Patrician disdain will out
We so often find ourselves in narrowing cul-de-sacs, don’t we, somehow unable to turn around and extricate ourselves. Whether in lives of insignificance or in positions of great responsibility and power, events grind on around us, favouring or dashing our hopes as they will, far from our immediate control, but so often down narrowing corridors that get harder and harder to escape. When this inevitability befalls the subjects of this article – those seduced by the tug of power – the consequences can be epochal. This is one of those moments, and has been, with growing intensity, for years now, probably decades.
What is power in its negative aspect but the desire and ability to make others act in ways they would otherwise not freely choose? What is fascism but power leveraged to extremes of abuse? Power corrupts cumulatively towards absolute power that corrupts absolutely. In so doing it stiffens, steadily losing its adaptive vitality until it breaks against its own rigidity.
I have argued here repeatedly that the clothing and paraphernalia with which power decorates itself don’t matter all that much; the State as a process is necessarily about Weberian monopoly (and thus over time, absolute) power at its core, that all institutions established to hold this dynamic in check can be corrupted over time, as history works its magic in tandem with the ambitions and flaws of those in positions of institutional authority. Again: “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That tending corrupts in only one direction: towards the acquisition of ever more power. Corruption, in this context, offers no other reasonable interpretation.
None of this should be surprising to anyone. History records many details that can be devilishly hard to interpret, but its broad civilisational sweep tracks this pattern of power.
Can anything be done about this unintended artefact of civilisational advance? Should anything be done? Answering that question has become the primary objective of this blog, crystallised into the call to “Demote money, promote wealth”. It is an objective I abandoned in 2015 as personal events overtook me, but one that was thrust back to the front of my life by the shock of global lockdowns. The first article I wrote on that phenomenon was entitled, “Only the intensity has changed. Nothing will ever be the same again”, a title that draws on the perspective I set out above. Though I published the finished article in June 2020, the title popped out of my mouth in a conversation with my daughter in early April. The phrase emerged from a deep intuition that had flooded me in late March, that the lockdowns were the beginning of something very sinister, and as such filled me with a horrible foreboding.
Events continue to develop more or less as that intuitive flood intimated, and as historical patterns of decadence and collapse – regardless of timescale and intensity – would suggest. Just a few days ago, the entire Canadian Parliament gave a monstrously unapologetic Nazi named Yaroslav Hunka a standing ovation. Not one single member of Canada’s Parliament remained seated. Mr and Mrs Zelenskyy cheered too.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a jew. He gave Mr Hunka, a Nazi, the honour of an enthusiastic fist pump. And Volodymyr knows very well how riddled Ukrainian power structures are with this vile ideology, the ideology of power and entitlement on the grounds of ethnicity alone, the ideology of dehumanising Untermenschen to ‘mere beasts’, which may then be treated however it pleases one to treat them.
Trudeau, a man who looks like a dull but dangerous narcissist to me, announced to the press that the House’s Speaker was at fault for this terrible blunder, and that consequently Russian propaganda was to be studiously avoided. A more baseless non sequitur you will be very hard pressed to find, and this one from the mouth of Canada’s Prime Minister. The BBC have assisted Mr Trudeau in his efforts to slide the blame over to Russia.
Any claims of ignorance are pure manipulation. Why celebrate a man in front of cameras recording images that would potentially be shared with the world, a man who surely would have been minutely vetted before being allowed into the House – two heads of state were present –, allowed into the House for the very purpose of that celebration, but about whom you know know very little? Two standing ovations in Canada’s Parliament for a man of whom one knows next to nothing? “A 98-year old Ukrainian-Pole who killed Russians? Hero!!” An organised photo-op of such delicate PR import that was unplanned, or at best egregiously mismanaged?
It doesn’t add up to me. A quick Wikipedia search would have sufficed.
