How the mainstream media others natural free-thinking human beings
We’re sleepwalking into a new global apartheid. In the post-covid era, segregation may no longer be based on your skin colour, ethnic identity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability status. Today’s rulers want to divide the non-compliant from the obedient. Countless billions of dollars, euros, pesos and pounds have been spent trying to persuade billions of human beings to accept a new kind of mRNA-injection with undisclosed ingredients. Relentless awareness-raising campaigns, featuring celebrities and media-savvy experts, have persuaded hundreds of millions of us that it is our civic duty to roll up our sleeves not only to alleviate the symptoms of coronaviruses but to protect others.
In recent years, progressive opinion leaders have been quick to shut down debate on topics as diverse as gender theory lessons in primary schools and the sustainability of mass migration by accusing the socially conservative of hate speech. Social influencers have exploited identity politics to such an extent that many feminists and members of racial minorities have now found themselves at the receiving end of hate speech purges. Why would anyone assume that all women must welcome the redefinition of motherhood or all black people must support the marginalisation of indigenous European cultures? The rainbow coalition of diverse categories of human beings has only ever been a tool of social engineering, favouring superficial diversity over strong communities based on cultural continuity and pride in one’s heritage. In short, anyone who questions socially transformative policies promoted at great expense by well-funded lobbies can sooner or later fall victim to censorship and ex-communication for allegedly offending a protected victim group. As many others have pointed out, it is almost impossible to discuss scientific or ethical subjects of any importance without hurting someone’s feelings. It doesn’t make any sense. If you’re pro-Israel, you could be accused of hating Palestinians and if you’re anti-Zionist you could be accused of hating Jews. If I suggested eating large quantities of cakes may shorten your lifespan, someone could accuse me of hate speech against cake eaters. Likewise, if a neurologist claimed women have on average much better emotional intelligence, I could accuse her of hate speech against biological males rather than examine the evidence. If we wish to retain liberal civil societies, I would argue respect and integrity matter more than bland inoffensiveness. I’d rather read the harsh objective truth on a contentious issue than sanitised spin that does more to confuse than enlighten us.
Scientifically Flawed Premise
The whole rationale for the rapid roll-out in country after country of vaccine passports is that they prevent the spread of lethal pathogens to the vulnerable. Yet not even the manufacturers claim that their widely advertised concoctions stop you from catching and spreading the infamous virus they labelled covid-19. They have only ever claimed that they alleviate symptoms if you catch it. This seems rather odd as earlier in the corona crisis we were led to believe in asymptomatic transmission. If true, the unjabbed would have more to fear from the jabbed who could be harbouring the dreaded pathogen without any symptoms and are also no longer required to submit to regular tests. However, the countries with the highest rates of covid-labelled vaccination also have the highest rates of covid-attributed hospital admissions. We only have to look at countries like Israel, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia. They all escaped the worst of the initial bout of rebranded seasonal flu. In the UK, a clear pattern is emerging with double-jabbed over 40 year-olds now statistically more likely to die with covid than their unjabbed peers. More disturbingly, the excess death rate has risen sharply in many countries since late August as mRNA-inoculation rates exceeded 70% of adults. The rise in the seasonally adjusted mortality rate, compared with the average for the previous 5 years, in England & Wales alone greatly exceeds the number of deaths attributed to covid or reported to the Yellow Card Scheme as fatal post-vaccination adverse events (just over 1600). A back-of-the-envelope calculation would reveal around 5000 extra deaths that cannot be otherwise accounted for. In the West of Scotland, there’s been a mysterious rise in patients rushed to hospital with blocked arteries. Some may blame bad diet, poor exercise or lockdown-induced depression, but why would we see a sudden rise now rather than last year before the mass vaccination drive? By now it must be crystal clear to any impartial observer that none of the corona-containment measures favoured by technocrats from house arrest to face masks and coerced jabbing have improved health outcomes. The initial lockdowns may have avoided some infections at the expense of delayed checkups and operations for anything not classified as covid. All of a sudden, the media reports more and more fully vaccinatedyounger adults dying allegedly with covid. Yet we are still supposed to believe that the Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca or J&J shots not only protect others but justify the exclusion of those who have not had succumbed to intense media and peer pressure to get the jab.
The so-called unvaccinated are now an openly despised underclass, even if most of us have received more than one traditional vaccine in our lives. Natural genetically unmodified human beings may soon gain the status of subspecies. The media derides us as ignorant, selfish, conspiracy-minded or unduly affected by dangerous propaganda disseminated by online activists with sinister agendas. Yet one need not be a rocket scientist to compare the imbalance between the opposing sides. On the one hand, we have the world’s leading banks, tech giants, media behemoths, transnational institutions, NGO’s and indebted national governments working in unison to regulate every aspect of our private lives. On the other, we have the people who have not yet submitted to the will of the Biotech Mafia. In affluent countries with advanced welfare systems, the majority has bought into some aspects of the covid narrative and opted to comply with mask and vaccine mandates to regain some of their former freedoms, but in most of Sub-Saharan Africa and rural India, the uptake remains very low. The Philippine and Indonesian governments have gone to extreme lengths to force these largely unwanted medical interventions on their citizens, but out of 7.8 billion people alive today most remain untouched by mRNA jabs. The only way the biotech moguls can hide the scale of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) is to blame a new potent pathogen such as the Marburg virus and in some way scapegoat the unvaccinated. Such a strategy can only succeed if the jabbed are too weak and the unjabbed are totally isolated. We pose a threat not because we spread germs more easily but because our ideas are contagious. The world’s tree-hugging technocrats have declared war on natural immunity. They want to commoditise not only immunisation but every illness, whether physical or mental. This has been a long-term trend that has accelerated beyond our wildest imagination within two short years. The new pariahs are not the unhealthy, whose vulnerability serves the interests of biotech control freaks, but the independently healthy.
It was only a matter of time before the waning US Empire and its loyal allies had to withdraw from Afghanistan. The US outlay over the last 20 years has been around $2 trillion. This astronomical sum may have empowered the likes of Halliburton, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin but it has brought Afghanis and military personnel alike nothing but death, destruction and more virulent strains of Islamic fundamentalism. Predictably much of the Western Media has blamed the current incumbent masquerading as the USA’s Commander-in-Chief for abandoning his troops and allies. The stage is set for Joe Biden’s exit for health reasons. The new Global Empire no longer needs American and European troops trapped in Central Asia. They can let China, Iran and India fill the vacuum. Besides, those troops may soon be needed much closer to home.
Have you noticed that some of the same high-profile opinion leaders who once evangelised humanitarian wars are now among the strongest advocates of our emerging bio-security state? They promoted the first kind of intervention to spread liberal democracy and overthrow tyrants and the latest kind to rid the world of a nasty disease. I’m thinking naturally of the likes of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in the British context, but Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern are very much in the same mould. Younger leaders may have distanced themselves from past escapades that have since proven electorally unpopular. However, they are ideologically committed to the concept of interventionism to guide us towards their vision of a progressive utopia or rather to put the little people in their place.
Interventionism is the idea that large organisations should take over the management of individuals, families and communities. It may take many forms. Outwardly it may mean military actions against naughty local leaders who fail to cooperate fully with multinational entities. However, it may also involve government agencies taking coercive actions to regulate the behaviour of people who fail to comply with expected psychological, medical or environmental norms. While many wishful thinking lefties may have opposed recent military interventions in the Middle East, they often championed coercive social interventions against people in their own country as necessary means to a progressive end. Such interventions may include early years mental health screening, gender theory lessons in primary schools, taking children into care if their parents fail to comply with expected behavioural norms, monitoring politically incorrect speech on social media or in people’s private spaces and censoring media outlets that permit dissent from the dominant progressive narrative. More disturbingly, we have now learned such progressive interventions may also entail stay-at-home orders, mandatory medical procedures, digital health passports and total surveillance, allegedly to protect the public against ever-mutating nanoscopic genetic sequences.
What else do these policies all have in common? They all have powerful lobbies deeply embedded in the world’s media giants and administrations and require multi-billion dollar marketing campaigns to win public support, usually by spreading fear that a failure to take immediate action will result in greater human misery. By this logic, a failure to bomb Afghanistan could have, purportedly, condemned Afghani women to permanent enslavement under Taliban rule. A failure to invade Iraq could have let Saddam Hussein deploy weapons of mass destruction and continue torturing his own people. A failure to impose strict coronavirus containment measures could lead to a proliferation of vulnerable people dying from respiratory infections. And last but not least, a failure to track the movement of every human being on the planet through mandatory microchip implants could lead to more tragic child abductions, such as the much-publicised Madeleine McCann story. In all cases, technocratic lobbyists want us to trade personal responsibility and traditional cohesive communities for the engineered safety of their corporate partners.
