The steady drift to technofascism

As governments roll out a fresh set of lockdowns in country after country, more and more of us wonder if this is really about a virus. Many people who supported the first lockdown, as a temporary measure to save lives in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, are beginning to doubt the true motives behind these draconian restrictions on basic civil liberties and the complete restructuring of our society and economy. To say that the cure is worse than the disease is a monumental understatement. The adverse effects of lockdowns are highly predictable. They engender greater reliance on remote organisations, lethargy, lack of self-worth, depression, drug addiction, domestic abuse and loneliness. Lockdowns stop children from playing with friends and prevent people from visiting elderly neighbours, friends and relatives with mild dementia. These measures seem tailor-made to wear us down as independent free-thinking human beings. Why would a government spend £500 billion, or over 60% of total public expenditure, on corona-containment measures that not only restrict personal freedoms, but destroy livelihoods and drive small businesses to bankruptcy? In Scotland alone we have seen a 34% increase in home deaths as fewer people access clinics for regular check-ups and life-saving operations. There are no historical precedents for governments around the world inflicting such draconian measures in such a coordinated manner to tackle a nanoscopic virus. Many cite the misnamed Spanish Flu from 1918 to 1920, but governments were too busy dealing with uprisings in the aftermath of the Great War and Russian Revolution to police the private lives of families and regulate social interaction. Any attempt to quarantine the healthy in squalid dwellings without basic sanitation would have almost certainly led to an even higher death toll.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that the covid narrative, as game-planned at Event 201 in October 2019 at John Hopkins University, is not about a virus, but reorganising society around a new post-growth paradigm. While I have long advocated a steady state economic model that focuses on gradually improving our quality of life within natural environmental constraints by adapting to levels of consumption and population that we can sustain in the long term, my goal has always been to save humanity as a whole, not to save the lump of rock we call home. Planet Earth will manage just fine without us. It may take its ecosystem a few thousand years to reconquer the urban landscapes that occupy less than 1% of the world’s landmass, but house over half of the human population, and possibly a million or so years to bury to the last artefacts of the Anthropocene, but the planet has happily shrugged off much more cataclysmic events in its 4.5 billion year history. Demographers and epidemiologists have to clearly distinguish the evidence-based science of the earth’s carrying capacity and the sustainability of our current economic system from the ethical implications of any extreme projections one way or the other. If we underestimate the planet’s long-term human carrying capacity, we run the risk of unnecessarily imposing coercive restrictions on procreation and consumption that could lead not only to untold human suffering and early deaths but could make life a misery for those of us who survive the democide deprived of youthful vitality. On the other hand, if we overestimate the earth’s potential population, we may at some stage encounter technological limits to endless growth with catastrophic repercussions for our species. What goes up, must come down, but what matters most is who guides any changes we may need to make to our lifestyles. If the impetus for more sustainable living comes from local communities via greater resilience and relative self-sufficiency, then ordinary people remain very much in control. By contrast, if most people are fully integrated into the global distribution chain and thus reliant on large corporations, the impetus for lifestyle changes to deal with sustainability will come from the top down and will inevitably reflect the priorities of the world’s richest powerbrokers. The immense wealth accumulated by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates may be dwarfed by hidden assets controlled by the world’s leading banks, largely in the form of debt, which they can harness to dictate government policies and crash vast sectors of the economy at a whim.

Technocratic Coup

While large corporations and local administrations have joined forces to promote the new abnormal by flooding the airwaves and cyberspace with mixed messages about fighting viruses, remote working and greener living, they are busy reorganising society around the new mantras of collective responsibility and rule by experts (or as Jason Brennan calls it epistocracy). Alongside persistent fearmongering about a deadly virus, the media began to champion a new tightly regulated puritanical lifestyle. The cultural revolution that for many had begun in the 1960s has in many ways come full circle. Across much of Europe and North America the old left – right dichotomy morphed into a new schism between the socially conservative working classes and the woke professional classes pretending to represent their rainbow coalition of special interest victim groups. The latter category often calls itself, especially in North America and the British Isles, liberal because they lay claim to a tradition that championed greater civil liberties, enlightenment principles and personal freedoms. However, their tolerance does not extend to the sanctity of family life, privacy and traditional cultures. Under the pretexts of upholding children rights, monitoring mental health or tackling prejudice, progressive lawmakers have expanded the role of myriad agencies to encroach on the private lives of commoners. Yet we retained the illusion of choice and expanding horizons with easier travel and instant telecommunication. The authoritarian trend that raised its ugly head among faux-progressives in the twenty-tens as they obsessed with political correctness and identity politics has now in the post-corona era metamorphosed into full-blown hostility to personal freedom, privacy and bodily autonomy. The same people who once chanted “my body, my choice” when it came to sexual relations and abortion now support mandatory vaccination, which will inevitably lead to mandatory psychiatric screening linked to digital health passports. The state could be empowered to regulate our moods as well as our procreation. New aspiring parents may need state approval to visit a fertility clinic to conceive a child whose every move and utterance will be analysed.

The Abolition of the Working Class

One key difference sets the current crisis apart from all previous crises since the advent of the industrial revolution. Our technocratic masters no longer need such a bountiful supply of obedient workers. In the early 21st century growing demand for electric vehicles in Europe and North America may fuel the exploitation of children and adult workers in Congolese cobalt mines, but at least they have jobs and can feed their families. In the near future, smart robots will supplant not just relatively well-paid workers in rich countries, they will displace unreliable human resources in poorer countries too. With the worldwide roll-out of universal basic income, it may soon not matter so much whether you happen to live in Lubumbashi, Lima, Lahore or Liverpool, except for the local weather, if you owe your existence to the benevolence of global corporations coordinated by NGOs. Once you have relinquished your bodily autonomy to get a digital health passport so you can travel and regain access to public venues, there is nothing stopping the authorities from regulating your reproductive freedom and thus determining who may procreate and raise the next generation. Many workless denizens after the Great Reset may not qualify for parenthood at all leading the rest of their lives as overgrown children indulging in supervised recreation. Klaus Schwab and Thierry’s utopian book, Covid-19: The Great Reset, may appeal to many wishful thinking professionals eager for a cleaner, greener and leaner tomorrow, but excludes most of the 7.8 billion people alive today. What’s worse if we are temporarily confined to our homes under medical martial law, we have no way to chronicle the activities of our ruling elites. They can simply write off unexplained deaths as consequences of a viral pandemic and dismiss naysayers as dangerous conspiracy theorists intent on undermining the battle against elusive pathogens. At the heart of techno-elitist thinking is that flesh-and-blood human beings are the disease, while artificial cleanliness via transhumanism and augmented intelligence is the final solution.