More likely in my view is that ‘elite’ arrogance and sclerotic venality is at its ribald zenith. Their blunder was getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
But blunder or not, it was a very dark day that had been long in the making. Is it of a piece with the censorship, the mandates, the draconian lockdowns, the lies and deceptions, and so much else, that have been unleashed on the Western world in waves, whose onset was late March 2020? I suspect so. Global lockdowns were the very audible starting gun, though preparation for this broad and lasting assault on The People has likely been long indeed. I cannot be sure, but that initiating global event, though inaugurated in China and rolled out globally, appears to me to be primarily targeted at the West.
In its wake, having finally initiated Project New Normal, is patrician disdain for us hoi polloi now so intense and unbridled they can no longer conceal it? Has the deep and abiding revulsion that has festered so long behind their narcissist smiles burst free?
State power becomes toxic over time. (Et: l’État, c’est nous.)
Yes, [covering the Russia-Ukraine war] has changed my world outlook. It has taught me something about the West, something about Britain, which, you know, I’d sort of come to understand up to a certain point, but Ukraine has – let me put it like this – it’s shattered whatever remaining illusions I had. And it needs to be understood that Ukraine is really where it all begins: Russiagate, the response to the pandemic crisis, the disinformation campaigns that we see in the West – which are really purges of dissident views – all of these have their roots, in some respect, in this crisis in Ukraine. And of course it has been the great catalyst, also, of the Americans … I think … of the Americans starting to understand […snip…] the collapse of the unipolar system that the United States created. But what Ukraine has shown is that as far as the West is concerned – let’s talk about the leaders of the West – there really are no boundaries; there are no moral boundaries, there are no political boundaries, they’re perfectly willing to get into bed with Nazis – this is what this Canada business ultimately shows –, they’re prepared to work with the most terrible people, even people they’ve spent the last 70 years rightly condemning for their […snip…] extreme evil in the 1930s and 1940s. There are absolutely no limits, there are absolutely no restraints, there’s no point where these people will stop. And they are also prepared to take absolutely monstrous risks with the survival of humanity. – Alexander Mercouris in answer the first question asked in the linked livestream (registration required to view)
All the toxins are coming to the surface, oozing from the rot that is the nasty fruit of incestuous entitlement, that ugly perversion of noblesse oblige left too long in its own bubble. But where there is a ‘noble’ ‘elite’, there must also be a hoi polloi, an unwashed mass. The former needs the latter to have meaning.
Together, we are the State.
We are being shepherded – or are we shepherding each other? – from hysteria to hysteria. In mass hysteria, what is most ugly in us urges to the surface and will out. Our suppressed depths are suddenly on display for all to see. Reason and decorum are jettisoned as the survival instinct takes over. From where I stand, it looks like collective debts have come due; some kind of psychic reckoning is at hand (not to mention geopolitical).
What is it we are party to? How has this horror come to be? How have We, The People become so easy to coax into whatever state of hysteria the ‘elite’ deem useful?
Well, because we have been necessarily dumbed down – for factory work, repetitive manual labour, grunt work, to be reliably manipulatable consumers –, because we are the State, because real history is being made an irrelevance in the interests of durable stability and more financial wealth for our ‘protectors’, our ‘superiors’. These are the essences of the root deal, the “social contract” that is the State, that ‘beneficent’ protection racket.
Now that a profound bifurcation point is upon us – The Fourth Industrial Revolution – there where history really counts it is being stealthily rewritten. Our past is being rewritten. Our minds are being rewritten. We must fit into what is being installed, neatly, compliantly, willingly.
In Hiroshima earlier this year, Ursula von der Leyen implied that Russia was and remains the planet’s nuclear threat. She failed to mention it was the US that dropped the bombs that devastated two Japanese cities in 1945.
History and cultural norms are being bent out of shape to accommodate the New Normal. Can’t you see that nazism/fascism is being carefully rebranded into a shiny niceness that translucently gloves autocratic rule? Can you feel how pedophelia is stealthily being made ever more acceptable? Blacks across the US and UK seem to believe slavery is a phenomenon in which white people enslave black people, and that’s all there is to it. Whites are therefore racist. It is as simple and unambiguous as that.