The alternative to interventionism is not necessarily complete anarchy but rather decentralised management of our affairs or self-determination at a personal and communal level. In the normal course of events, the cultural and ethical choices of other individuals, families, communities and small nation-states should be none of our business. The last century of growing interconnectedness has shown us that more humane societies are also more successful in the long run. Societies with greater personal freedom attract the best and brightest minds and let their people unleash their creativity. Given a choice, nobody wants to live in tyranny, but some may wish to suppress the freedoms granted to the great unwashed to secure greater freedom in their own neighbourhood. Totalitarian regimes could only survive by granting cooperative key workers special privileges. Under international law, self-defence remains the only justification for military action. That’s why George W Bush and Tony Blair had to use weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. The trouble with humanitarian wars is that all sides in a conflict can play the same game. As countries like Australia ban protests and keep their citizenry under house arrest, other regional powers may take the moral high ground. China may never need to occupy Australia militarily, but corporations with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party will find it much easier to acquire the country’s assets with a dumbed-down populace.
Just as the eye-watering sums squandered on the occupation of Afghanistan did not defeat terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism, the trillions of dollars spent worldwide on covid containment measures will not eradicate deadly viruses. Likewise, the colossal expenditures on psychiatric screening and surveillance of private lives will not free us of emotional distress or child abuse. They will serve instead to identify troublemakers and remove children from their parental homes. Strict censorship and tight controls on the free movement of ordinary citizens can suppress all evidence of sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by the privileged classes. Nearly all top-down interventions, however well-intentioned they may seem, serve to consolidate elite power. The phoney humanitarian wars of the early 21st century empowered the military-industrial complex. Now, the battle against elusive coronaviruses has facilitated the greatest transfer of wealth and power away from the affluent upper-middle classes to the biotech-industrial complex.
We’re witnessing a coordinated attack on critical thinkers who defend the now outdated concepts of bodily autonomy and free association. Your inclusion in polite society is now contingent on your stance on the safety of new mRNA injections marketed as vaccines. Until the day before yesterday, your medical history was in most public venues a private matter. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have basic dress and hygiene codes but seldom had to resort to heavy-handed enforcement. Social opprobrium alone would usually send a clear message to slovenly transgressors to clean up their act. Every living organism on the planet is a potential bio-hazard, but our immune systems evolved over millions of years to cope with everyday social gatherings. The narrative is simple. The so-called anti-maskers and antivaxxers endanger others by failing to follow official medical advice. These are just cheap smears for people who wish to carry on their lives as they did in 2019. Very few would be against practical infection control procedures in clinical settings and very few would oppose all vaccines. However, most object to top-down coercion and mindless groupthink.
Administrations around the world have applied mass hypnosis (cf. Prof. Mattias Desmet) both to guide persuasion campaigns and to identify subgroups who do not comply with the new social norms. In the UK the Behavioural Insights Team is at the helm of such public policy initiatives. It started as part of David Cameron’s much-heralded Big Society, which gave an official stamp of approval to the surreptitious activities of hundreds of charities and NGOs who have exploited the plight of selected victim groups to change people’s attitudes on a whole host of lifestyle issues. The mental health industry, an outgrowth of psychiatry, has long played a key role in creating new identity groups that fail to fit in with an increasingly atomised society. Almost anyone who has experienced mild levels of alienation, depression or anxiety can now qualify for a mental health label. Redefining life’s challenges in terms of presumed neurological deficits can only engender a sense of helplessness, which in turn boosts demand for mental health services and/or psychoactive medication. Today’s psychiatric labels are so vague as to cover almost any kind of non-conformity or imperfect socialisation. Many psychopathologists view political incorrectness as a mental illness. It is now common for political analysts to attribute undesirable opinions, especially those that favour traditional families, close-knit communities, greater self-reliance, ethnocentrism and faith in outmoded institutions, either to a lack of education or a personality disorder. As Jason Brennan advocated in his 2016 book Against Democracy, public consultation does not help administrators bring their policies more into line with people’s needs or desires. Its main purpose is to gauge how successfully they have persuaded people to accept the next step in their long-term plans for wide-ranging societal transformation. If consultants detect widespread resistance to their favoured policies, they will not necessarily abandon the policy but change strategy. In many cases, unpopular policies are mere steppingstones to a much more radical goal. They are not the desired endgame but serve to prepare people for more far-reaching changes in their daily lives.
Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, the governments of the world’s most prosperous countries have only managed to keep their people happy by artificially reinflating the consumer economy through unsustainable borrowing. Just as Chancellor Alastair Darling conjured up £600 billion overnight to bail out the banks thirteen years ago, in 2020 Chancellor Rishi Sunak found £400 billion under the sofa to enforce covid containment policies and keep millions of non-essential workers at home on furlough. While the likes of Google and PayPal may still pay lip service to the entrepreneurial aspirations of small business owners, they may now only operate within an ecosystem owned and controlled by a handful of tech giants. Sure, you can set up your handcrafted greetings card store on Amazon, accept payments via PayPal and source all raw materials online via similar channels. You’re selling a little piece of your human creativity. However, unless you can invest in specialised equipment with a dedicated workshop or become a megastar on Youtube, you will be lucky to earn more than some extra virtual pocket money to supplement your UBI. Your whole life will still be trapped in the matrix.
What is Technocracy?
Arguably, ever since the industrial revolution, our livelihoods have relied more and more on complex systems beyond our immediate control. Without clean water, electricity and integrated supply chains, our modern lives would soon grind to a halt. However, until recently, we needed millions of workers to maintain such systems. Large chunks of the workforce were thus directly involved in overseeing the smooth operation of machinery on behalf of their families, friends and neighbours. If the ruling classes failed to respect their key workers, they could hold their fragile economy to ransom. Outsourcing, smart automation and extreme labour mobility may have changed much of that, but even today some organised labour groups can challenge the powers that be. As the Australian governing classes deploy troops to enforce harsh lockdowns and their media outlets seek to shame those who do not comply with medical martial law, their truck drivers may offer the last hope in popular resistance. It may be easy for the military to neutralise and isolate a few thousand protesters in city centres, but a few thousand truckers can blockade cities and obstruct military movements giving a critical mass of suburban residents a window of opportunity to defy orders. Sadly, it is only a matter of time before driverless vehicles and deceptively green legislation disempower the last bastions of organised labour.
We should not confuse technology with technocracy. Where technological control is widely distributed, it can empower commoners. By contrast, centralised command structures with atomised and highly specialised workforces can abuse their effective monopoly on power to control every aspect of our private lives, including our most intimate moments and ultimately procreation itself. In a few short years, we have witnessed the close collaboration and commercial convergence of companies we once believed were fierce competitors. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook work in tandem to censor scientific dissent and spy on their customers. Artificial intelligence has already enabled tech giants not just to suggest new products and services based on your surfing history, but to analyse political leanings and diagnose critical thinking. Natural language processing may be in its infancy, but the leading social media platforms already have the means to intercept private messages that challenge their preferred narrative on strategic issues. They often justify such censorship as a necessary tool in their campaign against hate speech and in favour of vulnerable victim groups. This doesn’t just preclude open debate on sensitive subjects such as immigration or genetic determinism, it stifles any challenges to the new orthodoxy enforced ruthlessly by the biotech industrial complex.
The New Hate Speech
The faux-liberal elites have long co-opted the struggles against racial and sexual discrimination. Yet the same conceited ruling classes who once supported Western imperialism to tame the uncivilised peoples of the developing world have a new enemy in sight, the free-thinking socially conservative working classes and small business owners. The common thread that unites late 19th-century eugenicists such as Francis Galton with 21st-century transhumanists is their belief in the intellectual superiority of a master race. A century ago, race and biological sex were still key factors in determining one’s worthiness, but our rulers never intended to extend the same privileges they enjoyed to everyone who happens to share the same complexion or genitalia. Whether you were a Welsh coal miner, a Mississippi cotton picker, an Indian peasant or an African subsistence farmer, your imperial masters considered your lives expendable, unless they had trouble finding someone else to do a mission-critical job. Their main concern was to avoid open revolt and expand their commercial and cultural influence through a network of local leaders. Our technocratic overlords are now dividing us into rival castes of scientific gurus, middle managers, key workers, useless eaters, surviving on UBI and social credits, and the lowest of the low, outlaws or refuseniks.
