Drone strikes, targeted assassinations, sabotage of military and economic resources – are these necessary, even justified in times of warfare?

Sure, they do occur in wartime. The Zelensky government is no stranger to authorising and implementing secret missions. The Washington Post published an extensive investigative article regarding the intelligence capabilities and activities of Ukrainian secret services.

The Ukrainian domestic security services, the SBU, have waged a campaign of drone strikes and killings of Russian officials. Striking the Kremlin itself, and attacking the road bridge linking Ukraine to the Crimea, this underhanded campaign has been portrayed as pure self defence. However, as the Washington Post reporters make clear, the CIA and the UK’s intelligence services have been pouring money, and providing training, to the Kyiv regime at least since 2015.

The following quote from the article, while lengthy, is necessary to shed light on the issue:

These operations have been cast as extreme measures Ukraine was forced to adopt in response to Russia’s invasion last year. In reality, they represent capabilities that Ukraine’s spy agencies have developed over nearly a decade — since Russia first seized Ukrainian territory in 2014 — a period during which the services also forged deep new bonds with the CIA.

The missions have involved elite teams of Ukrainian operatives drawn from directorates that were formed, trained and equipped in close partnership with the CIA, according to current and former Ukrainian and U.S. officials. Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said.

In fact, the depth of CIA involvement in converting Ukrainian intelligence into a fully integrated operative arm of the CIA has eerie similarities to the cultivation of South Vietnamese intelligence in Saigon during the American intervention in that nation. One former CIA official was quoted in the Washington Post stating that we are witnessing the birth of a new Mossad, a reference to the Israeli intelligence service.

By annexing Ukrainian assets as proxies of Western intelligence interests, the Kyiv regime resembles the now defunct Saigon client state in South Vietnam. Nurtured by American and British weapons, sustained by funding from imperialist states, the parallels between Saigon and Kyiv are striking.

No, I am not suggesting that Putin is a new Ho Chi Minh, or that he is leading a guerrilla struggle against a militarily superior opponent. However, it is incumbent on us to shine a spotlight on the activities of intelligence services which are predatory and criminal in character. How many other former Eastern bloc nations have been transformed into intelligence assets against Moscow?

Neanderthals are our closest evolutionary cousins, yet they have received an appallingly bad press. We all know the stereotype of the dim witted, barbarous caveman – brutish and simple-minded, knocking people on the head and scouring the country for women. Actually, this reputation of Neanderthals as unintelligent savages is underserved.

Since the discovery of Homo neanderthalensis in 1856, Neanderthals have been regarded as the perfect Other, almost the antithesis of Homo Sapiens. Workers in a limestone quarry near Düsseldorf discovered unusual looking bones. The latter were submitted to anatomists, who initially believed the bones were of a deformed human.

Upon closer inspection, the bones were defined as belonging to a completely different species of hominin. Neander – derived from the Greek for ‘new man’ and thal, German for valley, the new species quickly made an impact on the wider community. Officially named in 1863, this was a time when the reading public was coming to grips with the startling implications of a new book – the Origin of Species.

Darwin was not the first to suggest that species, including our own, had a natural origin, excluding supernatural explanations. But he popularised the theory of biological evolution for an English-speaking audience. Now, the discovery of Homo neanderthalensis made clear that we are just one of numerous ancestral hominins to walk the earth.

Since the 1850s, other hominin species have been identified; Homo floresiensis, inaccurately referred to as ‘hobbits’; Homo heidelbergensis, the more recently confirmed Denisovans – all of whom occupied different geographical locations, and different times (sometimes coterminous) with our own branch of the primate family.

Neanderthals and human interbred, a discovery made possible by advances in technology analysing and cataloging information from ancient DNA. Biologists and geneticists, such as Nobel prize winner Svante Pääbo, have decoded and sequenced entire Neanderthal genomes. Pääbo pioneered the field of paleo genetics, and won the Nobel prize in medicine in 2022 for his research.

Europeans and Asians have between 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA, while sub-Saharan African people have none. While Neanderthals were the first fossil hominins to be discovered, exploring their DNA has increased our understanding of their relative genetic proximity to modern humans.

It is not only analysis of ancient DNA that is changing our beliefs about Neanderthals. Newly uncovered artefacts, and improved methods for dating archaeological finds, have revealed that Neanderthals made tools, clothes, created artworks, were capable of symbolic construction, and may even have had a form of language. They took care of their families, lived in small socially cohesive groups, and buried their dead.

