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The West and China share the same fate
https://unherd.com/2023/08/the-west-and-china-share-the-same-fate/
Our destiny is a total techno-state
BY N.S. LYONS
. Welcome to a world ruled by managerialist elites (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
A simple and easy narrative is often provided to explain our present moment: a new Cold War, we’re told, is dawning between the United States and China, complete with a global ideological “battle between democracy and autocracy”. The future of global governance will be determined by the winner — that is, unless a hot war settles the question early with a cataclysmic fight to the death, much as liberal democracy once fought off fascism.
In some ways, this picture is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading. When it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but becoming more alike, with both superpowers converging on the same not-yet-fully-realised system of technocratic-managerial governance.
This system, described by James Burnham and George Orwell as “managerialism”, is the product of a new class of professional managers bound together by a shared self-interest in the expansion of technical and mass organisations, the further proliferation of managers, and the drawing of society into the meddling embrace of managerial expertise. At its heart is a conviction that all things — even the complexity of society and Man himself — can be understood, managed and controlled like a machine with sufficient scientific technique.
It was managerialism that emerged as the true winner of the 20th century’s ideological battles. As Orwell prophesied in 1945: “Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.” China is just a bit further down the path towards this same totalitarian future. The West is following.
To get a sense of but one aspect of this ongoing convergence, we should travel back to Fengqiao (“Maple Bridge”), once a picturesque little township in China’s Zhejiang province. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his officials like to muse wistfully about the pleasures of the “Fengqiao experience” (楓橋經驗), but I’m afraid it is not a tourism package. Rather, in the Sixties, Fengqiao distinguished itself as a model town in the eyes of Mao Zedong. While usually Communist Party thugs had to go around identifying and rounding up “reactionary elements”, in Fengqiao the people handled it themselves: “Not one person [had to be] rounded up, and still the vast majority of enemies were dealt with,” as a report from the town informed Mao.
Here at last was a true example of the “dictatorship of the masses” that Mao hoped to establish. Mao encouraged the party to learn from the experience of Fengqiao, and in doing so planted a seed that would take root in the hard soil of the CCP imagination: a dream of a population so thoroughly conditioned by Chinese socialism that someday it would practically manage itself.
Today, Xi has revitalised and modernised this idea by marrying it to newly available tools: those of the digital revolution. Traditional methods of Fengqiao-style social mass monitoring and control, also known as “social governance”, have been combined with internet-wide mobilisation and a vast digital surveillance apparatus.
The jewel in the crown of this approach is intended to be China’s blossoming social-credit system. The system intends to assign each person, company or organisation a unique aggregated “social credit” score. This is much like a financial credit score: based on observed behaviour and other “risk factors”, the score can be adjusted up or down to designate an individual or business as more or less “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy”. Those with higher scores are rewarded with escalating perks, such as priority access to travel, loans, housing, higher education or even healthcare. Those with lower scores face escalating punishments, such as losing access to the financial system, being prohibited from buying luxury goods or real estate, or having their children denied admission to certain schools and universities.
Importantly, the system is deliberately social in nature. Those with low scores are publicly listed and shamed online or on public billboards; even some dating apps have trialled incorporating social-credit scores. Most significantly, since having too many relationships with low-scoring people risks lowering one’s own ranking, people avoid associating with the “discredited” at all, accelerating their progressive unpersoning by society. The goal of this gamification of the mind is to create a “New Man” to fit into its managerial machine; this is always and everywhere the inexorable object of managerialism’s obsession with control.
Such social engineering has already been effective. I vividly recall, for example, how, when I visited China as late as the 2000s or mid-2010s, everyone used to jaywalk to cross the street. It was simply a fact of life, a cultural constant seemingly ingrained by who knew how many centuries of the Chinese peasantry’s wonderfully incorrigible pragmatism. Today, nobody jaywalks (at least in the city), because if you do, your identity is captured by a facial recognition camera, your face, name and ID number are plastered on a billboard of shame next to the intersection, and a fine is sent to your bank. All those centuries of evolved cultural attitudes have been successfully overwritten by only a few years of conditioning by the machine.
This is not a million miles away from what is happening in so-called Western liberal democracies. In June, the British bank Coutts closed the account of Nigel Farage without explanation. Farage was subsequently refused service by 10 other banks. Internal “reputational risk” documents obtained by Farage soon after showed Coutts’s reasoning for “exiting” him from his account: he had been found to no longer be “compatible with Coutts, given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The terrible sins listed on Farage’s rap sheet included: being friends with Donald Trump and unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic; campaigning for Brexit; being “anti-Net Zero”; being “seen as xenophobic and racist”; and having been a “fascist” when he was a schoolboy, according to some second-hand rumours.
In this case, caught red-handed “debanking” a prominent and savvy politician for political reasons, the bank was forced to apologise and some of its top officials to resign. Such consequences are an exception to the rule, however. Debanking has in recent years become increasingly routine practice across the West; in the US, mere days after the Farage scandal, JP Morgan Chase shuttered the accounts of anti-vaccine proponent Dr Joseph Mercola, as well as his business’s CEO, CFO, their spouses and all of their children. Farage says he has begun assembling a “very large database” of potentially thousands of similar cases from the UK alone.
Much debanking is politically motivated. Most memorably, Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts and seize the assets of the truckers protesting his destructive vaccine mandates and demagoguery. Yet banks are not the only ones involved; online payment platforms have joined in too. GoFundMe, for instance, seized money donated to the truckers through its platform. PayPal, meanwhile, in one of the more symbolic instances of its prolific debanking habit, cut off the Free Speech Union for promoting “intolerance”. PayPal also attempted to slip language into its user agreement allowing it to confiscate $2,500 from users each time they spread “misinformation” or said or did anything “harmful” or “objectionable” (all defined at PayPal’s “sole discretion”).
Why is this happening? Why would private banks and other businesses force out paying customers like this? Because it is in their interest to do so if they want to survive and thrive, and indeed they have little choice. These banks are not really fully “private actors” — they are part of the managerial economy in a budding managerial party-state much like China’s, where an oligarchic elite class seeks to preserve its rule. Critically, there can be no neutral institutions in a party-state. The party-state’s enemies are the institution’s enemies, or the institution is an enemy of the party-state (which is not a profitable position to be in). This is what “reputational risk” really means: the risk of appearing to be on the wrong side of the party line.