Synthetic woke tolerance for people with different complexions, genders, sexual orientations and religions has now morphed into intolerance of anyone who fails to abide by arbitrary biomedical norms, which we once considered private medical matters. In two short years, we have regressed from accommodating people’s imperfections to treating nonconformists as lepers.
Opinion leaders and politicians, ranging from lowly BBC presenters such as Stephen Nolan in Northern Ireland to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, have started to blame the so-called unvaccinated or antivaxxers for a surge in people falling ill after testing positive with covid variants. Queensland health minister, Yvette Dath, went one step further to suggest citizens who refuse to get jabbed will have to stay under permanent house arrest. Western Europe’s hopes may now hinge on the French people’s reaction to Macron’s introduction of the controversial pass sanitaire. Every weekend hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens have taken to the streets in towns and cities across France, with some estimates suggesting participation rates of over 2 million nationwide. Yet these protests are barely reported in the mainstream media except as small gatherings of marginalised antivaxxers living in a parallel universe. The key issues at stake are not vaccination per se or even the development of new gene therapies to combat diseases, but coercion, bodily autonomy and complete submission to remote technocrats who may not have your best interests at heart.
Our technocratic overlords hope to harness their full spectrum dominance of the means of mass communication to atomise the general populace and isolate troublemakers. Their strategy is clearly to sow the seeds of deep societal division by blaming jab refuseniks for rising death tolls, including those caused by genetic code injections. They want to encourage people to report non-compliant neighbours to the health authorities, who may then involve either the police or psychiatric services. Groupthink may sadly be much more contagious than any biological pathogens. We have a limited window of time to save one of the defining features of humanity: independence of mind.
The public and private opinions of the controlled opposition
Prominent members of the Spiked Online gang, most notably Brendan O’Neill, Tom Slater, Joanna Williams and Claire Fox, have over the last few years gained some street cred among critically thinking anti-establishment types for their well-articulated critiques of identity politics, censorship and the demonisation of working class culture. They supported Brexit from the left and opposed many Draconian covid regulations, unlike much of the former Labour movement who have embraced the unattainable goal of zero covid. While Brendan, Claire and other regular Spiked talking heads pretend to be on your side in the battle against the remote elites, their deceptively subversive operatives have close ties with the biotech industrial complex. Out of the blue, Lady Claire’s sister, Fiona Fox of the Science Media Centre, writes a staunch defence of the quangos and scientists, such as the much-maligned Prof. Neil Ferguson, who masterminded the government’s deliberate overreaction to the corona crisis. It should come as little surprise that the Science Media Centre attracts funding from AstraZeneca, GSK and the Wellcome Trust among others. This is hardly out of character. The Spiked Gang have always embraced technocracy. Now you may wonder why Spiked promoted Laura Dodsworth’s excellent book A State of Fear? They never challenged the covid narrative, only the Draconian regulations like mandatory face-masks that accompanied it. Only a couple of weeks earlier Brendan O’Neill came out in support of making mass-marketed covid vaccines mandatory for care workers. Spiked's new line is that we should fear neither covid nor mRNA vaccines, but the whole rationale for digital health passports hinges on fear of an invisible virus and its constant mutations.
In the great debate on the limits of technology, environmentalists warn us of the dangers of overconsumption and catastrophic breakdowns due to our over-reliance on complex interconnected systems few of us can understand. We could call such people techno-pessimists. In the real world, we tend to like technology that empowers us and dislike innovations that enslave us. Billions of us have fallen in love with motor vehicles and the dream of exploring wide-open spaces along empty highways. However, we may not be so keen on the inevitable traffic congestion, noise, pollution and countryside destruction. On the other hand, techno-optimists believe humanity can always overcome environmental constraints with new technology and want us to trust the friendly household names behind corporate behemoths to deliver the goods. While much of the notional left opposed nuclear power and distrusted big pharma, one small group of Marxist intellectuals stood out in their unabashed support for technological progress.
I first encountered the tiny Revolutionary Communist Party in the early 1980s. They seemed mainly interested in recruiting students at the top universities. I only briefly flirted with them but have intermittently kept an eye on this clique ever since. Although their leading light, Frank Füredi, grew up in Hungary, they defended the old Warsaw Pact countries as deformed workers’ states against Western aggression in contrast to the SWP's position which viewed the whole Eastern Bloc as state capitalist. While many on the British left supported a United Ireland, the RCP went one step further and offered unconditional support for the IRA in their struggle against British imperialism, only expressing regret about the loss of human life. In the early 1990s, they rebranded themselves around their magazine Living Marxism, shifted their focus to culture wars and weaved a distinctive critique of the often reactionary and snobbish green movement. They helped form the smokers' rights organisation Forest, defended football fans against accusations of racism and hooliganism and fully embraced the working class’s newfound love of cars, gadgets and foreign holidays. In stark contrast to most trendy lefties, they unashamedly backed nuclear power and ran to the defence of the controversial insecticide DDT. I caught up with them again around 1998 in the run-up to NATO airstrikes over Former Yugoslavia. LM Magazine did admittedly expose some media deception about the Yugoslav conflict and, more controversially, had questioned the mainstream narrative on the tragic 1994 Rwandan civil war, which attracted accusations of genocide denial. LM Magazine famously lost a libel case against ITN (Independent Television News) over Thomas Deichmann’s exposé of trick photography to make an open refugee reception centre in a Serb-controlled area of Bosnia resemble a concentration camp. 3 years later the LM Gang re-emerged as Spiked Online. Their stances over the years perplexed many casual left-leaning observers. Their critique of NATO’s role in the dismemberment of the Former Yugoslavia and of US/UK support for Tutsi insurgents in the Rwandan civil war followed in the best traditions of anti-imperialism and Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism. Yet at the same time, the LM Gang were forging close links with big businesses, especially in the pharmaceutical sector. Their wider circle of contributors now included a number of media-savvy academics and boffins. Dr Michael Fitzpatrick came to the defence of the MMR vaccine, dismissing any links with neurological disorders despite having an autistic son. The mainstream media loved him. In 1998 Channel 4 screened Martin Durkin’s three-part critique of the green movement Against Nature. Its theme was simple. We have nothing to fear from the growing encroachment of technology into every aspect of our lives and even of an eventual merger of man and machine. I recall a scene showing a full-body transplant of a chimpanzee with the narrator wishing for a near future when we could bio-engineer replacement body parts and even augment our intelligence. They claimed that with the wonders of genetically engineered crops and almost limitless cold fusion power we could easily sustain a world population of 32 billion and thus had no need to either reduce per capita consumption or worry about a growing population. On a superficial level, the utopian vision of communism where everyone has access to everything they desire is only conceivable via an idyllic techno-panacea. Yet the LM Gang’s new business partners had other ideas about the future progress of humanity.
Green Technotopians
It’s a funny old world where the WEF (World Economic Forum,), the WHO (World Health Organisation), Prince Charles, Boris Johnson and the Greens all sing from the same hymn sheet. The covid narrative has conditioned many of us to view other members of our species as vectors of disease and thus to accept mandatory genetic code injections as a means to win back tightly regulated freedoms. More important, the authorities have ever so subtly pushed the message that we are not all essential and some of us may be superfluous to the needs of humanity as a whole. Now governments have set a precedent for virus lockdowns, the stage is set for climate lockdowns. Unsurprisingly, vaccine passports have been marketed as green passes in many European countries. Now people can be tracked everywhere they go and can no longer gain access to many essential services without smartphones, which despite fact-checker denials will soon morph into wearable microchips. Digital health passports are effectively temporary movement permits.
Environmental campaigners once distrusted our overreliance on complex technology and preferred local solutions to global problems. Many critics of neoliberal globalisation, such as French farmer and syndicalist Jose Bove or Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, defended the rights of smallholders, craftspeople and factory workers from the left in opposition to an emerging world controlled by a handful of multinationals. Most eco-activists also favoured holistic healthcare with a focus on diet, exercise and natural remedies over lifelong dependence on pharmaceutical products and invasive treatments such as chemotherapy. In many ways, the early green movement with its love of mother nature had much in common with social conservatives. Who would oppose new airports, motorways, high-speed railways and more suburban sprawl? Often concerned local social conservatives would join forces with affluent professional newcomers who had moved to the countryside to escape the hustle and bustle of the cities. The early green movement instinctively rejected both militarism and imperialism, the notion that one group of people, whether organised as countries or corporations, may impose their will on others through coercion. However, as green politicians gained office in regional and national administrations, they soon cast aside their new-age love for self-sufficiency and formed new alliances with tech giants who wanted to transition away from the old fossil fuel economy. In the early 21st century the main drivers of economic growth were no longer cars and other wasteful machines, but smart low-consumption gadgets and digital services. People had to be persuaded to pay for abstract services and ephemeral fashion accessories they did not know they needed.