Hardly the picture of the lumbering, dimwit savage that we have been led to believe.

In the pages of the Scientific American magazine, the findings of archaeologists and geneticists have been elaborated, which paint a completely different picture of Neanderthals as ignorant brutes. They were capable of symbolic expression and art, even if only in nascent form. In various European caves where Neanderthal artefacts have been uncovered, researchers discovered that Neanderthals decorated themselves with body art, such as using red ochre for self-painting.

Neanderthal diet, far from being dominated by red meat, was quite diverse. They ate mussels, seals, sharks and various marine resources. Their dietary variety also included numerous types of vegetables, and indeed, vegetarian diets were not uncommon.

At Krapina, Croatia, a Palaeolithic site, Neanderthal artefacts and tools have been unearthed and catalogued, suggesting a complex system of tool manufacturing and symbolic reconstruction. Eagle talons, found buried at the site, require modification to be used as hunting tools. Not only for hunting – these talons were found to be decorated, which suggests their ornamental purpose.

Neanderthals went extinct 40 000 years ago. The causes of their extinction remains a hotly contested topic. I do not propose to resolve this debate in one article. However, we can firmly lay to rest one explanation – that modern humans hunted the Neanderthals to extinction, wiping them out through systematic violence. There is very little evidence of conflict between the two groups of hominins. There is ample evidence of their peaceful coexistence and intermingling.

Most archaeologists now favour a multi factorial explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals. Climate change and the retreating Ice Age left the Neanderthals with a narrowing food supply, diseases brought by Homo sapiens would have impacted the smaller social groups of Neanderthals, leaving them vulnerable. Exchanging packages of pathogens leads to mortality. Smaller social networks also meant smaller gene pools, thus increasing the probability of heritable conditions being passed on.

Let’s put to rest the stereotype of the knuckle-dragging troll that we have circulated regarding the Neanderthals. By recognising their cognitive capacities, we can also gain an understanding of our own humanity. In fact, the discovery of numerous hominin species is a bit like discovering the multitude of Kuiper Belt objects that could be classified as planets.

Pluto, demoted to its current status as a dwarf planet, is one of many celestial bodies in the Kuiper Belt. The latter is a circumstellar region of icy bodies ringing the Solar System. Are all the objects in the trans-Neptunian Kuiper Belt planets? A similar, parallel problem of classification arises as we research and understand the various hominin species, including Neanderthals. We need to expand our definition of humanity to include the gamut of hominins who, while different, share characteristics with us.

Since the beginning of large, coordinated and sustained Palestine solidarity protests around the world, the Israeli government and its Zionist supporters have portrayed the protesters as motivated by antisemitism. This slander is nothing new; since the inception of the state of Israel, Zionism’s partisans have kept up an unrelenting barrage of accusations that Palestinians, and the wider Arab and Muslim communities, oppose the Israeli state on antisemitic grounds.

Let’s untangle this topic, because it is impossible to highlight that multiethnic solidarity underpins the protests for Palestine solidarity, which is the exact opposite of racial or ethnic hatred.

Since its origin in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Zionism’s creators have regarded European antisemitism as not only inevitable, but an important political ally. Accepting the growth of antisemitism as something unavoidable, Theodor Herzl, the main foundational thinker of modern Zionism, regarded the antisemitic nations of Europe the most reliable allies. Pushing Jews out of Europe and into the putative homeland of Palestine, Zionism’s goal of an exclusive Jewish state corresponded with the exclusionary philosophy of white European antisemitism.

So much for the claim, advanced by Tel Aviv and its supporters, that Zionism emerged as a response to European antisemitism. In fact Herzl, Weizmann and the early leaders of Zionism accepted the racist logic of the antisemite – which holds that Jews are a biologically distinct ‘race’ incapable of assimilating into their host nations.

Herzl and his cothinkers were a tiny minority in the European Jewish community at the time. Zionism was a marginal force, but one which sought the patronage of imperial powers. It is well known that Herzl actively pursued the support of, for instance, Tsarist Russia, in the hope that the Russian Tsar would encourage the expulsion of Russia’s large Jewish community. Tsarism’s secret police and paramilitaries were engaged in antisemitic pogroms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jews were maligned as the originators of Bolshevism; the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy becoming a staple of antisemitic parties.