In a society as digitised as ours, control over digital transactions means surveillance and control over nearly everything. When someone is debanked — and then inevitably blacklisted from all other banks — they are cut off from participation in almost every aspect of modern life. They will have no easy way to receive pay from a job; they cannot buy property and may not even be able to rent. They will be unable to purchase almost any digital service and, increasingly, will be prevented from buying everyday goods offline as well. Once the ongoing war on cash is won, they will be well and truly screwed. Debanking therefore serves as an extremely effective means to isolate and silence a targeted person or group, quickly breaking any presence and influence they may have once had within society. Which is, of course, the point.
This appears to be a lesson taken directly from the Chinese method of dealing with dissidents. Indeed, the West’s managerial elite seem to have concluded that they now have the tools and latitude to begin implementing a Chinese-style social credit system here. Although not yet anywhere near as comprehensive, this nascent system shares the same fundamental characteristics: using public-private coordination and “social governance” to collapse any distinction between public and private life, thereby greatly raising the risks for public non-conformity and dissent from the narrative. Utopia is doubtless just around the corner.
In fact, we can see transparent steps towards the construction of something like a social credit system in the now widespread use of such innovations as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) scores. Major financial institutions wield them to vocally conform to specific social and ideological practices required to access capital. Similar NGO-led scoring schemes such as the Corporate Equality Index and UK-based Diversity Champions programme also threaten those businesses that fail to conform with “reputational risk” blackmail and de-platforming.
How far might this all go? While the powerful realm of financial flows is today’s focus, there is no reason to think that, on the current trajectory, the same dynamics won’t eventually be applied to every other sector of our economy and society. We shouldn’t be surprised if someday soon apartment leases come with ideological morality clauses, airlines unite to ban customers with the wrong beliefs from travelling, or people find themselves evicted from their insurance policies for speaking out of turn online. This will simply be the behaviour of a hardening managerialism seeking stability through mechanistic control over all the details of life.
New technologies such as AI and, especially, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will only continue to make this kind of granular control easier. A few months ago, an American man found himself completely shut out of his digitally controlled “smart home” by Amazon after a delivery driver accused his doorbell of saying something racist. Why would Amazon bother to do this? Because they can; and so, under a managerial regime, they must. As our managers find that every day it feels easier and easier to “solve” problematic people with the click of a button, they will not be able to resist hitting that button, hard and often.
Such is the very Weltanschauung — the whole way of seeing and believing — of the managerial mind. As more and more powerful technology comes within the grasp of the managerial machine, its grip will only continue to tighten. For, as C.S. Lewis understood, “each new power won by man is a power over man as well”.
Today, as Orwell predicted, the great super-states struggle for possession of the earth. But for all past speculation that the 21st century would be defined by a “clash of civilisations”, there is now only one, smothering form of modern civilisation that has stretched itself across the face of the globe, its multiple personalities vying for imperial supremacy. In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilisation in a river of blood, then crystalised into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China.
This is the truth behind why China and the West, for all their proclaimed differences, share the same managerial hubris, are tempted by the same growing technological powers, and are sheltering the same elite insecurities and delusions. Even as they roil and clash, they are converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government — to a total techno-state.
***
This essay is an extract from a longer piece on The Upheaval.
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Looks like there’s no hope, doesn’t it? And there is no hope, if we do nothing but read articles like this and post well-meaning comments.
Unlike the wretched Chinese, we live in democracies. We need to exert ourselves to make those democracies work properly.
It requires hard work – debating, organising, agitating – but it can be done.
Question is, do we want to?
The west is full of oligarchies, not democracies.
Quite so. And they say Maga folks are a threat to democracy!? Now we know why he is hated so much by the left.
We should want to.This brilliant piece outlines the greatest threat to our freedoms. The Woke may attract far more comment but are a lesser challenge.
One of the difficulties, however, is that our existing political mechanisms lack the bandwidth to control the emerging techno regulatory nexus. In the nineteenth century twenty Cabinet ministers could realistically hope to control the limited activities and law making of the state. Today the same number cannot grip the sprawling regulatory system whose tentacles are spreading out into every sector and aspect of society – especially as private / public boundaries are getting blurred. Did Tory ministers direct the system to embrace Stonewall’s agenda or push for the debanking of dissidents? or did these happen without even their awareness? In other cases, parts of the public system have fallen under the influence of assorted corporate or ideological groups.
I do not have a detailed blueprint for reform but I suspect that – if it is possible to tame this new Leviathan – it will involve supplementing elections and ministers with far more transparency, more use of polls, juries and citizens’ assembles to vet options, a new and much longer bill of rights and severe limits on the amount of personal data corporates and most agencies hold. We need democratic structures with more bandwidth. Otherwise, all the debating, agitating and voting will be in vain.
Well said. And, yes, I think we do need a new form of direct-action democracy. The old system has been corrupted and is no longer fit for purpose. This will require individual standing up and saying no to authority, and speaking out against pervasive, pernicious ideologies. It’s definitely starting to happen. Huge push back against ULEZ and 15-minute cities. I think Canterbury council had to abandon their plans.
Plebiscite democracy instead of representative democracy is what Brexiters have always wanted. Some of them don’t appear to know the difference, and become very excited when MPs “don’t do as they are told” lol.
There is a case to be made for a system of plebiscite democracy, but there are as many arguments against. Essentially, to favour a plebiscite system, you’re betting the house on the sagacity and reasonableness of the hoi polloi.
Good luck with that one
Back up. I’m an American so I don’t claim to know the ins and outs of British government but what you’re saying sounds like: There are two groups: Pro-EU and Nationalists. The Pro-EU group is in favor of traditional representative Democracy and the Nationalists are in favor of Rousseau style Direct Democracy?
How could a Pro-EU stance be fully consistent with representative democracy when you’re outsourcing policy to Brussels?
I don’t think this has anything whatsoever to do with Brexit, pro EU or pro Nationalism. The EU is just as authoritarian as described in the piece above. Maybe more..
This is about people everywhere being managed into a totalitarian state of being, where we all become ciphers of the state, to be erased if we don’t comply. We should all be terrified of this & we need to focus if we want to live with dignity..
To paraphrase your argument…”to favour a representative system, you’re betting the house on the sagacity and reasonableness of the elected representatives.”
And do get over Brexit, it’s extremely tiresome to see it regurgitated in every one of your posts. And it detracts from any other sensible points you may be making.
At this point, I’ll take the “sagacity and reasonableness” of the hoi polloi over the elected representatives, thank you very much.
I wish that were possible, but it’s too late. There is no way back.
Too pessimistic? History suggests there is hope. One optimistic parallel is with the response to the Gilded Age in America (1875-1900). Plutocrats dominated the Republic, corrupting politicians and recruiting private police forces to break strikes. Some saw US politics as merely a concealed struggle between a New York banker, JP Morgan, and an Ohioan oil tycoon, John Rockefeller. The middle class was outraged and rebelled. The Progressives under Teddy Roosevelt, Taft and later Woodrow Wilson broke up the biggest business empires and cleaned up both politics and the civil service.