When the climate change narrative first reached public consciousness around the turn of the millennium, the world’s largest car manufacturers and oil concerns seemed loath to adapt and funded the climate sceptic movement. While the growth in car ownership slowed and then declined slightly in Western Europe, it skyrocketed in much of the developing world. In 2007, Channel 4 broadcast Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle, much to the chagrin of the vocal army of climate change fundamentalists such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot. We soon learned the two pillars of the new religion of scientism, peer-review and the scientific consensus. Superficially, it makes sense for rigorous research papers to undergo methodical scrutiny before publication. If a scientist dependent on corporate sponsorship suppresses key evidence about the safety of her sponsor’s products, it seems fair for a more neutral academic to correct the bias. Science can only thrive with complete transparency and open debate on the interpretation of evidence. However, in practice, peer review often serves as a form of corporate censorship to ensure scientific publications do not contradict the preferred consensus. The latter term no longer refers to a thesis supported by almost indisputable evidence but to the received truth, i.e. a dogmatically enforced orthodoxy. On the MMR debacle, we saw most of the centre-left establishment, academia and the LM Gang adhere strictly to the preferred narrative that the triple vaccines were extremely safe and could not trigger regressive autism in a small susceptible subset of children. Opposition tended to come more from social conservatives, back-to-nature bohemian types and a handful of dissident medics, most notably Dr Andrew Wakefield and Dr Joseph Mercola. Yet on climate change, the LM Gang sided with the mavericks who disputed the IPCC’s scientific consensus. By 2010 any scientist, such as Australian meteorologist William Kininmonth or Canadian zoologist, Susan Crockford, who challenged the consensus would struggle to get their research papers peer-approved. Around the same time, the big energy cartels embraced the transition to a post-carbon economy. BP rebranded itself as Beyond Petroleum. All along their main goal had been to hold humanity to ransom by controlling the resources that regulate our material freedom. If all communities were self-sufficient in energy, water, food and essential raw materials, the big energy mafia would be out of business. On the fringes, two visions of our post-carbon future vied for our attention.
One involved the re-localisation of our economy through greater self-reliance and a more frugal existence with fewer but more durable machines. Some envisaged such a scenario might evolve as a natural reaction to a future worldwide economic collapse. When modern distribution chains fail to deliver the goods amid financial mayhem, people will have no choice but to learn once again to grow their own food. However, in many densely populated urban areas, this is simply not a practical option without substantial reallocation of land use and redistribution of population centres. Some have pointed to urban farms in Detroit’s sprawling suburbs as an example, but the city not only had plenty of disused land that could be repurposed, its population had declined.
The other vision of a green utopia harnesses advanced technology on a global scale to radically reduce our collective carbon footprint. It reduces human beings to the status of environmental hazards whose activities must be micromanaged to protect our delicate ecosystem. It’s almost the polar opposite of the loose network of decentralised self-regulating communities that early environmentalists had envisioned.
Green-labelled parties have long strayed from their original focus on ecological sustainability to champion other causes that require greater reliance on remote organisations. Over the last twenty odd years, green politicians have been more interested in welcoming unbalanced migratory flows, allegedly caused by climate change, and in promoting transgender ideology than in saving natural habitats. Such policies inevitably reduce self-sufficiency. If millions more people move to a region that is already a net importer of food and other essential resources, it becomes even more reliant on international trade and finance. Likewise, only male-female partnerships can reproduce naturally and raise the next generation with strong cultural bonds to their forebears. Alternative family structures with single or same-sex parents rely much more on state intervention and biotechnology. Here the new greens, as we may call them, have converged with the classic RCP position that technology would free humanity from the shackles of mother nature. While the LM Gang still lend lip service to free speech and carefree consumerism, the greens pretend to care about the planet and the rights of indigenous peoples. Behind the scenes, the same multinational corporations pull their strings.
The Great Reset
In the run-up to the corona crisis, the notional left in its social democratic, radical chic and eco-warrior garbs had abandoned the settled working classes and called for restrictions on free speech under the pretext of combatting hate crimes. This left a political vacuum for millions of disillusioned voters who felt totally betrayed by successive Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory administrations and unpersuaded by the short-lived UKIP and Brexit parties. The LM Gang made a strategic decision to back the campaign to leave the EU. Claire Fox even won a seat in the European Parliamentary elections after Theresa May’s government had failed to respect the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum. In the same period, the likes of Brendan O’Neill would appear on new alternative media outlets, such as Dave Rubin Show, alongside American intellectuals on the libertarian right. Three core beliefs seem to unite these new media pundits. First state regulation, including limits on free speech, should be minimised. Second, capitalism has been a fantastic success story that has vastly expanded the horizons of billions of human beings. Third, Israel is largely a force for good, but Islam represents a major threat to liberal democracy. How exactly do we square the RCP’s historic support for Sinn Fein, its radical critique of Western meddling in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia with its newfound love of Israel and its abject failure to criticise the growing power of the biotech mafia? The answer is simple. The LM Gang are polemicists who co-opt causes that resonate with a large cross-section of their target audience to demolish the arguments of the principled opposition to the ruling elites. Their disciples could make a radical Marxist case for almost anything as long as they can conveniently distance themselves from their partners in crime. Brendan O’Neill is no stranger to the population debate. He has repeatedly argued against neo-Malthusianism. I find it hard to believe the LM Gang could not have been aware before 2020 that Boris Johnson’s father Stanley has long advocated radical depopulation. Boris himself penned a letter to the Times of London in 2007 urging the government to address the issue of overpopulation. Yet Boris chose to elevate Claire Fox to the House of Lords for her services to the campaign to leave the EU. Her critique of the lockdowns has always stopped well short of questioning the dubious science behind it and, more importantly, the government’s true motivations for spending countless billions of pounds on the mass administration of dodgy mRNA injections. Big Pharma can rely on Claire to provide controlled opposition to the more unpopular aspects of the covid psyop, which was always just a means to an end. The LM Gang treat free speech as an academic debate about toxic identity politics but fail to attack Big Tech’s blacklisting of leading scientists such as Dr Peter McCullough, Dr Mike Yeadon or Prof. Luc Montagnier because privately they agree with the censors.
The virus scare may have served to justify previously unthinkable policies such as antisocial distancing, forced isolation and face-mask mandates, but the medium-term goal has always been a radical shift to a centralised technocratic world order, marketed as the Great Reset. Its proponents will move heaven and earth to bring every human being into their surveillance grid. Both the green and black strands of the technophile left have failed to oppose the biggest transfer of power from the masses to the ruling classes in human history. One can only conclude they are complicit and their apparent differences over demographic sustainability, free speech or the Palestinian question are merely rhetorical. The descendants of the old RCP are in bed with the architects of the technocratic coup.
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.
The well-to-do managerial classes suffer from an extreme form of cognitive dissonance. In public, they love to express their sympathy with the plight of the underclasses, especially those who belong to perceived victim groups. In private, they dream of a society where everyone shares their narrow worldview and the uncooperative great unwashed masses have either embraced new more malleable childlike identities or have disappeared into oblivion. They can only tolerate the underclasses if they know their place and do not question official experts. In a new virtual reality, the guardians of truth may hide unspeakable crimes against humanity while treating whistle-blowers and dissidents as terrorists or psychiatric patients. If you think this sounds far-fetched, just consider the plight of former school chaplain, Dr Bernard Randall, who was reported to the UK’s counter-terrorism body, Prevent, for delivering a sermon on respectful free speech. It is now clear our technocratic masters want to ensure the next generation is unaware of alternative perspectives. They can only trust the upper echelons of the managerial classes to resolve controversies. Everyone else should internalise and recycle the authorised scientific consensus, even if it conflicts with our first-hand experience, common sense intuition and earlier scientific orthodoxies.
We could see the warning signs of our current drift towards progressive totalitarianism long before the covid scare. While politicians posing on the liberal left may be well-intentioned, their advisors have consistently promoted policies that disempower the working classes. Comprehensive education in large high schools stifles excellence and creativity. Teachers spend more time on dealing with inevitable conflicts in oversized classes than imparting a passion for learning. Such an approach rewards conformity and penalises critical thinking. Schools no longer teach children how to think but rather what to think. The same well-paid consultants support welfare incentives for smaller and more malleable non-traditional family units, while also favouring the influx of new communities with a stronger work ethic. Ironically new immigrant communities often prefer traditional families and retain more socially conservative attitudes. As a result, millions of working-class youngsters have been deprived of meaningful job opportunities. First they had to endure dumbed-down schooling that failed to inspire them, then they encountered intense competition at the lower end of the labour market unable to compete with better disciplined newcomers and finally, they succumbed to the allure of welfare dependence and became the clients of mental health outreach workers.