That huge numbers of Jews participated in antiracist and socialist movements is indisputable. It is this segment of Jewish opinion against which Zionism has fought. Anti-Zionist Jews are a serious thorn in the side of the Zionist movement. Ellen Brotsky and Ariel Koren, writing in The Guardian last year, explicitly denounce Israel’s assault on Gaza for what it is; an act of collective punishment tantamount to an unfolding genocide.

Indeed, the staunchest supporters of Israel and Zionism in Europe today are the far right and ultranationalist parties. They each have their own shameful history of antisemitism. Viktor Orban, the ultrarightist president of Hungary – and populist peddler of antisemitic conspiracy theories – is a fervent Zionist.

Geert Wilders, the far rightist Dutch politician who won the most recent elections in the Netherlands, is a fanatical supporter of Zionism, finding similarities between his ethnonationalist vision and the apartheid practices of the Zionist state. A notorious Islamophobe and anti-Arab racist, he has suggested the mass expulsion of the Palestinian population and its relocation to Jordan.

In fact, Israel’s most enthusiastic supporters in the United States are not Jews, but Christens. The evangelical movement, motivated by a literal belief in the tenets of the Old and New Testaments, see the ‘ingathering’ of Jews in the holy land of Palestine as fulfilment of biblical prophecy. While rejecting the eligibility of Jews to enter heaven – Protestant millenarians have a long tradition of antisemitism – white American evangelicals encourage the settlement of Jews in Palestine in accordance with their particular interpretation of biblical orthodoxy.

Chuck Schumer, Senate Democratic majority leader, was a keynote speaker at a March for Israel rally, held in Washington by evangelical groups. Supporting the ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza, Schumer and his colleagues regard the foundation of Israel as an opening salvo in the final apocalyptic battle of Armageddon.

Let us stop comparing the October 7 attack by Hamas to the Holocaust. No, Hamas did not attack Israelis because of their Jewishness, anymore so than Belgian anti-Nazi resistance fighters attacked German soldiers because the latter were Christian. Attacks on civilians are always horrendous, but do not saddle Hamas with the equivalent moral culpability as the Israeli military. The latter has besieged, blockaded, starved and malnourished the entire population of Gaza at least since 2007.

In fact, the conditions in Gaza since 2006-07 have resembled those of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War 2. Squashing an entire population into an overcrowded open-air prison creates the conditions where the oppressed lash out in their own ways. Our comfortable feelings about Hamas tactics may be shaken, but our feelings are also irrelevant. The Palestinians in Gaza do not have to consider the ‘feelings’ of the outside world, as they are fighting for their very lives.

Invoking the Holocaust, and the feelings of Zionism’s supporters, is an emotionally manipulative tactic to divert conversation from the realities of Palestinian oppression. Comparing Palestine solidarity as motivated by a Holocaust-continuing desire to eliminate Jewish people is a smear tactic deployed by Zionism’s supporters.

The accusation of antisemitism is used to censor critics of Israeli government policies – and Australian journalists are bearing the brunt of these kinds of attacks. Even the purportedly centrist ABC is enforcing a pro-Israeli perspectives on its journalists reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Do not allow the ultranationalist Right to monopolise the definition of antisemitism to criminalise Palestinian solidarity. Palestinians are fighting, not for the physical elimination of Jews, but for the repeal of Zionism, and the reestablishment of a secular, democratic state with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of nationality or religious affiliation.

The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted a deluge of commentary regarding its impact on almost every field of human endeavour. Journalism, music, art, technical writing, education- all of these fields and more have felt the impact of AI. While most articles have examined the potential automation of these jobs by AI, I want to examine the underlying assumptions, and some myths, regarding AI And its impact on human creativity.

The brain is not a computer. This long-standing analogy, which undoubtedly has assisted research in the field of computer science, has outlived its utility. It has become a hindrance in psychology and understanding the origin and expansion of language. You will never find Beethoven’s symphonies, or impressions of the paintings of Da Vinci, located in specific areas in the brain like we are examining a block of computer code. No, the brain is not analogous to ‘hardware’, like we would find a computer’s motherboard.

Matthew Cobb, writing about this very subject in the Guardian, elaborates on the long history of the brain-machine analogy. Rene Descartes, the famous philosopher, surmised that the brain was a series of hydraulic pumps and values. Throughout the ages, various technologies have inspired a wide variety of analogies – electrical, mechanical, telephonic, and currently, digital and computerised.