In the interests of better control, to ensure a lasting stability some time after a period of managed chaos, we are being set at each other’s throats. Culture is being deliberately reengineered while we are endlessly encouraged to bicker and brawl. The stage is being set, the lights dimmed, the exciting new show is about to begin. As far as I can tell, this programme is occurring primarily in the West, but will be extended globally if the ‘elite’ globalists get their way.
In other words, We, The People can be led like sheep from mass panic to mass rage, and back again, for the simple reason that much time and money has been invested – decades and centuries of it – to make sure we are sheep. (Whisper: “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.”) There’s no more important tool of statecraft than propaganda, right? How good is We, The People at inter-group dialogue these days? Worse than ever. So many topics are taboo, what we are left with, socially, is a pervasive toxic niceness – the misbegotten brat of respectful manners –, a shallow facade that cracks quickly into red-faced rage.
Triggered yet?
Three quotes I cite regularly: “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.”
I hope it is clear to you how these three quotes belong together. My fear is that the opposing historical current – the endless conveniences delivered by the march of progress and technological advance – has so shaped how we in the West see the world, how we apprehend reality, that the pivotal importance of these three quotes is lost on most today, certainly those under 40. These three vital quotes would have to be animated in rapidly changing saturated primary colours and be spoken dramatically by very cute unicorns and very scary demons to have the slightest chance of making an impression on an entitled and spoiled Western world. Which is precisely why I have argued that deep collapse is a prerequisite to a healthy historical course correction.
Perhaps this very correction is being part-engineered by Putin’s SMO in Ukraine, an horrific necessity he sorely wanted to avoid. Whatever the truth of this, his is a decision that has awoken the non-Western world to its own potential, its growing ability to loose a weakening global bully from its throat. I understand over 60 nations want to become members of BRICS+. Their desire speaks volumes, as does their willingness to make that desire public, regardless of how viable BRICS+ proves to be. Does this momentous geopolitical shift presage the correction the West so desperately needs?
The West is in steep decline, its credibility and authority disintegrating precipitously. Seeing this, watching on incredulously as the West needlessly eviscerates itself, the rest of the world responds accordingly. Currently, the main vehicle of that response is the BRICS. This battle of the giants spells historical turbulence aplenty, turbulence whose fallout will be devastating for the West, though primarily for the EU and the UK.
Love is always the answer
But one that tiggers most people more than any other.
Nobody leaps from zero to love just by deciding to do so. Love is a long and winding way that starts small and delivers mysterious fruits whose joys and sustenance are hard to taste at first.
Love is an emanation, is endemic to consciousness, to the nature of reality, and is both earned and unearned. It is the state of being you become at peak health, or rather when your health – the health that you dynamically are – is rich and complete, from top to toe. Love is thus true wealth that wants for nothing.
I don’t measure friendship by the number of my friends, but by the quality of the moments I share with my fellow earthlings. Friendship emerges from the quality of a shared moment to fade away organically as the moment moves on. As with breathing, one cannot hold on to the in breath forever.
Something deep in the DNA of civilisation, in humanity’s reflexive socialising groupthink, wants to hold on forever to that which secures power, affluence, pleasure. The State is an evolved social technology that structures this possessive desire towards impossible permanence. We are caught up in it more intimately than are fish in the sea. As we fear, so the State fears. As our fears oscillate turbulently, cumulatively outwards and upwards, so the State decays. And so we all suffer.
So goes history.
This is easy to observe, but far harder to change, to evolve beyond. Logic suggests that as we learn to love, to become love, so will the State. The State may well be breathed away one last time, to be replaced by something else, I don’t know. But if we want something healthy, something deeply good and beyond the rot of today, love is the way that will birth it.
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