For much of the 20th century the upwardly mobile middle classes continued to grow, while the numbers of traditional blue-collar workers gradually shrank. Big business first outsourced and then automated manufacturing. By the turn of the millennium, the burgeoning service sector employed the lowest paid workers such as temporary burger flippers, toilet cleaners or fast-food delivery drivers, with gruelling farm labour and food processing assigned mainly to transient migrant labourers. A dwindling minority of the working people now make essential goods or provide mission-critical services. Since the advent of medical martial law in early 2020, we’ve learned to call such people key workers. Policymakers now consider everyone else expendable or in modern parlance non-essential. Seriously, our authorities seem more concerned about covid compliance and vaccine acceptance than helping young people gain fruitful employment and start natural families. In the UK a nominally Conservative government has overseen the largest expansion of welfare dependence ever and the decimation of independent small businesses. The other main parties all support the rapid transition to a new economy that will exclude most adults of working age from any meaningful participation, except as cheerleaders, rule enforcers and carers. Via the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, the global high-tech industrial complex has swept aside the old debates over public ownership, EU membership and Scottish independence. The National Health Service has now effectively become a subsidiary of big pharma with central government merely dishing out digital cash underwritten by banking cartels.
The Equality Myth
In classic NewSpeak we are “the same but different”. Learning disability charities love the slogan and shamelessly recycle it for very different categories of people with additional support needs. Expressions such as differently-abled may make us feel good about our assigned disability but really mean that some people are more equal than others, i.e. not equal at all. Since the early 2000s I’ve chronicled a growing trend to broaden the definition of learning disabilities to cover anyone who has challenges in any intellectually demanding task. Dyslexia is both hard to define and may affect as many as 10% of the population. A much larger percentage could be mathematically challenged and the vast majority of mobile phone users would struggle with rudimentary programming concepts. Eventually, learning disabilities may apply to anyone below the top 10% of the IQ range (approximately 120+). As smart automation gathers pace, more and more workers within the medium intelligence range (80 to 120) will lose their jobs to AI. With moves afoot to roll out universal basic income, people will soon be rewarded not for their labour but for their compliance and good behaviour with social credits. Many may earn a little extra as part-time as carers, customer relations managers or narrative enforcers. However, these roles are non-essential and serve only to manage the moods and behaviour of other members of the underclasses. We can see that now with store staff employed not to serve customers - something machines can easily do these days - but to ensure visitors comply with new covid measures. It should come as little surprise that over the last 15 months governments around the globe have targeted independent small businesses that are not subservient to larger corporations. This follows in the wake of a three-decade-long worldwide onslaught against small-scale farmers. It hardly comes as a surprise that Neil Ferguson’s wild projections of mass death also served to bankrupt family-run livestock farms in the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, leading to the incineration of over 6 million animals.
Traditional skillsets, of the kind farmers and craftsmen once had in abundance, rely on multiple facets of intelligence, experience and conscientiousness. Devoted generalists could succeed in life with a can-do attitude. This is no longer the case. A broad range of mediocre skills no longer suffice for anything but personal care and hobbies in a world where big business with its vast economies of scale and smart automation can undercut any talented artisan. There remain niche markets for millionaires prepared to spend £13,000 on a handcrafted record player, but the rest of us may enjoy superior sound from a digital download at a fraction of the cost. Craftspeople work today more as artists who sell their creative spirit more than their actual products. An overpriced custom turntable is a work of art whose market value depends on its uniqueness and authentic embodiment of a bygone technological era. However, only a tiny minority of the millions of skilled workers who once formed the bedrock of modern industrial societies will transition to new roles as celebrity artisans. Alas most young adults have chosen to pursue tertiary-sector professions that are neither mission-critical nor immune from smart automation. We live in a world with more recruiters than engineers and more social workers than fishermen.
The once culturally homogenous working classes have now morphed into a motley collection of atomised individuals that social scientists may categorise by employability and mental health. A new social structure is rapidly emerging:
Non-academic people, i.e. within the low to medium intelligence range:
The caring classes: Well-socialised and compliant members may earn extra within the social care and awareness-raising sector. Their jobs may be non-essential but serve to give people a sense of purpose and participation.
The idle classes: Well-socialised but lethargic members may rely on UBI (universal basic income), but occasionally earn social credits for compliant behaviour. In practice, most people will flow between these groups at different stage in their lives.
The victim classes: This growing subsection of emotionally unstable and often uncooperative individuals, prone to drug abuse and risky behaviours, will be subject to intensive surveillance and act as guinea pigs in social and medical experiments. As long as their noncompliance is expressed through recreational drugs, junk culture and sports, social workers can prevent the brighter elements within this subgroup from succumbing to the lures of personal independence and associating with subversive intellectuals.
Academically gifted, i.e. within the upper 10 to 20% of the intelligence range.
The Managerial classes comprise the better-socialised and more cooperative among the new upper classes, they will vary from low-ranking social engineers to high-status policy analysts but will rely increasingly on artificial intelligence.
The Engineering classes: This more creative but cliquey group will be rewarded for their technical expertise and afforded greater personal freedoms within their exclusive clubs.
The critically thinking classes will form a subversive subset of the first two subgroups. They may be tolerated to a limited extent to allow some innovation but must be carefully monitored at all times. When dissident academics overstep the mark, they will be treated as psychiatric patients but kept well away from other potential troublemakers.
I have just outlined a likely outcome of the Great Reset within the next 10 to 20 years, assuming it all goes to plan, which I hope it will not. The policy planners at the World Economic Forum seek to phase out the middle and skilled working classes as they roll out UBI and social credits while restricting private ownership of real estate and motor vehicles. Our challenge is to build an alternative and avert this drift towards a Huxleyan dystopia. Meanwhile, the progressive chattering classes, from media pundits and leftwing politicians to trade union leaders, have betrayed us by denying us any meaningful bargaining power. Among the biggest cheerleaders for the so-called zero-covid strategy favoured by many progressive think tanks such as the misnamed Independent SAGE in the UK, are the trade unions. They perpetuate the founding myths of the corona scam, through their dogmatic embracement of face masks in workplaces and schools and their abject failure to oppose experimental gene therapy injections in school children, despite ample scientific evidence of their potential for long-term neurological adverse effects. Many wishful thinking lower-ranking middle managers may mean well, but they serve the interests of their technocratic masters.
It beggars belief how anyone with half a brain could let an obsession with infection rates destroy the freedom of future generations.
If you get your news from the likes of the BBC and the Guardian, billing themselves as bastions of liberal progressivism, you might be forgiven for knowing little about the biggest anti-establishment protest in London since the massive February 2003 demonstration against the invasion of Iraq. No doubt, if such a large anti-government protest had taken place in Minsk or Moscow, this would have been headline news. You may have just heard that a few thousand demented antivaxxers staged a super-spreader event, undermining our collective struggle against the virus, and attacked brave police officers whose sole mission was to protect public safety.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of thousands of people travelled from all over the UK to stand up for basic civil liberties, scientific truth and humanity as we have known it for countless generations. I feel guilty only because I could not take time off to join the crowds. Many ethical issues may divide us, but the prospect of a permanent bio-security state should horrify anyone concerned about society’s steady drift towards a technocratic dystopia.
Luckily, the event was livestreamed on alternative media. Unlike other large gatherings in the English capital over the years, the mainstream media did not publicise it at all, in stark contrast with the mass-marketed pro-EU and anti-Trump demos. Despite coronavirus restrictions last year, the venerable BBC gave favourable live coverage of the much smaller Black Lives Matter protests. They downplayed the scale of violence against police who had earlier taken the knee, while completely ignoring regular episodes of police violence against peaceful anti-lockdown protesters. The only minor skirmishes at yesterday’s demonstration occurred after the police attempted to break up crowds of youngsters playing live music in Hyde Park. The police were massively outnumbered and unwisely attempted a baton charge against hundreds of fit young men and women, who did little more than hurl food scraps at retreating officers. I feel sorry for the police forced to wear face nappies on a sunny day and enforce scientifically flawed public safety measures detrimental to people’s emotional and physical health.