What has all this got to do with AI? Consciousness is not a neural network; language is not the product of coding by developers, but an outcome of our biological and sociocultural evolution. We have all seen the headlines, such as ‘can a robot write for a newspaper?’ Very interesting question, and one that needs to be answered. AI can certainly take the drudgery and monotony out of writing first drafts, reviewing and editing journalistic articles, for sure. No, it cannot substitute for human judgement.

Artwork, music – all these endeavours are the products of human labour power. AI can certainly increase productivity, but it cannot replace it. What we have been doing since the dawn of the digital age, is outsourcing our moral and value judgements to the algorithm. Search engines have become the first point of call for questions and issues we have. Medical diagnoses, prospective romantic interests, gaming hobbies, chess, shopping for music – we have enabled the algorithms to do our thinking for us.

Steven Poole, British journalist, wrote about this precise trend in 2013. The growth of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) was heralded in university education as a boost for the empowerment of students, making available thousands of courses for anyone willing to learn. That’ll great, but then computerised algorithms were marking papers – graduation by algorithm. Do we replace the university structure with MOOCs?

Let’s take self-driving cars. In theory they sound great – the algorithm simplifies the driving experience. That is all well and good. However, let’s look at the road toll. Gary Marcus, psychology professor at New York University, offered a scenario. You are in a self-driving car, about to cross a narrow bridge. A school bus full of children careens out of control, and there is not enough room on the bridge for both of you. Should the algorithm controlling your vehicle decide to drive your car off the bridge, sacrificing your life to save all the schoolchildren?

Even in seemingly routine matters, such as driving, moral and value judgements are required. If you think that scenario is far fetched, think again. The former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA, General Michael Hayden, stated that when it comes to the collection and retention of surveillance data, “we kill people based on metadata.” That comment was made in the context of a debate on how our metadata – phone call logs, internet searches, – is being used by surveillance and intelligence agencies.

AI, being a product of human engineering, inevitably reflects the biases and values of the corporations who own and operate it. Even the large language models (LLM) of generative AI are not value free. Language, originating in the human sociocultural experience of cognition and formation of words, can be mimicked by LLM, not replaced.

Surely something as straightforward as the retention of facial recognition data would not be subject to biases? Take the case of Randal Quran Reid, an African American man improperly arrested and jailed for six days purely on the ‘strength’ of facial recognition. Arrested by Louisiana police on the basis of theft reports from New Orleans, Reid had never actually been to New Orleans. His protestations came to nothing.

His family raised thousands of dollars to get Reid out of jail. Reid’s case is not unusual. As Silicon Valley tech magnates warn of the dangers of abusing machine intelligence, they are still spending millions of dollars on developing such tools – stochastic parrots, as one commentator put it.

The danger is not AI itself, but in how we are allowing the generative AI technology to shape the world in which we live. ChatGPT can simplify our writing tasks, but it can fully replace the nuances and subtleties of human perception, cognition and language. Indeed, a subject which has been missing from all the talk about AI – the vital importance of nonverbal communication. I seem to recall that a book, which started this subject was published in 1872, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, by Charles Darwin.

That book was the earliest foray – at least in the English-speaking world – about the psychophysical processes underlying emotions, and our nonverbal communication. I do not think it is an exaggeration to surmise that human language had a crucial nonverbal precursor, before evolving into a fully verbal and social experience.

We certainly require a discussion of AI. Lets expand that discussion into how we can shape and use it, and not let ourselves be guided by the market imperatives of those tech giants who control it.

Richard Rampton, the libel lawyer who took on Holocaust denial in his capacity as a barrister, passed away late last year. He was 82. His antagonist was the long term Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathiser David Irving. Irving, in 1996, sued Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin publishers for defamation. Why? Irving contended that Lipstadt, by referring to him as a Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, had defamed him.

The object of Irving’s irritation was the 1993 book by Lipstadt entitled Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory. A sweeping analysis of the burgeoning phenomenon of Holocaust denial and its basis in antisemitism and Nazi philosophy, the book made mention of numerous Holocaust deniers, and the role they played in rehabilitating Nazism. If the enormous guilt of the Holocaust could be removed from the shoulders of the Nazi regime, then the ideology which underpinned that regime would be easier to rehabilitate.

Irving was mentioned, among others, as a prolific author of books which denied or minimised the Holocaust, and praised the leading figures of the Nazi regime. Incensed, Irving launched defamation proceedings – and Richard Rampton stepped up to defend Lipstadt and Penguin Publishers. English libel law is weighted in favour of the plaintiff – the onus is on the defendant to prove that they did not libel the plaintiff.