Really, surely the ‘new’ Rockefellers & Morgans just maintain a lower profile?
JP Morgan and Rockefeller descendants and acolytes ( Soros Gates and so on) still there – who do you think is behind Blackrock Vanguard etc
Woodrow was JP’s man to a core, and did his bidding absolutely. Creation of the Fed Reserve and the US entry into WW1 despite Woodrow’s election pledge to the contrary to protect JPM’s loanbook.
Do please read the A Heath article now up on the Net Zero Plan in D Tel. For me it sets out quite how impossible it is to reject the coercive Blairite Order we still live under. How democracy died. And Yes – Blairite Progressive still. Were any of us aware of how the 2008 Climate Act of 2008 and the add ons by the Wretched Fool May has determined – with 5 Year Budget/Targets – our economic progress for 40 odd years – until 2050? Well reform it you think! No – the Leftists will appeal to the courts and win. The unelected Climate Quango will continue to rule with immense power. They and the derwnged ESG fanatics in our financial system will strip us of a defence industry and fossil fuels and push us deeper into a sickly perma recession and a Pol Pot like Utopia/Dystopia. As with Open Borders and mass unplanned migration, what the people want and actually voted for is utterly and completely irrelevant. I fear your reform ideas would make them smirk. We are comotose. We have lost genuine free speech. NHS First Komissars (save us! F u!) boss us around and now have the key to locking us up when their inadequacies and failures risk total shame. Farmers will be debanked, forced to shoot their methane cows before vanishing in a forest of re wilding weeds. Actually – no. This really is no joke. We are – I repeat- a corrupted anti enterprise proto East German Socialist State. Our destiny will be the same. No levers for democracy exist in the New Order 97- present and its weedy One Party groupthunk elite.
Well said, Alex – if you’ll permit me – and while I whole-heartedly agree: “it is possible to tame this new Leviathan,” I would proffer a way for so many of the over-steps being made by today’s form of government. That is: Bring government home! National governments should have an interest – and authority only – in the issues beyond national borders. Inside those borders authority flows in the opposite direction; not top down, but bottom up. Beginning with the most important element – MONEY! All taxes are collected at the township/city level. Counties, Provinces or Districts receive their revenue from the Local governments, and those revenues include an income, paid onward by them, to the National government for its limited service. Unthinkable before the age of Data Management, much simpler today. However, this poses a problem to the citizenry: they have to (as in must) become more involved with their local governments. Whatever happens at the National level begins at the Local level – so there’s nobody else to blame but ourselves. Yes, there’s just as great a benefit to the scoundrels at the Local level, but – herein, both problem and solution exist – they have to dip into the Local’s pantry to access it. THERE, if we, the locals are paying attention, they’re close enough at hand for us, again, the Locals, to do something about it. We don’t do that? Then there’s no difference from today’s debacle, except NOW – in this case – we don’t deserve whatever we’ve surrendered.
Everyone wants it David. But I really disagree with your – we live in a democracy, so where is the will?? Since the EU/Blairite revolution of governance and culture in the 90s we have been living with this mangeralism (so wish there was a better word!). And this New Order is fundamentally anti democratic, controlling and different. Did any of us vote for Net Zero and its random uncosted targets? No – but the entire political class did. Did any of us vote for uncontrolled mass migration? No. Never. But the State and political classes ignored us. The clue us 1.2 million incomers last year. The attempt to overturn the Brexit Referendum should have alerted you to alarming new attitudes toward ‘democracy’. This State is indeed becoming an authoritarian techno state. Never mind the insidious de banking or ruinous ESG, have you forgotten the tyranny of a 2 year total lockdown to save the reputation of the false god NHS?? Our New Order successfully disabled and dismantled the powers of the Executive and handed vast chunks of regulatory governance to the unelected armies of Quangos, all of whom adhere to the same toxic progressive Groupthink – everything Farage hated they like. This is why reform and change (see the sorry farce of small boats) is impossible. Read todays paper – it is littered with stories the failures of what is a now a de facto Soviet-like ruling One Party, sustained by 20 years of progressive laws and a propagandist State media. Free speech is just another liberty trounced on by The Groupthinkers. So what democratic party is really going to lead us out of this Maze? Labour is the Party of the Blob. Lib Dems are wild eyed ‘Yes to Open Border No to Reservoir and Houses’ lunatics. And the so called Tories have been bullied bossed selecitvely assassinated and turned over by this progressive proto Techno State. So show us the way out. I think this article is pointing the finger correctly at our foe.
Well said. The situation is very dark indeed and has been deliberately assembled in the course of years, all the while keeping the population as sweet as possible with kick-the-can-down-the-road economics. Now, however, that the can won’t move any more and the foundations of our oppression are in place, our masters grow openly hostile to liberty, conscience and the popular wish. They are sliding from Liberal definitions of democracy towards Marxist sophistry, defining “the people” as those of whom they approve and “the people’s wishes” as their “interests”, in turn misrepresented by Marxist dogma.
How on earth do we change things now?
Websites are marginal, news channels are prosecuted, the indigenes are ageing and the few children they have are indoctrinated. Surveillance and perverted law intimidate resistance – online, in the work place, in public fora – and, in Britain at least, tribal political habits built on a two party system prevent the emergence of a legally insurgent force.
Meanwhile, across Europe, resettlement means that the natives’ belated recognition of their plight is smothered by the votes of a new client populace, which will shortly throw its idiot hard left leadership into the gutter in favour of more congenial bosses – see the work of Houellebecq.
And people tell us to “do something”? What, exactly? They are notably short of suggestions – because there are none which apply. Our sole recourse now is to slow the poison by sticking with the least appalling of the appalling options confronting us and in Britain that probably means Mr Sunak.
What is Marxist about it? Not every authoritarian is Marxist
Marxism is a precondition to Fascism. They’re both subvariants of the same Gnostic mindset. You can have Marxism that doesn’t evolve into Fascism but Fascism can’t develop without Marxism first disrupting and destabilizing society.
Franco, Idi Amin and Pinochet were all authoritarian despots, yet I don’t see them as Marxist. The two aren’t linked in my eyes. I’m no fan of Marx but to label every horrible regime as Marxism is just lazy tribalism
Franco came to power as a reaction to the Popular Front government which included both Socialist and Communist elements. Pinochet as a reaction to the openly Marxist government of Salvador Allende. So I think there is some validity to the argument that Marxism is a necessary precursor to Fascism.