Ministries of Truth
As my week-long Twitter suspension neared its end, I checked reactions to yesterday’s events. Two stood out. One from BBC’s notorious Marianna Spring would not look out of place in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, effectively denouncing hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people as dangerous conspiracy theorists intent on undermining the UK’s glorious mass vaccination campaign.
We may note Ms Spring’s obsession with the QAnon phenomenon and her constant reference to false claims. The adjective false is meaningless unless you can refute an assertion you claim is false. Just because the government and the BBC’s corporate partners such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation claim that an assertion is false does not make it true. Tony Blair dismissed any suggestion that his government supported the occupation of Iraq to retain control of the oil supply as wild conjecture you may read on the Internet, which was still in its infancy back in 2003. Subsequent events proved the so-called conspiracy theorists right, although keeping the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency also played a role. Caitlin Johnstone and Wikileaks have exposed how the QAnon movement was most likely a CIA-driven pied piper operation, focusing on claims that Trump had someone code-named Q embedded in the Deep State to expose the cabal’s widespread ritual satanic sexual abuse. Back in the real world, Trump not only appointed war hawks to the highest levels of his administration, but he also collaborated with the biotech industrial complex in the roll-out of experimental mRNA injections going so far as to claim credit for Operation Warp Speed. However, most disturbingly Marianna Spring has lent her rhetorical weight to calls for the censorship of any means of communication that big corporations cannot control. She disparagingly refers to Telegram as an encrypted channel that facilitates conspiracy theories. Both Labour and Tory politicians have already called on the government to take tougher action against vaccine misinformation. Yet even the government’s own Yellow Card reporting system has detailed over 160,000 serious adverse reactions as of 14th April 2021 and admits elsewhere this accounts for fewer than 10% of actual adverse events. We do not know how many of the excess deaths of frail nursing home residents in January and February this year, assigned to covid-19 were expedited by adverse reactions to the Astra Zeneca or Pfizer injections. However, testimonials by nurses and carers would suggest much higher numbers than those revealed in the Yellow Card reporting system.
Classic smear tactics
Another message retweeted by the NHA Party (who amazingly still follows me) accuses protesters of antisemitism because they likened the prospect of medical apartheid via vaccine passports with the plight of Jews forced to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany. If Christine Williams had done her homework, she would know mainly Jewish protesters in Tel Aviv made the same comparison. Are they antisemitic too? More important many prominent scientists, such as Dr Mike Yeadon and Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, have warned us of the prospect of death on an unprecedented scale as corporate forces take full control of every aspect of our private lives and are busy building a new urban landscape clearly designed for fewer people. All the warning signs are there, discrimination, dehumanisation and polarisation.
Manufacturing Reality
Well-funded fact-checkers, as promoted by the mainstream media, academia and establishment politicians, employ a simple modus operandi. They focus on a few obvious falsehoods, which may have enjoyed some limited currency in the alternative media space, while either dismissing or ignoring the big questions. Once they have impressed the gullible with their cogent debunking of a claim of little consequence (e.g. do facemasks contain worms?), they proceed to cite peer-reviewed research favourable to the interests of their corporate funders. Very occasionally, fact-checkers will try to win public trust by highlighting a few cases of genuine corporate malfeasance or political corruption, but usually only to distract us from larger crimes or to discredit outmoded practices or expendable politicians.
Free speech, as in intellectual freedom, logically lets anyone make any claims about current and historical events. Many conscientious political activists may make claims based on limited knowledge or second-hand sources. Few of us can employ researchers to verify each claim we make. However, we can report what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears. Once we go down the road of subjecting all pronouncements to moderation by official experts or artificial intelligence, we will have no way to verify if the official experts are lying.
Over a year has passed since the Global Government's Scottish branch imposed the first virus-inspired lockdown. Of course, the authorities rolled out variants of the same policy first across much of Europe and the Americas. We may note a few partial exceptions in Europe, such as Sweden and Belarus, and some US states, such as South Dakota, that never enforced antisocial distancing and mandatory face masks. Just as the UK technically left the EU, we began to hear much more about the four countries’ approach to the pandemic, with Nicola Sturgeon trying to outdo Westminster in her apparent resolve to defeat the virus. All of a sudden power-hungry regional leaders started to read from the same pseudo-scientific script. Behavioural psychologists had probably concluded that people were more likely to listen to leaders who speak the same vernacular. We didn’t see very much of Boris Johnson, especially as he had a bout of flu or, as we call it now, covid. Instead, we were treated to daily press conferences from the UK health secretary Matt Hancock and medical mandarins such as Chris Whitty, Sir Patrick Vallance and Jonathan Van Tam. In Scotland, we regularly heard from former Clinton foundation groupie, Devi Shridnar, who used her skills in neurolinguistic programming to win public support for tougher restrictions, more testing and more surveillance. From the outset, the mainstream media drove the agenda, sensationalising reports of a new deadly coronavirus first in Wuhan, China, and then in Lombardy, Italy, with harrowing scenes of overburdened intensive care units chock-a-block with patients on ventilators. This was the dreaded Spanish flu all over again. The media went into overdrive to promote social isolation and get us to view our neighbours, friends and relatives as potential bio-hazards, unless they adhered strictly to new draconian social regulations. The greater freedom we enjoyed over the last 60 to 70 years went into rapid reverse as a new bio-security state took charge of our private lives.
Cultists
Society is now split into three broad categories of atomised individuals. At one extreme we have the covid cultists on a mission to educate the wider community on the benefits of our Brave New Abnormal. The followers of this new religion like to attribute all illnesses either to sars-cov-2 variants or to the new mysterious catch-all sickness long covid. They see covid everywhere and not uncommonly claim to have had it themselves. These are the kind of people who will loyally install the official track-and-trace app on their mobile devices and voluntarily have a PCR test at the slightest hint of symptoms we would normally associate with the common cold. On social media they love to publicise their adherence to the new medical safety regime by posing with colourful face masks, often championing other causes or institutions that undermine traditional families and personal autonomy. Many proudly sport NHS logos with LGBTQ+ rainbows and EU emblems to signal their support for top-down social engineering. Such people have blind faith in corporate science. They seldom challenge the logic or competence of official experts when they move goalposts or make 180º turns in official guidance. One moment they welcome free movement of all peoples across anachronistic national borders and the next they welcome strict border controls around public buildings to check everyone’s medical records. One moment no human being is illegal and the next any unvaccinated person represents a major biological threat to those you have dutifully participated in mass-marketed medical experimentation. I find it very hard to reason with many covid cultists because they will always dismiss any critiques of the official virus narrative as dangerous conspiracy theories before they dutifully direct your attention to an official fact-checker. Disturbingly, if you try to counter their arguments with links to well-researched online resources, social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, will flag them as misinformation. One recent example is Prof. Denis Rancourt of the Ontario Civil Liberties Association whose peer-reviewed study on the harms of face masks was banned from the academic publishing site ResearchGate after being viewed over 200,000 times. A covid cultist would instinctively assume such censorship serves the greater good as it might discourage people from wearing masks and lower their guard in our collective struggle against the virus.
Heretics
At the other extreme, we have a very heterogeneous set of lockdown sceptics. It would be nice if we could conveniently pigeon-hole these heretics into neat categories such as antivaxxers, religious fundamentalists, whitenationalists or far-right libertarians who believe personal freedom always trumps collective responsibility. In short today’s dissidents are anyone who fails to trust the holy alliance of big tech and big governments and suspects the current obsession with preemptive infection control is leading us towards a high-tech dystopia that may wipe out much of humanity. Was the late Tanzanian president John Magufuli a white supremacist? Is Dr Michael Yeadon, former head of research at Pfizer, an antivaxxer? Is Prof. Sunetra Gupta an extreme libertarian who would let the poor die if they cannot afford private healthcare? Obviously not, but if you get your news from the Guardian or, heaven forbid, the BBC, you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In true Stalinist style, if no other slurs work against a dissident, our new guardians of truth can simply play the insanity card. Both Dr Thomas Binder in Switzerland and Prof. Jean-Bernard Fourtillan in France have been detained in psychiatric hospitals for voicing their dissent from the covid narrative. Unsurprisingly, the former has recently been banned on Twitter. A clear pattern is emerging. Tech giants and governments are working in tandem to neutralise meaningful dissent. The current wave of social media censorship may have first targeted sensationalist outfits such as Alex Jones’ Infowars, but their real goal has always been to close down scientific debate when it threatens vested interests. If you’re unsure whether Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon or have any doubts about the Earth’s shape, Youtube can still offer you plenty of uncensored videos challenging the scientific consensus. I don’t mind if some people think the Earth is flat as astronomical observations can easily disprove such claims. I do not need some higher authority to protect me against bad scientists. I’m much more concerned about evil scientists, who have sold their soul to large corporations with nefarious agendas. Since February 2020 public health advisors have promoted behaviours that most of us would have considered harmful before the covid craze spread around the world.
