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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Private and Public Opinions

How affluent liberal progressives think of themselves as a master race

We all tell white lies from time to time, preferring to tell others what they want to hear rather than what we really think. This may seem fine when commenting on your partner’s new hairdo. You may prefer her old style, but you don’t want to hurt her feelings. White lies may be more sinister when someone cheats on you and stabs you behind your back, while claiming to be your friend. You may not want to hear that your business partner is having a salacious affair with your wife while you work overtime to keep your company afloat, but when your marriage breaks down you may wish you had learned earlier.

The same kind of mendacity occurs in public administration, but on a much bigger scale. Progressive influencers have public and private opinions. Publicly they preach greater equality, diversity and tolerance for all, namely they want to be your friend, but only if you behave. Privately, they see themselves as a master race of enlightened professionals entrusted with the task of managing everyone else’s lives, rewarding compliance and penalising the self-determination of sovereign individuals who may threaten social stability.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s the incipient moral superiority of some overzealous health and safety managers and social workers may have seemed a little condescending at times, but basically benign. Health visitors would advise new parents on how to deal with tantrums without smacking and food standards inspectors would visit fish ‘n chip shops to replace old salt-shakers with new ones with fewer or smaller holes. Both sets of well-meaning professionals believed they served the public good because they knew better than most unsophisticated commoners who might otherwise beat their naughty children senseless or die of salt-laden heart attacks. Many such professionals have attended NLP or neurolinguistic programming courses, so they do not come across as arrogant or condescending when interacting with the great unwashed. One approach is to appeal to collective wisdom rather than suggesting the other person is in any way negligent, e.g. “Did you know some people fail to brush their teeth properly for at least two minutes?”. This technique drops a gentle hint that only fools would fail to heed official advice and forget to brush their teeth methodically. We are thus motivated not so much by a self-determined survival instinct, but by a yearning for social acceptance and thus appealing to a pseudo-intellectual hive mentality, i.e. doing what appears to be for the greater good rather than in our own interests. That doesn’t mean we should not listen to good advice from people we can trust, but we should ask whom we can trust and, more important, who has our best interests at heart?

Could the Covid Scare really be about Population Control?

For decades we have lived under the illusions of liberal democracy with full respect for human rights and growing prosperity. Many of us failed to realise the fragility of the short-lived neoliberal age that seemed to have space for a wide range of people from different walks of life and cultural backgrounds. The apocalyptic forecasts of the 1970s oil crisis never quite materialised. The world’s population continued to grow with rapidly declining infant mortality and lower levels of famine as hundreds of millions moved from small traditional communities to large conurbations. By 2015 most people in the developing world had access to clean water, electricity and telecommunications. At the turn of the fourth industrial revolution, most people on earth are somehow connected and aware of better economic opportunities in far-off lands, but only a tiny minority have the niche intellectual skills that 21st century high-tech businesses needed. We may have over 6 billion consumers, if we exclude off-grid subsistence farmers, and hundreds of millions of potential sales assistants, office clerks, drivers, production line workers or cleaners, but most will be made redundant by rapid smart automation. Over the last twenty years economic migration has mainly allowed employers to keep wages low and make it much easier to hire and fire expendable human resources that will soon be delegated to artificially intelligent robots. In an interconnected world population control has two related meanings, namely controlling our behaviour and potentially controlling our numbers. Once our livelihoods depend almost entirely on corporate welfare, with limited bargaining power, we are at the mercy of the hand that feeds us. The Australian government already operates a “no jab, no pay” policy that withdraws child support and other welfare to parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. As long as most families have at least one breadwinner on a good salary, they can opt out of some state-mandated behaviours. Antivaxxers have become the new unclean outsiders, as powerful lobbies have over recent decades spent billions persuading us of the critical role vaccines play in warding off potentially lethal diseases. Concerns about vaccine safety are often dismissed as scientifically illiterate quackery, despite many widely documented cases of adverse reactions to heavily promoted vaccines such as MMR, HPV and swine flu. However, vaccines may only be a means to an end, another way to bind our survival to the biotechnological industrial complex. If we let natural herd immunity win the day, potentially sacrificing a few vulnerable individuals we cannot protect through common sense precautions, at least we remain in control with stronger immune systems. By contrast once we succumb to the lure of DNA-altering wonder drugs, our survival as species will forever more be intimately bound with biotech giants responsible for micro-managing our immune responses and certifying our health.

Sweeping controversies under the carpet

The biggest taboos of the late 20th century and well into the first two decades of the current century are the earth’s human carrying capacity and eugenics. Talk of the latter unwelcome dilemma fell into disfavour in the aftermath of the Second World War. Democracy relies on the notion that we should respect everyone’s needs, wishes and opinions, not just those of the anointed classes. As long as governments and big business can keep their people happy with bread and circuses, they can afford a high degree of public consultation and tolerate dissent, although the mainstream media has long channelled public debate into a narrow range of acceptable opinions, manufacturing consent over protracted periods for far-reaching social changes. However, that era may well be coming to an end as Western Democracy morphs into epistocracy, as envisaged by Jason Brennan in his 2016 book Against Democracy, namely rule by experts. In such a world anything that runs counter the experts’ narrative is deemed heretical. In today’s language dissidents are invariably dismissed as either as far-right or conspiracy theorists. In the recent past the establishment press would worry more about the far-left, intent on destroying our thriving free market economy, or about anarchists, intent on destabilising our cherished civil society. The old left versus right divide has now given way to a growing rift between the universalist outlooks of the affluent professional classes and more socially conservative perspectives of commoners. Who would have guessed that many of the same people who last year championed the free movement of workers and sexual liberation everywhere have now become some of the most fervent proponents of social distancing, face-masks, travel bans and mandatory vaccines. This cognitive dissonance is strongest within the green movement. While back in the 1980s ecologists advocated a back-to-nature approach to long-term sustainability supporting greater local self-sufficiency and often critical of high-tech solutions such as pesticides or genetically modified organisms, today’s Green leaders are very much in bed with cybertech and biotech giants. Indeed Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Bayer- Monsanto, GSK and AstraZeneca are all keen advocates of the much-flaunted Green New Deal.

The End of Endless Growth

The world’s business elites have now ditched the mantra of endless economic growth. Smart automation has dispensed with the need for a large working class. The mega-rich can consolidate their power and privileges without a large army of loyal workers or the need to milk profits from mass consumption. Since the worldwide roll-out of corona-containment measures the accumulated wealth of the planet’s top billionaires has risen exponentially. In the US alone their wealth had risen by a staggering $434 billion by the end of May this year. Jeff Bezos is now worth over $200 billion, more than the whole GDP of many countries. In public Bill and Melinda Gates may talk about empowering the poor through better education and healthcare, which usually means more vaccines and drugs. In private they consider the great unwashed useless eaters. As the United States teeters on the brink of a civil war, the metropolitan elites have struggled to hide their disdain for American rednecks and blue-collar workers, whose love of SUVs, private houses and guns makes them a huge liability. Our new technocratic masters will only tolerate the masses as long as our behaviour and thus our environmental impact on the planet can be micromanaged. The covid-19 narrative provides the perfect pretext to track not only the movements of all 7.8 billion human beings alive today, but to monitor our actions and ultimately our thoughts. Mental health screening will serve not just to identify depression or psychosis, but problematic critical thinking. To the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, polar bears, Amazonian rainforests, giraffes and lions are as worthy of protection as the working class tribes of Europe, North America or anywhere else for that matter. They may not yet have immediate plans to cull the global population, as some in the anti-lockdown movement believe, but they certainly want to tame us like wild animals in a zoo.