And Idi Amin? Well he was just a nutcase.
Spain, Chile and Uganda all went through failed Marxist phases before the military Dictatorship took over.
Cmon. Let’s have a debate here if you’re so certain. This is far from lazy. Its an empirically proven fact. Find 20th century Dictatorship that didn’t benefit from mailed Marxist coups.
Let’s actually talk about what Marxism is and what it is not. It’s a totalizing Gnostic system of Dialectical Reasoning guided by Philosopher Kings that seeks to turn the Have Nots into vehicles for Revolution through agitation, disruption and destabilization.
Fascism or Marxism, the end result is the same, authoritarian forms of government and suffering for the people who live under those systems.
It matters though because Fascism can’t occur without a Marxist subvariant. Marxism is a Religion. It has written Tenets, Prophets and End Times Prophecies. All you need to do is look at the evolution of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot. Were they Marxists or Fascists that pushed Marxist policy so they could get on top of the pile?
Another way to slow the poisoning process is to stop swallowing, and generating, so much poison. I mean this as an appeal to everyone, myself included, with apologies to those who may become (further?) enraged at my comment.
Or course we can’t avoid all pathogens, literal or figurative, but strengthening oneself is not a trivial campaign. A few more calm but determined* heads out of every hundred means massive, potentially transformative momentum. Granted, that’s a lot of total heads across any large population! One well screwed on head may tighten another; this can even be reciprocal, as most of us have some stable and some rattling parts.
In less aspirational terms: Even from the standpoint of your own preferred politics, expressed here and on other boards: Neither Britain nor Europe is under the unopposed sway of the hard Left–far from it.
*or volatile but determined, to make space for myself and those of my ilk.
Well said Walter. As indicated in the article we are ruled by a managerial class, which includes politicians, bureaucrats, public servants et al, all of whom answer to the real rulers: Big Corporate in its many guises. As we saw last year with Liz Truss in the UK, the real government only has to trash your currency if you go against their ideology and you are out. It’s no use petitioning politicians as they are part of the problem. I fear the momentum is with the managerial class for now which means more authoritarian forms of government, especially when CBDCs really come into play. We are slowly being boiled like the proverbial frog and when the masses finally wake up it will be too late.Not everyone reads Unherd or similar media, unfortunately.
The English have never had much taste for ‘debating, organising, agitating’ prefering to rely on the good sense and good appetites of the ruling class. It is all laid out in simple terms in The Wind in the Willows’. Now we have been abandoned by our masters we will hunker down like badger and await the reckoning.
Inspired parallel! but my own metaphor for English society is a carthorse being led by a boy. The carthorse represents the descendants of the Saxon peasantry (culturally if not always genealogically) while the boy is the ruling elite, which has always been a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan group with successive infusions of Vikings, Normans, Scots … and most recently Indians. Most of the time the carthorse plods on, content to be guided by the boy, but on occasion it decides to assert itself and the boy is powerless. BREXIT is the recent example. Interestingly, my Somerset neighbours – mostly small farmers – were as adamant about defending their freedoms as they were about leaving the EU.
Most it the so called Scots were actually French freebooters first.
Do you also recall what happened to the magnificent cart horse ‘Boxer’ in Animal Farm?
If I remember correctly, Boxer in the allegory stood for the Russian peasantry who had passively accepted collectivisation, the anti-Kulak campaign, famines, etc. Consequently, Orwell had Boxer ending up heading for the knackers. Judging by Orwell’s essays on England, however, if he had seen Boxer as English the latter would have concluded that Napoleon was unsound about the time the slogan “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others” appeared and driven the artful swine from the farm.
Yes that’s it.
Unfortunately many in this country thought Boris might have been Boxer, but were sadly disillusioned!
I disagree.
Today, by chance, I visited the Armley Mills industrial museum in Leeds. It does a superb job of describing the benefits and the drawbacks of the Industrial Revolution in Leeds. The new industrial working class were little better than slaves, but they fought back. Gradually, things improved, first to tolerable levels, then to a stage where they shared some of the prosperity.
It can be done, if we have the will and stomach for the fight. And, believe me, it will be a fight.
Yet, as the Conservative Party demonstrates, it’s extremely hard to break free when all the major parties are bound by the same policies set by the administrative state. Even now, facing electoral oblivion, the Conservative are unable to take even baby steps contrary to their managerialist masters.
First we need to understand who is really in charge – here is an extract from Patrick Bet David on Joe Rogan’s show – you can view on youtube:
how much Joe have you looked at you know Larry Fink Soros State Street you know Vanguard BlackRock how much have you looked at what they’re doing and what their ties are?
I’ve looked at it
yeah they’re pretty much running everything -S P 500 you know the number that 88% of the companies on S P 500 – 88% of them the largest shareholder of those companies is either State Street BlackRock or Vanguard
88% of them! and then you see their influence in defence contracts okay so we went through do these guys Larry Fink Vanguard State Street – if they have any influence on Military defence contracts
if you Google the largest shareholder for Raytheon three out of the four top shareholders of Raytheon are BlackRock State Street and Vanguard it could be top three with Raytheon but I think it’s three out of four
if you go look up General Dynamics if you go look up Boeing if you go look up Northrop Grumman and then you work backwards and you say how much money is that in what these guys are doing you’ll find the amount of money we spent in our military 744 billion dollars – that’s how much they’re making from defence but you’ll see some numbers saying last year is 13% of our GDP which is around 850 billion dollars that’s more than the next 10 investors combined
and when you look at these contracts then you’re like okay Fink is there these guys are there let’s go look at Hollywood same thing you see there let’s go look at Pharmaceutical let’s go look at this and you’re like wait a minute these guys essentially have a monopoly well how big is Blackrock 10 trillion dollars
how big is 10 trillion dollars? – only two countries have a bigger GDP than BlackRock has assets under management – that’s U.S and China that’s how big Blackrock is so then they went and they started getting all these other guys to sign on and say hey we want you to participate with the same thing as well with ESG and they ended up having I think that 31 signers I think end of 2022 they got 60 -something signers for a total of 70 trillion dollars of assets under management that they’re controlling
Most people don’t have a clue as to what is going on, nor do they care. So long as they have Netflix, 24/7 sport in Super HD, online gambling, online pornography, celebrities to worship, drugs, alcohol, and a steady supply of willing sex partners, what more could they wish for? Their compliance to the new World Government was evident during the Covid scam, and the same is now happening in regards to the climate ‘catastrophe’. According to surveys done in the UK, the majority of people would willingly succumb to another lockdown in the event of another ‘pandemic’. Your sentiments are noble but unrealistic.