The Acquiescent Majority
The first two vocal groups do not represent the population at large. The former come mainly from the chattering classes, academia, social services, charities and healthcare. While all major political parties in the UK have supported strict coronavirus containment measures, the woke left has taken the most radical stances cheerleading SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) and even setting up an even more radical Independent SAGE that wants, wait for it, zero covid, something only attainable through the most extreme form of medical martial law, literally transforming the country into a giant clinic. They build on people’s affection for the once much-loved National Health Service at a time when most bricks-and-mortar hospitals are effectively out of bounds to the general public. By contrast, covid dissidents come from an alliance of the thinking working classes and small business owners alongside outcasts from academia and scientific research.
Between these two extremes we have the unsuspecting majority who like to get on with their lives and go with the flow without getting too involved in political and scientific controversies. Such people are more likely to watch talk shows and soap operas on mainstream TV and be more easily swayed by celebrity endorsements. Behavioural psychologists have successfully exploited media pundits and celebrities to spread fear of a nanoscopic virus among people who until the day before yesterday had much less fear of fast cars, motorbikes, cigarettes, booze or junk food. By isolating people in their homes and flooding TV, radio, newspapers and social media with endless covid-themed propaganda, the authorities have inculcated in the masses a new sense of civic responsibility and expected social behaviour, partly by encouraging people to snitch on transgressors. Within a month of the first lockdown last year, the word covidiot was on the tongue of all social conformists. Soon entering a supermarket without a mask felt like being a lone Celtic fan in the Rangers’ home stand back in the days of endemic sectarianism. I often observe a stark contrast between my nearest large supermarket with over 95% mask compliance and the local park where most visitors do not wear a mask and interpret anti-social distancing rules very liberally. People often pay lip service to the covid narrative, speaking of relatives who had covid-19 on their death certificates, but scratch beneath the surface and it becomes clear that lockdown policies have further isolated the lonely, deprived people of a sense of purpose and made people feel guilty for attempting to go about their normal lives. Once the silent majority realise that experimental injections will not help them regain their personal freedoms and see their relatives die within months of booster shots, you can bet many so-called sheeple will wake up. At that stage, we must be prepared for greater state repression.
The tech media giants started with easy high-profile targets, either genuine white supremacists, à la Red Ice, or sensationalist purveyors of American Exceptionalism and half-truths à la Infowars. They knew blocking these channels would only annoy a small subset of their customers. Few politicians would dare speak up in defence of these fringe outlets. Next, they targeted the likes of Stefan Molyneux, with nearly 1 million Youtube subscribers, former President Trump with over 50 million followers and last week the Corbett Report. I find this unsurprising, but also rather perverse. I never subscribed to Stefan Molyneux, but YouTube algorithms would keep suggesting his videos. Before I figured out how to disable auto-play, his videos would often follow other videos on the free speech theme by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad. I long suspected Stefan was controlled opposition. His philosophical videos targeted a huge reservoir of dissent among the disenfranchised working classes. If you were not paying attention, you may have dismissed the core precept of his belief system: the fundamental importance of genetics in determining intelligence and success, both within and between racial groups. Such opinions have been rather unfashionable in the public discourse since the end of WW2. However, it’s now becoming glaringly obvious that the elites have public and private opinions on many controversies. Superficially, they pretend to side with the people but behind the scenes, they work to sow the seeds of new divisions and prepare the public psyche for future policy shifts.
Now the likes of Twitter are targeting anyone who challenges the official covid narrative, even those of us with a modest following in the lower thousands responding to someone with fewer than 30 followers. It seems you may hurl all sorts of gratuitous insults and spout some of the wildest scientifically illiterate theories on Twitter, as long as you do not challenge narratives of strategic importance. I’ve read messages supportive of paedophilia. Indeed, one message contained a preview image of a pornographic scene involving a child. I blocked its sender immediately. I admit this represents a grey area in the debate on the bounds of free speech, but I always stress intellectual freedom rather than absolute freedom of expression. I’ve lost count of the number of flat earthers and moon landing deniers active on social media, but their accounts never seem to get blocked.
The usual excuse is to protect community guidelines. You may naïvely think this is just about good social etiquette in the digital space. Some may have worried that such guidelines prevented open debate on issues such as unsustainable migratory flows or the promotion of transgenderism in schools for fear of offending vocal lobbies or vulnerable individuals. Now the assault on free speech has extended to anyone critical of the biotech industrial complex. The covid scare has unmasked our ruling classes, who still hide behind the façade of saving lives. Big Pharma lobbyists have been very active for many decades. Since the advent of social media, they’ve employed people to counteract any claims they do not like. I recall a long thread about the massive over-prescription of antidepressants. This could potentially offend people dependent on such psychoactive meds. By the same warped logic vegans may not highlight the horrors of slaughterhouses for fear of offending meat eaters. Initially the thread involved genuine users with a range of views. The next morning, I received a deluge of unfavourable replies with all the hallmarks of professional copywriters and was stupid enough to waste valuable time interacting with someone who could almost immediately respond to any first-hand evidence I gave with peer-reviewed reports on the safety and benefits of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (such as Prozac). These people always claim to be mental healthcare professionals. None of these tweets were flagged as abusive. I first encountered the Twitter thought police in 2019 about a misinterpreted sarcastic reply with the trigger word “kill” I had forgotten about. My comment paraphrased someone’s illogical statement (Do you want us to kill ourselves?). I gladly deleted it to restore my access. Lesson learned: avoid certain trigger words unless you make the context abundantly clear. Now what kind of gratuitous offence could earn me a one-week suspension? Threatening to kill someone? Overt racism? Denying that anyone has ever died as a result of covid-19? Nope. I merely claimed that numerous trials have proven ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are safe and effective treatments for the kind of respiratory illnesses associated with sars-cov-2. Whom exactly is this offending? I can only suspect that my interlocutor, going by the handle of Justin Time, works for the social media monitoring arm of the biotech industrial complex. They want to suppress any suggestion that the new experimental gene-therapy injections, marketed as covid-19 vaccines, do more harm than good. If alternative treatments are proven to be safe and effective, then the new injections will lose their emergency use authorisation and the whole case for authoritarian bio-security measures, with its lockdowns, mandatory masking, antisocial policing and digital health certificates, collapses.
Ever since the birth of Keynesian economics and the abandonment of the Gold Standard in 1933, the world’s economy has thrived on material growth. The more people who could transform their labour into greater consumer demand, the merrier. This model was so successful that by 2019, obesity had replaced undernourishment as the world’s leading cause of preventable illnesses. Yet for many decades we’ve been living on spiralling debt. The 2008 financial crisis should have been a wake-up call, time to transition to a steady-state economy focused on social and environmental stability by letting the big banks go bust and bailing out the people. Instead, Western governments chose to bail out the bankers and extend more dodgy loans to the people to keep the consumer economy afloat.
Over the years I’ve explored all angles of the irksome population debate. The idea that the world may have too many human beings can feed the wildest fantasies of eugenicists. However, sometimes we have to separate science from dogma. It is all too easy to let deep-seated ideological convictions and emotions cloud our interpretation of conflicting scientific evidence.
Let's look at the rise of the world population since the industrial revolution. There is no doubt that it has grown exponentially and most of this growth has taken place over the last 70 years as infant mortality has declined across Southern Asia, Africa and South America. Before the covid scare, most forecasts suggested the world’s people count would peak between 9 and 11 billion in the mid 21st century. Most of Asia and South America were well on course to reach replacement-level fertility rates within the next decade without the need for coercive constraints on natural procreation. Urban lifestyles and compulsory schooling for all girls and boys have led young couples to choose smaller families, especially with the rising cost of raising children in a high-tech society. If your ten-year-old daughter can no longer help out on the farm, you may need to set aside some cash to buy her a laptop. The dire forecasts of population pessimists have, despite civil wars and occasional famines, proven mostly wrong. In his 1969 book, “The Population Bomb”, Paul Ehrlich predicted extinction-level starvation by the end of the 20th century. In the event the fertility rate declined in much of the developed world, while malnutrition and childhood deaths plummeted across India, Africa and South America, mainly due to improvements in agriculture and sanitation. More Africans starved in the 60s and 70s than in the 90s and early 21st century.