This trial, which began in 2000, raised questions about modern history. Is there such a thing as objective historical truth? Are not Holocaust deniers exercising their freedom of speech, no matter how repulsive their views? Such issues occupy the minds of Armenians in the diaspora, facing the organised campaign to deny and downplay the genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish Republic in 1915.

Rampton, who taught himself German for the trial, attacked the falsifications and distortions in Irving’s books. Demonstrating a clear pattern of behaviour in Irving’s work that tended towards exculpating the Nazi regime, Rampton conclusively proved that Irving was a Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust denier. Rampton did not allow Holocaust survivors to testify, lest they be subjected to taunts and ridicule from Irving (the latter had done that on numerous occasions).

The court ruled in favour of Lipstadt and Penguin Publishers. Rampton, the judge stated, proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Irving was indeed a Holocaust denier, racist and antisemite. The objective facts of the Holocaust could not be disputed. Rampton, throughout his legal career, won many libel cases, but his triumph over Irving was the victory for which he wished to be remembered.

The trial, and the issues involved, were dramatised in the 2016 movie Denial, with the English actor Tom Wilkinson (RIP) playing Rampton. One of the expert witnesses who testified in Lipstadt’s defence, Richard J Evans, wrote the definitive account of the entire topic.

When a prominent person like Rampton passes away, it makes me consider what subjects I would have liked to discuss with them if they were still alive. So many topics and questions arise in that scenario, but there is one topic I would have loved to talk about with Rampton. While Irving was the most prolific Holocaust denier and history revisionist, he was not the only one attempting to whitewash the criminal record of a genocidal regime from the World War 2 years.

Established institutions, sporting clubs and migrant centres among the Croat Australian community have for decades celebrated and whitewashed the genocidal record of the 1941-45 Croat Ustasha regime. Led by Nazi collaborator Ante Pavelic, the ideology of hyper nationalist racism underpinned that regime. The Ustasha massacred Jews, Serbs, anti-Ustasha Croats, Croats who had converted to Orthodox Christianity – all with the active connivance of the Catholic Church.

The Ustasha regime earned a reputation for gruesome violence, implementing its ultranationalist vision of an ethnically pure Croatia. Defeated by the multiethnic Yugoslav partisans, functionaries of the Ustasha escaped justice in Europe, many settling in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia.

The Croats who came to Australia were virulently anti-Yugoslav, and had experience in committing acts of terrorist violence. The soccer clubs and migrant centres founded by Croat Australians promoted a narrow, ultranationalist version of their nation’s recent history. This is not my invention, but the findings of an investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Entitled “Fascists in our midst: the community whose leaders embrace Nazi links”, the SMH journalists found that Ustasha memorabilia is incorporated into the clubs and institutions of Croat Australian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. April 10, the anniversary of the establishment of the Ustasha regime, is openly celebrated. The sadistic pogroms committed by the foot soldiers of the ultranationalist Croat regime is either denied, or downplayed as ‘Yugoslav communist propaganda.’

Srecko Rover, a Croat ultranationalist who played a crucial role in founding migrant clubs and institutions for the Croat community, had a history he would have wanted others to forget. A member of the Ustasha, he was a participant in mobile killing units, targeting Serbs, Jews, non-Catholic Croats and other minorities in the areas controlled by the Pavelic regime. Rover found sanctuary in Australia.

Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the Croat ultranationalist community has only increased its efforts to revise the history of World War 2 era Nazi collaborator groups, such as the Ustasha. Reinventing war criminals as anticommunist ‘nationalist heroes’ was made easier by the warm reception granted to escaping Croat Ustasha killers in the immediate aftermath of the war.

In a similar manner to Canada, Australian multiculturalism has a dark underbelly – providing refuge to those Eastern European white supremacists fleeing international justice at Nuremberg. Holocaust obfuscation is a central tenet of destructive Eastern European ultranationalist revisions of modern history.

Indeed, in the former Yugoslavia, this kind of destructive revisionism is under way, with statues and memorials to the partisans vandalised, and their antifascist struggle downplayed.

I wonder what Rampton would have made of the sanctuary provided for fascist war criminals in Australia. I wonder what he would have observed about the falsification of history happening among sections of the multicultural Australia community.