Yes we do!! We need to. Finding & then applying that way is the hardest part.. we’re all so ‘busy’ with our lives. Don’t put your head above the parapet is the attitude. But I’m up for any damn fool thing. Flour on snooker tables, abseiling into Parliament, streak across Parliament Square? Anyone?
Sober comment in the media only goes so far..
Technology will not eliminate humanity in a nuclear inferno instigated by some Artificial Intelligence gone rogue. It eliminates it through the mundane sacrifices we make to it each time it offers a more convenient solutions to our problems that we take without considering the price it extracts in return.
For the overclass it doesn’t matter – they control the system – they can have the superyachts, the private jets and walk-in ice-cream freezers so long as they stick with their pals. For the underclass, the druggies and shoplifters etc, it doesn’t matter – more blackmarks, but what do they care, they have nothing to take away. The people being controlled are the middle class, those with aspirations, who want their children educated in a good school, and to get the house in the nice neighbourhood.
They’re already controlled at work – particularly in larger companies and public administration. Conformity. Quality checks. Ratings and reviews. Inspections. Access control. Time trackers. Always another form to fill in. Another training course to do. And a psychopathic manager fixated on ticking all the boxes. This is normal life, so they don’t understand how anyone else can function without these controls in place. The system knows best, and if you don’t do it right the system might glitch and the psychopathic manager will come round.
It’s the people outside this system – family businesses, farmers, shop keepers, wheelers and dealers, tradesfolk – who understand and see the blind stupidity. But they don’t have the organisation to stop it as money passes between large businesses and public administration over their heads.
Very true. And these little people, the small businesses, shop keepers, tradesfolk, etc. can drop out and create their own local economies. These independent, maybe even underground, polities can survive the end times much better. Much more prepared for major disruption.
I don’t know how you can read this and not be terrified by ESG, or the NGOs that compile advertising rankings to punish companies like GB News or Twitter. Tobacco companies have higher ratings than Tesla because they manipulate the system.
Don’t be afraid. Yes it is scary, yes we need to push back against it, but there is no need to fear it. Not fearing it is the first step towards tackling it. The next step is ridiculing it. And it is utterly ridiculous. Imagine if they tried the billboard thing in the UK – you’d have people dancing across the street in order to have their pictures displayed in lights! The roots of radical liberty run too deep in our culture to be pulled out by loony nihilistic techno-communist Utopianism.
That’s not to say we don’t need to fight it. Remember that all of this is being implemented out of weakness and fear – fear of being left behind, fear of losing control, ultimately fear of death. The courageous will always be stronger, individually and collectively, than the fearful. As Samuel Adams said, “It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”
Quite.
“The aim of life is not to be in the majority but to avoid joining the ranks of the insane.”
Marcus Aurelius
Or perhaps this by the same author:
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”
Rehashed by Shakespeare. “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” True atheist, he was!
Well said. Viva the brushfires! But we need to identify the means by which power can be/ has to be shifted from those who now wield it. Parliamentarians are weedy; even executive power has been neutered and dismantled. So even a supposedly radical democratic mandate of renewal in Brexit can easily be quashed by the mainly unelected and permanent Progressive Alliance of State, Blob, Quangocracy. Its values are promoted and defended by a compliant captured Law and Media. So what actual levers can be pulled if – as in a Soviet era state – all these levers of actual power are controlled by a same thinking elite??
I concur with your comment on the whole. The problem, for me, with your concluding quote is that fear and anger (“irate-ness”) have so much overlap. And even when there is little or no overlap anger debilitates the individual body and spirit over time, and casts intermittent, destructive flames that can’t be contained to those things we intend to burn. (Given my own temperament, and my ongoing efforts to temper it, this isn’t just speculative for me).
I admit it’s a rousing quote from Adams the old patriot, but I rather he’d chosen “determined” or “inflamed”. Replacing fear with anger/rage not enough of a switch long term. However, anger or heated defiance is sometimes needed to shake fear’s grip, if only for long enough to breathe more deeply and think.
In some instances, a step prior to your first step may be needed: admitting to ourselves that we are afraid. Then we may contend with that fear, and hope to summon (sometimes pray for) the strength or grace that will overcome it. Not merely to help ourselves or then turn our backs on those whom we fear or those who seem too afraid, but to help others, and help one another, overcome fear.
Your post is helpful to me and others in this regard.
Exactly. Some months ago I saw a chart provided by the FDA (America’s Food and Drug Administration) that listed Fruit Loops cereal as higher on the nutrition scale than apples. Government agencies are bought and paid for, just as the media is owned by pharmaceutical companies. We’ve been living Black Mirror lives for decades, and now there’s no way out.
Which major US political party permits more gaming of the regulatory system by corporate and pharmaceutical interests? I know it’s not an altogether one-sided case but I wonder what your short or long answer would be.
The main place where I think the New Left–or however the innovating tech geeks like Wosniak and Gates and their Tech Bros issue are best labelled –got it it disastrously wrong* was in the (almost) totally unregulated filth and violence of what used to be called the World Wide Web.
*in terms of regulation or lack thereof
There’s one critical difference between our cultures that will render the full-on technocratic state ultimately impossible (in the UK at least)… and that is, we celebrate rebels… we feel no shame in being a rebel. We love the recalcitrant protester. Anyone who was on the million-strong London “freedom” marches of 2020-2022 witnessed that. Even many of our police were silently on our side. Okay, at first they got to a lot of people, and we had a short, sharp burst of rule-following and snitching on people who had too many people round for dinner, but as lies about the “deadly virus” got exposed, and people saw that they’d been tricked, they soon saw the error of their ways and the feelings turned to anger and mistrust of authorities. That’s why the attempted regime change in the UK failed. The “common man”, in England at the very least, will always retain power. “We are the people, we are the power!” That has been the slogan or sentiment on every protest march in British history. We are winning against the invasion of CCTV in our cities. We don’t want Big Brother, and we will kick him out. Orwell was a psy op to scare us into believing it was inevitable (that’s why we were made to study him at school.) They tried and they failed. Not sure what the future holds but too many of us will refuse to live in their surveillance state for it to ever work. Maybe it will take hold in the US, but England will never be remotely like the CCP’s China.
I do hope you are right Amy, sometimes it feels like we are losing the battle
Trust me, there are already whole communities living more-or-less outside of the system. Their descendants will thrive. There’s no future for the digitally-controlled, they will die out fast.
So in all your online hours and pocket device use–whatever that average is–you fully escape any digital control. How about negative influence?
I think the underlying message here is that technology makes a good servant but a poor master. We can’t fully reject it unless we turn into Unibomber types.
