And the New Era of Eugenics
The liberal consensus over the last seventy-odd years had, until recently, favoured equality of opportunity. As long we all have access to good and inspiring education with a supportive family and wider local community, we can all thrive in our chosen vocations. We may have allowed for a few unlucky exceptions with severe mental retardation, but by and large, we liked to think most people had opportunities galore to be masters of their destiny. There is no easy measure of excellence or success. It all depends on your priorities and expectations. Some people may succeed financially but fail academically. Others may succeed in raising the next generation, but only enjoy modest personal wealth or career progression. Likewise, some may be content with moderate success, while others may feel demoralised if they fail to compete at the top of their league. It hardly mattered if you were a mere sole-trading plumber, factory worker or housewife, you were just as worthy as a surgeon, property speculator or the CEO of a large company, or at least so we were led to believe.
The illusion of equality before the law lasted little more than half a century. In most of Western Europe, it emerged from the ashes of the Second World War. Other countries had to wait for the end of colonial rule or racial segregation. While the managerial classes have long distanced themselves from open support for eugenics, the corona crisis has unmasked their thinly concealed contempt for the uncooperative underclasses.
The new eugenics, as we may call it, builds on the core precepts of modern psychiatry, namely that free will is an illusion and thus all aberrant behaviour can be tamed through psychological conditioning and/or pharmaceutical intervention. Over the last three decades the pendulum has swung from an emphasis on the psychosocial causes of mental disorders to the genetic determinism of all behaviours ranging from sexuality and violence to depression and hyperactivity. Such behavioural patterns may now be considered as immutable as skin colour or biological sex. Indeed feelings, with mysterious genetic origins, may trump more obvious physiological traits. In the absence of free will, a person lacks agency. We can always ascribe presumed misconduct to genes, bad education or a lack of early medical intervention rather than conscious decisions by responsible human beings with minds of their own.
Once people attribute behaviour mainly to genes, it only takes a small leap of faith to link intelligence with genetic inheritance and thus to justify a master race of experts empowered to regulate everyone else‘s lives. Wrongthink, as George Orwell called it in his dystopian novel 1984, means any idea at variance with the orthodoxy of official experts. In just a few years the Overton window of permissible opinions has shrunk from open debate on a range of scientific and ethical issues to complete deference to the cult of scientism. The mainstream media no longer debates whether genetic code injections marketed as covid vaccines are safe and effective but how we can persuade the vaccine-shy to roll up their sleeves. As I have explained amply in earlier posts, the nature versus nurture debate presents a false dichotomy. Our genes do not compete with our environment to determine our personality or intelligence. They form the blueprint for the biological hardware on which our emotional and intellectual software runs. Surprisingly little may distinguish the DNA of a successful brain surgeon from that of a semi-literate unemployable welfare claimant but their phenotypes may differ in some important respects. This may soon change with advent of human genetic engineering and augmented intelligence implants, bypassing limits imposed by natural biology or ecology. We could soon see a rapid shift away from the expansion of human activity that has characterised progress since the industrial revolution to transhuman excellence. Until recently, technological progress relied in large part on intense competition among natural human beings. Only a few of us would ever develop ground-breaking inventions, but advanced societies needed millions of conscientious workers with a diverse range of skills. Not everyone may have had the intellect to invent a new form of locomotion, but we still needed millions of specialised assembly workers and mechanics, many of whom could earn good salaries. Alas with smart automation, industry needs fewer and fewer engineers to drive innovation. The economics of growth is now morphing into the economics of supremacy.
Here we see a paradox. The same global corporations that welcomed expanding consumer markets that thrived on a multitude of human resources have now shifted gear to techno-feudalism with strictly regulated consumption and behaviour. The same advertising agencies that for decades sold us the dream of carefree mass motoring and debt-fuelled retail therapy in a sprawling urban landscape of highways and shopping malls are now selling us both the misnamed Green New Deal and the new concept of bio-security. We even get hybrid neologisms such as a green pass that grants additional rights to people with up-to-date genetic code injections. Green is the new grey, the antithesis of the natural harmony that many pre-industrial civilisations and many in the late 20th century ecology movement championed. Rather than learning to live alongside nature and adapting technology to help humanity as it has naturally evolved over the millennia, the technocratic elite now seems hellbent on radically modifying human nature itself.
The Green-Grey Alliance
The convergence of all mainstream parties and big businesses behind the biosecurity state and the Green New Deal should not have surprised the more astute political analysts among us. The controversial progressive policies of the last decade such as open-door mass migration, gay marriage, gender theory lessons in primary schools and proactive mental health screening did not grow organically from grassroots campaigns against social injustice. All these initiatives came from powerful lobbies deeply embedded in NGOs, academia, mainstream media outlets, private and public sector agencies. They may well have co-opted a few activists from communities with genuine grievances. On the surface, Black Lives Matter is about racial equality. In practice, this well-funded organisation promotes anything that destabilises close-knit ethnocentric communities that value strong families. This is almost the polar opposite of what most Black Africans want. BLM leaders do not just support the LGBTQ+ agenda, paving the way for transhumanism, they’re fully on board with the covid narrative, wear submissive face-masks at staged protests and have yet to utter a word of criticism against the multi-trillion dollar mRNA-vaccine roll-out. Rest assured that BLM did not voice any concerns over the suspicious deaths of five black presidents who failed to cooperate with the WHO’s mass mRNA-inoculation plans. Within little more than a year Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza, Tanzania’s John Magafuli, the Ivory Coast’s Hamed Bakayoko and Eswatini’s Ambrose Dlamini died prematurely and Haiti’s Jovenel Moïse was murdered. All presided over countries with very low covid-related death rates and growing populations but had expressed scepticism about mass inoculation. Their successors have all fallen into line with the WHO’s plans. Black lives only matter if someone’s high-profile death can sow the seeds of racial disharmony by blaming the white working classes for the crimes of their ancestral rulers. Not surprisingly, this organisation has enjoyed massive corporate support especially among cybertech, entertainment and sports giants.
