So There: Civilization - Its Betrayers and Enemies in Perspective

John O'Loughlin

May 2022 · Centretruths Digital Media/John O'Loughlin

About this ebook

As with John O'Loughlin's previous title, Keys to the Kingdom of Truth, this new work tends to utilize both aphorisms discursively and maxims sequentially in a kind of compromise between contrasting approaches to his writing, the one more literary and the other more technical, with some material of an autobiographical nature included for good measure, as also in an attempt to clarify his situation as a self-styled intellectual whose 'journey' to a well-nigh definitive realization of his thinking did not happen overnight or without considerable effort both personally and vis-a-vis whatever obstacles domestic and/or environmental circumstances may have thrown in his way. Nevertheless, the intellectual adventure somehow continued, and one is relieved to say it has eventually attained to something of a culmination beyond which further progress in this regard would be virtually impossible, given the conclusive nature of, in particular, so many of the maxims, whose sequentially comprehensive structures matured only gradually but nonetheless cumulatively to a point from which it should be possible for their author to leave off journeying, having reached his adventure's end in what must surely be the most logically definitive philosophy imaginable, if not – dare one say it? - ever, the form of which – if there is such a thing – follows from the content and not vice versa, which makes, so Mr O'Loughlin would contend, for a certain contentment with the overall results. 

About the author

 ohn O’Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic of Ireland, of Irish- and British-born parents in September 1952. Following a parental split partly due to his mother's Aldershot origins (her father, a Presbyterian from Donegal, had served in the British Army), he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who had initially returned to Ireland with her daughter after a lengthy marital absence from Athenry) in the mid-50s and, having had the benefit of private tuition from a Catholic priest, subsequently attended St. Joseph's and St. George's RC schools in Aldershot, Hants, and, with an enforced change of denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been put into care by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his grandmother, he went on to attend first Barrow Hedges Primary School in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and then Carshalton High School for Boys in Sutton, Surrey, where he ultimately became a sixth-form prefect. Upon leaving high school in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an assortment of CSEs (Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs (General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved up to London proper and went on, via two short-lived jobs, one of which was at Ivor Mairants Music Centre on Rathbone Place, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford Square, where, with some prior experience himself of having sat and passed (with merit) a Grade 4 ABRSM piano exam, he eventually became responsible for booking examination venues throughout the British Isles. After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he was then living, he returned to his former job in the West End but, due to a combination of personal factors, not the least of which had to do with the depressing consequences of an enforced return to north London, he left the Associated Board in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which, despite a brief spell as a computer tutor at Hornsey YMCA in the late '80s and early '90s, during which time he added some computer-related NVQs to his other qualifications, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds ((1976), Cross-Purposes (1979), Logan's Influence (1980), Sublimated Relations (1981), and False Pretences (1982). Since the mid-80s Mr O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned more than eighty titles of a philosophical nature, including Devil and God (1985-6), Towards the Supernoumenon (1987), Elemental Spectra (1988-9), Philosophical Truth (1991-2) Maximum Truth (1993), The Soul of Being (1998), Point Omega Point (2002), The Dialectics of Synthetic Attraction (2004), The Centre of Truth (2009), Musings of a Superfluous Man (2011) and, more recently, Atoms and Pseudo-Atoms (2014) and The Black Notebooks (2015). John O'Loughlin is a life-long bachelor who has lived at various addresses in the north London borough of Haringey since 1974, after having moved from Merstham, Surrey..