Fair assessment. My intended poke is at the assumption of a clear discernment between who is digitally-controlled, because how could that include you or yours? And at the wheat from chaff biblical binary of it.
The commenter also praises those living outside “the system”, which seems healthy enough in an abstract sense, as long as your not alone in the woods. Could become Kaczinski adjacent otherwise.
I think Jeeves would disagree. He was a very effective master of Bertie.
Not me, personally. I’m already sunk! I’m talking about future generations. It’s going to get harder and harder to dip in and out of cyberspace autonomously. We are being forced, on so many levels, to use digital devices for everyday life. It won’t end well. Those who figure out how to have a completely non-digital existence will have the only chance of real survival. Everyone else will be turned into a hybrid human-cyber entity, unable to shop, move, function without the permission of their digital control pads.
No human life ends well in the bluntest sense. But don’t give up please. Don’t disavow your own agency by saying you are forced–that’s left-wing safe-space talk. It’s also close to true, especially in many jobs, just not truly true, if you will.
People of faith, among whom I include myself though not as an institutional “joiner”, sometimes need to remember that Gospel means good news. I sure do on many days. And I am not even talking for or against anything supernatural, but of the ethical and visionary teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
In Melbourne Australia we cannot opt out of smartmeters if we want to use electricity. The spectacular incompetence and similarly impressive hubris/vanity of our decision-makers e.g. Bill Shorten means Australia will remain a cyber-criminals’ wet dream.
Smartmeters like all smart devices are hackable meaning any sick psycho can control our lives without any risk of prosecution, because it is impossible to prove that a power disconnection sabotaging someone’s work is a crime in the first place, let alone proving the criminal’s individual guilt beyond reasonable doubt. In Australia committing crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/worse is such risk-free triviality, bikies brag about their government security clearances on social media, self-identify as drug-traffickers, and show off their drug-wealth like toddlers show off a new puppy.
Cyber-capabilities far beyond what civilian experts know about have been flaunted by organised crime types since 2009 in my case – a stalker data-thief ex-coworker is evidently trading the up-to-date whereabouts of people in witness protection for crimes as a service with bikies and insiders from the Australian Signals Directorate. Cyber-capabilities not known to civilian experts at the time are a surefire way of discrediting crime witnesses and victims: Australia’s criminal police officers have been using witness/victim discreditation possibly for hundreds of years to make crimes invisible.
Look up my name for my public interest disclosures about Australia’s absurd crime reality, how much power a highschool-dropout data-thief stalker gained and kept since 2009 at least in Melbourne, Australia. The stalker added me to his already extensive list of concurrent targets at the Victorian Electoral Commission – a government entity where the stalker had (still has?) unrestricted access to every woman’s up-to-date home address, the up-to-date addresses of people in witness protection.
Australia never had functional law-enforcement. Police have neither duty of care nor accountability, while having a monopoly on what is a crime.
Fabulous crime statistics are the result of crimes never investigated = crimes never happened. Witnesses and victims of crimes are terrorised into silent oblivion. Except for ex-refugees who escaped from communist countries/brought their babies to Australia at an enormous sacrifice expecting to live in a country of law and order, like in my case.
I admire both your principled outspokenness and clear command of English (which, as a communist-state refugee, isn’t your “native” language, though I’m guessing you studied it before you escaped).
I can’t find the specific public interest disclosures you mention, but there seems to be a different woman who shares your name. I stopped searching pretty quickly once I felt I was creeping too close to becoming one of those “data-stalkers” or cyber-creeps myself.
Thank you for the compliments and especially thank you for caring enough to do a search.
I must be doing something right, given the ongoing bikie intimidation attempts delivered to my home in a leafy Melbourne suburb of million $ homes, where I have owned (1) my own home since 2001. Last bikie visit was a few hours ago on a dark, rainy winter Saturday.
I am somewhat amused how befuddled Australia’s thugs get at the failing of their vulgar brutality. It seems their recipe for solving any issue has always been adding more bikies on bigger and louder motorbikes, showing off risk-free criminality in broad daylight – at times wearing Victoria Police uniforms and riding marked Victoria Police motorbikes in the process.
Might = right in Australia, as it has always been.
A search for my name should bring up some of my digital posters about Australia’s absurd crime reality – linked to my accounts on various platforms. My accounts/posts show the effects of ongoing harassment, sabotage, vandalism, corruption of my work, services everyone needs to use in industrialised countries in physical and cyber-space since 2009, but especially since 2015, when I stopped quietly waiting for the stalker ex-coworker to grow bored of committing crimes against me.
Graeme MAYNE ex-Victoria Police officer, DHL Supply Chain’s Security Manager for Australia appears frequently on my posters alongside other bikies, e.g. M.A.A. MEEHAN from the Purana Taskforce also ex-Victoria Police and Allan MEEHAN, the Australian president of the Comanchero. The stalker is a MEEHAN. I recognised M.A.A. MEEHAN from a bikie album on Facebook in 2018 as he openly tracked, stalked, ambushed and harassed me on a daily basis 2015-2018, until I shared his Facebook photo in my MEEHAN Thugs group (4). Allan MEEHAN is the least objectionable, because he never masqueraded as an upstanding citizen.
Several of my LinkedIn (2) posts have disappeared without warning about the risks Clare O’Neil’s – Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security and Home Affairs – incompetence, vanity and hubris pose to the whole world, since Australia faked its way into Five Eyes, AUKUS, etc. I had bikie victory laps for hours when I discovered the posts gone a few days ago. I acknowledged the excitement in a Facebook post via the Oz Community Notice Board (3).
Being attacked/blocked on various fora I created two Facebook groups also (4) since 2015. My posts in these two groups are so often attacked also, I stopped posting there, but my surviving old posts may be visible – some are visible to me. There are only a handful members in each group, I created them to broadcast to the world what I am forced to learn about Australia’s lawlessness, not to make friends or build a network. Fighting Australia’s crime and corruption is a lonely business. Crimes against me keep spilling over to people who associate with me even as tenants. I’d welcome others better resourced/qualified to take over this fight in a heartbeat. Until then I will keep fighting.
The Oz Community Notice Board is public and does not permit complaints, which is great 
Since LinkedIn and now Unherd have allowed me to make public interest disclosures, I no longer need to post in my own two Facebook groups.
#ididnotstaysilent
—
PS:
Australia’s absurd crime reality, outright barbarity doesn’t just affect grown-up public servant witnesses to crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/worse, whose conscience cannot bear the burden of silence.
Today I saw an obviously well-loved and well-cared-for little girl of maybe 7 walking on her own next to the road that bikies and other criminals frequent – in our leafy suburb, part of Clare O’Neil’s electorate since 2013.