Nonetheless, rapid urbanisation brought about new conflicts and challenges, not least the demise of traditional extended families and job insecurity as new city-dwellers could not easily keep pace with fast-evolving technology. As I’ve stressed in some earlier posts, the real question is no longer the prospect of 10 billion human beings but the environmental challenge of 5 billion cars with the massive infrastructure such an automotive utopia would require. Back in 1970, the world had around 200 million motor vehicles. Today that figure has risen five-fold to over a billion, while the human population has merely doubled.
Historically, our numbers have adapted to environmental conditions amid spouts of internecine violence, famines and plagues. If our habitat can accommodate more people, our instincts to go forth and multiply will prevail as opportunities abound for young adults. Conversely, as environmental conditions deteriorate, fewer people survive without modern welfare systems and easy exit routes. In the 1840s, the Irish potato famine triggered an implosion of Ireland’s population due to a mix of starvation and emigration of the Emerald Isle's fittest young adults. However, our environment is not the wildernesses we inherited from our distant forebears, but the urban and rural landscapes we have engineered over many generations. We may contrast the natural geosphere, as might exist in our absence, with the much smaller technosphere. Over half of us live in the 1% of the world’s land area that’s urbanised and the other half in smaller settlements in the 10-11% of available land fit for farming and animal husbandry.
Any concerns about the long-term sustainability of the world’s population inevitably lead to calls for concerted global action that logically undermine the self-determination of peoples at local and national level. When investment bankers in Zürich or Singapore worry about demographic trends in Nigeria or Pakistan, self-determination is unlikely to figure high in their list of priorities. Rather global planners prefer to use applied behavioural insights to guide people towards more sustainable ways of life. By sustainability technocrats do not mean the conservation of our ecosystem so much as political stability as they shift gear from an economic model based on consumption-led growth to one based on micromanagement of all human activity, treating most denizens of our planet more as zoo animals than working consumers.
Wishful-thinking Progressive Cornucopians
For the last 30 years or so, mainstream economists and opinion leaders have downplayed the significance of the population factor, often welcoming immigration from poorer countries with growing populations to wealthier countries with ageing populations. One of their favourite arguments was the need for more young workers to pay taxes and boost consumer demand. I’ve covered the fallacies of this theory before. The existing population only benefit materially from immigration if newcomers pay more in tax than they consume in services. While we may reasonably debate the pros and cons of high levels of net migrations in times of economic growth and low unemployment, it makes a lot less sense with millions stranded at home on furlough and economic activity suffocated by medical martial law. It only took a few months for liberal progressives to abandon their love for the free movement of people across outdated national borders to become the staunchest proponents of internal borders, preventing people from leaving their region or county and gathering in large groups. Other human beings have suddenly turned into biohazards. It baffles me how we can love all other members of our species, while simultaneously avoiding social proximity and hiding our facial expressions.
Green New Deal policies make absolutely no sense if you naively believe that trendy progressive types want to embrace humanity in all its wonderful cultural diversity and celebrate our growing numbers. Multiculturalism has only ever served as a transitionary phenomenon to undermine native cultures and usher in a global super-culture that would make it easier for the intellectual elites to micromanage the urban masses. Since the turn of the millennium two competing visions of globalism have divided Western electorates. Some see a wider range of restaurants and the cultural enrichment of well-educated colleagues who have moved from other parts of the world. Others see divided communities, congestion, crime and alienation in their country of birth. Academics and affluent professionals tend to view mass migration much more favourably than the home-grown working classes. How could the population of Greater London, which grew from around 6.4 million in the early 1990s to over 9 million by 2019 and was once projected to hit 13 million by 2050, meet Agenda 2030 sustainability goals? How could the conurbation’s teeming residents make drastic cuts in their true carbon footprint, while importing almost everything from other regions and exporting their pollution? The answer is simple. It could not. Any honest city planner should have known that within a decade most short-term service sector jobs would be either outsourced or fully automated. By 2010 the city had already started to resemble a giant airport terminal with shopping malls, luxury apartments and bedsits for transient labourers. After 10 months of corona-containment measures, the city’s once-bustling streets and markets have been emptied. As many as a million workers have already fled. It simply doesn’t make any sense for remote workers to rent a studio flat in an unfriendly city where spontaneous socialisation may land you in trouble with the covid police. While some may argue the corona crisis was an unforeseen cataclysm that demanded emergency measures, once again the affluent professional classes have abandoned the working classes. Greater London grew rapidly in the 19th and early 20th century mainly with newcomers from other regions of the British Isles, but with a fair sprinkling of adventurers from overseas. By the 1930s it had reached chronic levels of overcrowding with its characteristic pea-soup smog. Wartime evacuations in the 1940s and post-war redevelopment prompted a steady exodus to the suburbs and satellite towns. Old settled communities and industries moved out and new communities moved in. London began to grow again in the 1990s as a hub of the global banking and media industries. Employers could easily exploit a new breed of international commuters. The same chattering classes that once tolerated racism against the indigenous peoples of the British Empire and later blamed Britain’s strike-prone home-bred workers for post-imperial industrial decline are now indifferent to the mass exodus of their Eastern European neighbours, whose services they no longer require. For every highly qualified doctor or engineer who has added to London’s human capital, there are 10 to 20 temporary office workers, caterers, builders, lorry drivers, hairdressers, nurses, nannies, decorators and cleaners. The covid scare has merely accelerated the rate of smart automation. If you have to order your caffè latte via a mobile app and then pick it up from a local coffee shop where you may only briefly exchange greetings with a masked barista, you might as well interact with a robot.
A World of Metropolitan Snobs
2020 marked a watershed in human development. The trendy managerial classes revealed, amid platitudes about saving lives, their unspoken eugenicist tendencies. They may not target a specific ethnic group, but they have a deeply ingrained contempt for independent-minded unbelievers or rather the politically incorrect plebians who fail to worship at the altar of scientism. Most wishful-thinking middle managers may still believe they’re working for the common good of humanity, but have become increasingly intolerant of nonconformists who fail to fall into line and internalise the new orthodoxy on covid, gender identity or climate change. Political correctness, obsession with equality and diversity and identity politics have long concealed a much more sinister agenda. How could we transform the world into a giant adventure playground or a kind of hipster paradise populated only by trendy progressive types with robotic slaves?
Unlike empirical science, scientism is the unquestioning faith in official experts, the high priests of global technocracy. Scientism teaches us to follow the science. By contrast science teaches us to subject each hypothesis to rigorous tests and analysis, explore alternative hypotheses and challenge orthodox theories when new evidence comes to light. Scientism suppresses dissent, while science welcomes open debate. Scientism is inherently elitist, while science thrives on an enlightened citizenry with constant interaction between different groups of concerned citizens and technologists with full accountability within an open and fair democratic process. Today the issues with the largest impact on our lives, from atomic energy to artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, natural families and bodily autonomy, depend on our understanding of science. Very few of us can be experts in all these fields, spanning nuclear physics, molecular biology, medicine, programming, nano-robotics and bioethics, although some of us may claim a degree of expertise in some specialist areas. By deferring our analysis to experts favoured by large media outlets, who in turn are closely allied with the biotech industrial complex, we reduce democracy to choosing which management team should carry out policies that remote technocrats have devised.
Slow Development in a Steady State Economy
The biggest challenge we face as a species is not so much overpopulation as over-development. We have become too reliant on technology that most of us can neither understand nor control. The problem is not change itself, which may good, bad or indifferent, but the sheer speed of psychosocial disruption that rapid technological transformation inevitably engenders. Accelerated progress always empowers the new elites at the expense of the more conservative underclasses. However, when technology evolves more gradually, ordinary people have time to adapt technology to better suit their needs and put themselves back in the driving seat. An alternative to the global utopia that Klaus Schwab envisaged in his Great Reset, is the decentralisation not only of political power, but of technology. Why, you may wonder, should Africans, Indians and South Americans, develop independent solutions for telecommunications, clean energy, irrigation, potable water and food security? The answer is simple. If you can control the technology on which your life depends, you are once again master of your own destiny. If you place your trust in a few technocrats employed by a handful of multinationals, they may decide if you are surplus to requirements.
For over twenty years I have ranted and railed in the wilderness against the unsustainability of endless economicgrowth. Now I find myself warning of the tragic human consequences of its polar opposite: planned economic decline and the dehumanisation of those who fail to comply. However, it may not be too late. We need a people’s reset that irreversibly transfers power from the tech giants to the people. Can we do it? It’s up to us.