More disturbing has been the authoritarian drift within a broad spectrum of the liberal green left. Tony Blair’s support for vaccine passports, around 15 years after trying to introduce mandatory ID cards, should surprise nobody. However, many who once opposed military adventurism, the abuse of corporate power, profit-driven environmental destruction and the over-regulation of people’s private lives, have now embraced zero covid, something that could only be achieved with total biological surveillance putting an end to the last vestiges of personal freedom. Admittedly long before covid entered our daily lexicon, idealists had to reconcile the conflicting demands of wildlife preservation, ecological stability, universal prosperity, human rights, peace, personal freedom and democracy. We had been led to believe we could have our proverbial cake and eat it, but you need not be a genius to see how these virtuous goals conflict with each other. We cannot clear forests and savannahs in the world’s most hospitable regions to make way for more farms, mines, roads and urban settlements without depriving other species not only of their habitats but also of their functional independence. Likewise, once our life support systems depend on advanced technology and supply chains controlled by a handful of interconnected corporations, we too descend to the status of zoo animals. Our freedom is now at the mercy of our technocratic zookeepers and conditional on our compliant behaviour.
Around 2018 Extinction Rebellion appeared on the scene. It recycled the extreme techno-pessimism of earlier radical ecologists. They believe if we don’t cut aggregate human consumption forthwith, we may soon face a man-made cataclysm that may wipe out our species. However, rather than advocate greater self-sufficiency and seek common cause with grassroots opponents of crony capitalism, Extinction Rebellion (XR) targets the consumer habits of the Western working classes. Most of the recent rise in demand for non-renewable resources has come from what we once called the developing world. Most Western countries have fertility rates below replacement level and, since the 2008 banking meltdown, have seen falling per-capita consumption, as young people’s priorities have shifted from car culture to electronic gadgets. Whether you believe our overconsumption of fossil fuels may destabilise our climate or not, growth in India and China would offset radical reductions in Western Europe. XR’s activities would hasten the demise of the Western working classes and, as is already happening, empower the very tech giants they claim to oppose. XR has attracted mainly wishful thinkers and dropouts from the affluent professional classes, whose antics facilitate the transition from the old model of hyper-consumerism to the new model of hyper-surveillance.
The same activists who once campaigned to keep the state and church out of people’s private lives when it comes to consensual sex or recreational drugs now oppose personal freedom when it comes to natural unmasked faces or informed consent on medical procedures. A few years ago, trendy metropolitan professionals may have liked to express their support for progressive causes such as saving refugees, tackling climate change by adopting greener technology or standing up for their rainbow coalition of worthy victim groups. At least their concerns, however impracticable or counterproductive, related to the plight of natural human beings. Now they virtue-signal their compliance with a puritanical narrative that transforms organic human beings into potential biohazards. All of a sudden, the chattering classes have co-opted a compulsive obsession with hygiene and a blind faith in the biotech industrial complex. The common denominator here is the triad of the mass media, academia and NGOs posing as independent charities, trade unions and think tanks. These have come out almost unanimously in favour of stronger corona containment measures and accuse all sceptics of murderous irresponsibility. Their tactic is to frighten us into submission unless we succumb to groupthink and relinquish our personal independence outside carefully monitored environments. Intelligence is no longer a measure of one’s analytical powers or problem-solving skills, but an expression of one’s internalisation of the presumed scientific consensus. This only works if you assume the experts employed by the organs of global governance have your best interests at heart. The growing rift in society no longer runs along left vs right or libertarian vs authoritarian lines but pits conformists against free thinkers. Behavioural psychologists have persuaded a critical mass of ordinary citizens that so-called covid deniers and antivaxxers threaten their freedom and health. Corporate technocrats and environmentalists have perversely joined forces to reset the world’s economy. Now the fake greens and elitist left sing from the same hymn sheet as the WEF (World Economic Forum), the WHO (World Health Organisation), the tech giants, the big banks and retail empires. They have buried their differences over the profit motive and industrial waste and concluded that humanity is the problem.
The New Master Race
Over the last 18 months, many leading scientists and medical professionals have been unpersoned and confined to the dark web of the alternative media. Meanwhile, other approved experts, such as Dr Anthony Fauci in the USA or Prof. Christian Drosten in Germany, have acquired an almost godlike status in the eyes of social conformists. Postmodern deference to scientism differs little from medieval deference to religious leaders. The architects of public opinion have thus simplified complex scientific questions to soundbites about our collective responsibility to each other. Politicians can now get away with sweeping generalisations based on a selective interpretation of available data unchallenged as they talk down to their subjects and dismiss any divergent opinions as mere conspiracy theories. Behind the thin veneer of public relations officers posing as elected representatives or acclaimed academics, a global governance network pulls the strings of the disposable talking heads we may want to hold accountable. Unsurprisingly, we see variants of the same policies rolled out in diverse jurisdictions around the globe.
The technocratic classes probably make up less than one percent of the general population, but they now consider themselves superior both to the plebs and their underlings in middle management. They have now cleverly exempted themselves from most coronavirus regulations that affect the plebs with exclusive travel corridors and resorts. Some may have posed before cameras to publicise their covid vaccinations, but we have no proof they received the same genetic code injections as the underclasses.
On a more serious note, current events across the prosperous world from Canada to Australia via Western Europe, clearly show the global governance classes are acting in lockstep to wage a war of attrition against non-compliant free-thinking citizens and guide the acquiescent majority to a new reality of socially engineered submission.