The little girl was neatly dressed, beautiful and happy, walking away from a shopping centre. It wasn’t raining this morning, she was dressed for the sunny break we had.
Well-loved and well-cared-for children seem to be highly prized by Australia’s paedophiles. Look up the Beaumont children (5). South Australia’s police have been refusing to check a disused well(?) for decades. I know this from an eye-witness’ statements on Facebook. She had exhausted all legal avenues to get the final resting place of the children investigated and failed like I did, trying to get the stalker’s crimes on record at least. If you read their story, remember the honesty box for raspberries as a sign of trust in rural England in one of the recent Unherd articles. Australia was a trusting place a few decades ago also.
The father of the eyewitness was a paedophile whom the eye-witness says was involved in the Beaumont children’s murder. She saw their mangled corpses as a child herself in her father’s car boot. The father died of natural causes reaching old age without any trouble in the world, as is customary for Australia’s murderous thugs (6).
While I cannot confirm the eye-witness’ statements’ truthfulness, her desperation to clear her own conscience is familiar. As a child her father terrorised her. As a grown-up she cannot bear the burden of silence.
Children are disappearing without a trace in Australia by the thousands every year. There are 25 million of us in Australia.
We had to have a Royal Commission into paedophilia whose findings were then suppressed for 80(!) years. Our statutory/regulatory bodies, our commissions, ombudsmen etc. are only for the show as my story shows.
My fight is against organised crime, of which paedophilia is likely to be a small fraction, hence I don’t write about paedophilia in Australia much.
Seeing this little girl walking happily on her own today, her parents’ evidently knowing nothing about Australia’s barbarity is so scary, I had to write about it.
I brought my babies to barbaric Australia expecting law and order 35 years ago. I must warn others. Thank you for your time.
(1) In Australia all crime-victims are assumed to be pathetic charity cases, hence the reference to my home ownership.
(2) https://www.linkedin.com/in/katalin-kish-38750b154/
(3) https://www.facebook.com/groups/ozcommunity/
(4) https://www.facebook.com/Katalin.Kish.Perfect.Crime.Showcase.Exhibit.VEC/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/MeehanThugsBentleighEastFerntreeGully/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/illstandwithyou/
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_the_Beaumont_children
(6) Having been reduced to surviving crime-to-crime since 2017 I am not looking for further trauma, I am not looking stories of gruesome, unpunished crimes in Australia. I know from my own experience how widespread they are in Australia in big cities like Melbourne as well as anywhere else. The below names and crime descriptions are from what I could not ignore over the past few weeks:
Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans: kidnapped, repeatedly gang-raped in public, tortured over several days, at least one witness tried to report to police the crimes, police did nothing until after the decomposing corpses were found.
Jennifer Tanner’s murder was classified as unsuspicious suicide via 2 separate, perfectly aimed gunshots through the woman’s forehead with a long-barrelled shotgun. The victim being assumed to pull the trigger with her toes, yet achieving perfect aim. TWICE.
Colleen South – police refused to investigate, ignored crime reporting attempts.
Tina Greer murdered – bikie ex-boyfriend never even questioned in spite of history of violence.
Also, police did nothing with Paul Onions’ crime reporting attempt – Mr Onions escaped Ivan MILAT serial killer in a typical hitch-hiker hunting scenario in 1990. Ivan MILAT continued hunting and killing hitch-hikers for ANOTHER TWO YEARS undisturbed! No one knows how many he killed in total.
The key, Amy is to know when we have been “tricked” and to muster significant numbers in protest. I hope to God you are right.
The long form piece on Substack (linked to at the end of the essay) is well worth the investment of time in reading it. What’s concerning is how long the Antichrist has been with us and how we’ve adapted a little and a little, like the proverbial frog being slowly poached to death. People have been warning us for the better part of the last 80 years… yet, as David McKee quite rightly asks in his post here: do any of us have the will to change anything? And can we?
The first commenter on this article. He raises the issue of how do we actually change what is happening.
I routinely jaywalk. Helps by being pretty quick on my feet but it also amuses me to see people stood at crossings when the lights are on green (i.e. “don’t walk”) but with no cars in sight, or some distance away. I just waltz across, or don’t bother with designated crossings at all. The idea that i might incur the wrath of a social credit system for doing so makes me shudder for the citizens of China. Indeed, i’ve seen them frowning at me at crossings here in the UK as they’re so conditioned by their homeland experience.
Here in the UK, a new traffic regulation was recently introduced, giving pedestrians ‘right of way’ at junctions over vehicles emerging from side roads. There’s hope for us yet!
Ever tried crossing a clear road on a ‘red light’ in the Fatherland?
“Helps by being pretty quick on my feet”?
Self praise is NO recommendation.
Having survived to tell the tale, i’d maintain that it is!
I once got fined in Australia for jaywalking, that was the first I’d ever heard of it. Not that the fine got paid mine you
I trust the Australian authorities have noted that insubordination!
I’ve been back since with no hassle so I’m guessing I’m not on their most wanted list
Australia basically does this, since, following the 1970s-80s, when state police were told it was rather naughty of them to be running the heroin trade, the forces in each state had more police than they knew what to do with.
One activity to fill in time, is booking jaywalkers.
Sounds rather like Derbyshire or perhaps even Manchester.
Unsure I’ve ever seen a policeman on the streets in Manchester. One down by the canal, but he was up to other stuff. Looking for The Pusher ?
With regards to jaywalking I am a cyclist, when the time comes, e’rso frequently in London where I do most of my mileage I look for traffic not lights and act accordingly – painful experience has taught me it’s safer.
I have been broken bones smashed up eight times, all but one of them cycling through traffic lights when they were green for me. I have never come close to being hit while jumping red lights. My experience is reflected in the stats of cyclists killed in London between 1999 and Jan 2006. No cyclists were killed jumping lights. I think something like eight were killed by vehicles jumping lights. Of the rest something like 90 were killed obeying green lights.
Female cyclists were hugely over represented among the killed – in the order of 70% of those killed were female. Female cyclists in that period represented less than 30% of the cycling population. The Road Transport Laboratory – commissioned by that prince among socialist misprints, K Livingston – concluded they were over represented because they were temperamentally more inclined than male cyclists to obey the lights. That is women are over represented because they tend to obey them and men are under represented because they tend to take them into consideration.
In the way that long term progress is more often made by many short progressions strung together how about we start the fightback against the blob, technocrats, quangos and NGOs by behaving as though Monderman’s “shared space” was already with us. With such pressure the scheme of Monderman lite in Exhibition Road might be enhanced to full Monderman and extended. And from there extended further into our daily lives.