My understanding of psychology comes from popular books, magazines, my time as an undergraduate decades ago, and internet columns. While I was good at psychology, I was not so outstanding that anybody made a fuss, if that makes sense. My late father encouraged me to study psychology. One aspect of the neuroscience module in the psychology course was the name Santiago Ramon y Cajal, a scientist who should rightfully be up there with Newton, Pasteur, Darwin, Pavlov, Einstein and Hawking.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 – 1934), co-winner of the 1906 Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine, is responsible for our current understanding of neurons, single discrete cells which, via axons and dendrites, communicate and make up the human nervous system. The discovery of the neuron as the fundamental unit of the nervous system was a crucial scientific breakthrough, because it laid the basis for the emerging field of neuroscience.

The birth of the neuron doctrine was not all smooth sailing. It had to confront, and eventually overthrow, the reticular theory of the nervous system. Today, we all understand the nervous system to be composed of neurons. The axons carry signals via neurotransmitters to the dendrites of the next neuron.

However, Cajal’s findings flew directly in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy of the time; reticular theory. The latter held that the nervous system was one, singular connected network. He fought tooth and nail to have his findings discussed and accepted. Using the metaphor of a tangled thicket, his illustrations of the intricate network of neurons are considered not just scientific breakthroughs, but also works of art in their own way.

He was not only interested in the physical structure of the brain and nervous system, but also in the workings of the mind. He was responding to the predominant theory of vitalism. The latter held that mental life was dominated by an immaterial force, a soul, which guided the psyche. Cajal, by demonstrating his discovery of the pyramidal cell – his initial name for the neuron – provided an anatomical basis for the activity of the brain. He was striving for a material explanation of the mind – consciousness.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal challenged Freudian analysis, by demonstrating that humans have a very physical – what we now call electrochemical – network of neurons and nerve connections. He opposed the inherent mysticism of orthodox Freudian doctrine – how can we comprehend the unconscious? Denouncing Freud’s analysis as pseudoscience, he maintained a strong rivalry with the Viennese author, which was Cajal’s reference to Freud.

Cajal was definitely not the first to wrestle with the thorny issue of consciousness – how can the human mind study itself? Indeed, the examination of consciousness goes back thousands of years. The Upanishads, the ancient Hindu texts, deal directly with the topic of consciousness. Does that make the Upanishads correct? No, but it does demonstrate how deeply ingrained the study of consciousness is.

Let’s not go down the path of surreptitiously introducing immaterial, metaphysical concepts into the study of mind – Deepak Chopra’s labyrinthine twists and turns of modern scientific findings into Hindu-adjacent concepts is a prime example of this institutional absurdity.

While I do not propose to solve the entire mystery of consciousness in one article, I would venture a suggestion. Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934), and his colleague Alexander Luria (1902 – 1977) recognised the importance of a physiological basis of brain activity, but also closely studied cultural socialisation and labour activity as crucial determinants in the emergence of consciousness. They avoided the twin pitfalls of biological reductionism, and the drift into metaphysical immaterialism. Labouring activity is indeed vital to the production and maintenance of human consciousness.

What makes us tick? How can we better understand human behaviour? It is not only psychologists who are asking this question, but giant tech companies as well. What am I talking about? Surveillance capitalism.

What is surveillance capitalism? Professor Shoshanna Zuboff wrote that our personal data, our shopping preferences, purchases, individual searches and choices, are now commodities for big data corporations. Why? To analyse our consumer behaviour, and predict our future habits. Driven by the profit motive, our private lives and personal information is a valuable commodity, to be bought and sold, and exploited. The large corporations want to modify our behaviour by understanding what is going on inside our heads.

The digital economy is a scenario of mass surveillance and data collection that Orwell could not possibly have imagined. The dystopian future of 1984 outlined a world where political surveillance was paramount. For instance, in communist Albania, prior to 1991, the state apparatus kept files on people’s political opinions. The ubiquitous secret police surveilled the population for political dissent.

In the post-1990 world with the rise of the neoliberal economy, the private sector amasses and exploits our personal data in a way unthinkable in Orwell’s time. Indeed, the post-Communist transformation in Albania turned out from a seemingly sweet transition into a sour and lethal social experiment.

The monetisation of our behavioural data and its conversion into profit has been done in the name of freedom. The tech giants have replaced the metaphorical Big Brother. Nearly every area of our lives – retail, finance, health care, travel – is in some way part of the surveillance capitalist paradigm. Back in 1986, former Soviet historian Dmitri Volkogonov wrote about Psychological War in the west, and how our social consciousness is impacted by the propaganda efforts of the ruling class in the sociocultural sphere. It is an early book on the battle for our minds – perhaps he was not exaggerating.