Strong article overall. Warranted notes of alarm and de-mystification of the managerial class that I found persuasive and instructive. Yet Lyons’ concluding sentence “pronounces sentence” with too much certitude:
“Even as they roil and clash, converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government — to a total techno-state”
This is a danger, not a destiny. No earthly hellscape, nor prophesy of doom, however inspired, must come to pass, not even in China. These are warnings, not inevitabilities. But the analysis, and warning, seems very apt and timely.
This is the most important and the most frightening summary of what is actually happening in the West and what seems inevitable. But there is even more scary part. That the people in Western democracies, who were given a chance like no other population ever in time and geography to live in freedom, rejected it in favor of feeling cozy and “safe” and “protected”. In China it was done by terror, in the West it’s the people. And it is much worse.
Thanks to the author for this piece and to Unherd for making it available. It is not, in my opinion, nihilistic, but a warning of how far we all are willing to go to maintain our social credit. I love China and the Chinese people. I find the depth and wonder of the Central Country unfathomable. But I agree with the author that social credit can be a path to conformity there, for reasons we in the West find hard to comprehend. However, it is easy to underestimate the true power of the individual actor in such a State. The West has a strong and not yet defeated tradition of individual value and liberty and still celebrates the genius (good or bad) in a way the East has never understood, as seen in the veneration of Elon Musk. The West still has the opportunity to turn away from conformity required by managerialism to a better path as Madeleine L’Engle so eloquently illustrated in her stories. One can still change the world.
Resistance requires the love of a common language and culture.
I’m surprised it wasn’t mentioned but isn’t the West actively pursuing Stakeholder Capitalism as preached by Schwab and the WEF for decades? Power partnerships between politicians and corporations? The pols get to establish centralized control with the aid of the “smartest guys in the room” from business and industry. In return, corporations that sing the party songs about DEI and ESG get favourable financial advantages over the competition. The wooly cover story as so cleverly woven by King Klaus is that this power partnership will allow us to fast-track solutions to the world’s problems such as climate change or pandemics. Combine Bill Gates’ smarts with the WHO’s political weight and a poor virus won’t stand a chance. Schwab was positively gleeful when discussing a digital capsule, that when swallowed could allow health officials to track possible virus spread. We won’t talk about what other possible uses there could be for such a device.
China’s system is called State-Capitalism which is the same thing but without pesky elections. Even the most fervent communist ideologues learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union: a democratic revolution for the people needs money and has to make deals with people that know how to make it.
Justin Trudeau let the WEF cat out of the bag a few years ago when he opined off-script (Trudeau speaking off-script almost always ends badly) that he admired China and their ability to “turn their economy on a dime”.
As the article states it looks like there may be a showdown between these two similar but different systems. IMO, the one real difference in the two is that China has the means to deal with corporate miscreants. Even billionaires are sometimes invited to reflect on their wayward attitudes at one of the state-sponsored resorts but I’m not sure about the West. Which end of this partnership is the tail and which is the dog? What roles are there to play for elections and the shredded remnants of independent and critical media?
I don’t like either option, no thanks. Individual freedom comes from the Creator, not government. I will live free today and forever, that’s my choice. “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism because it is the merger of State and Corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini
A rather depressing analysis, but rather fortuitously alleviated by the simply splendid news from Northern Ireland last night.
Here our wonderful ‘techno-state’ has just managed to inadvertently release/publish the personal details of all 10,000 members of the PSNI*! A data breach of titanic proportions that may yet have very dire consequences indeed.
Whilst the PSNI has my every sympathy, it only goes to prove that the great ‘techno – beast’ is NOT infallible and for that much we must be thankful.
For the benefit of Andrew F of this forum, my personal feeling is that where else could such a catastrophe have occurred but Norther Ireland?However I do hope that I shall be proved wrong.
(*Police Service of Northern Ireland, formerly known as the RUC or Royal Ulster Constabulary, and before that the RIC or Royal Irish Constabulary.)
,
An accurate and overdue essay.
All true and, as we saw with covid restrictions, the managerial state is highly prone to error and groupthink. The way to avoid this is by popular uprising. They may debank me, but they’ll never make me drink Bud Light.
Just look at the typhoon in China and the incompetent communist government’s response to it by releasing the flood waters into the path of hundreds of thousands of people without warning, killing many and destroying homes and businesses. The “managerial” incompetence of the dictatorships rulers fails every time. But, hey they do not give a damn about those people. Not unlike dictators and ruler wannabe’s anywhere else. Rising up starts with standing up for the rights of others.
I suspect that the technocrats shall snatch defeat from the jaws of victory via deficit spending. Right when they are on the cusp of enacting their iron utopia, they are going to run out of money. Because, let’s face facts, the sorts of welfare states necessary to convert the masses into easily controlled subjects are expensive. And you can only burn through your existing societal capital for so long before you’ve burned through it all. There’s only so much government debt the world can absorb before the techno-states will have to resort to printing money to cover their deficits. Once you head down that road, economic collapse is almost inevitable. You can debase your currency for a while, but eventually it loses so much value that even your own security forces won’t accept it, and when that happens, you’re screwed. If you can’t pay your soldiers and your police, you’re screwed.
Every major world revolution has been preceded by a debt crisis.
Expecting that the global central banks will act in the interest of working people rather than the corporate oligarchs, multimillionaire an billionaire ruling classes and particularly the parasitic financial industry is about as probable as hoping a starving wolf won’t eat the chicken, that pigs will fly, a fictitious hell will freeze and Wall Street will give all its money away to the poor and homeless before a central bank of the capitalist cesspool of greed goes against its raison d’être.
Surely we don’t need to be reminded of central banking behavior in the recent past. Consider that five central banks, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and Bank of Canada handed out about US$10 trillion to artificially prop up financial markets in the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic on top of the US$9.36 trillion that was spent on bailing out “too big to fail” hucksters and golden parachutes to the financial markets in the years following the 2008 global economic collapse. Of the smarmy cockroach managerial classes who orchestrated the global debacle were not only not punished or even prosecuted, many ended up in the Obama administration that carried out the deplorable bailouts.
About $20 trillion, the equivalent of a year’s gross domestic product of Japan, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, France and Italy combined was handed out to reward the most parasitic layers of the economy (assholes with bullshit jobs doing bullshit work) in a bullshit industry that steals money not only from all who work for a living but from industrial capital as well.
And what did Joe Lunch Bucket get? The working poor and elderly who did most of the dying during the covid-19 debacle and rip-ff got little or nothing; in fact what you have been getting for the past several decades of pillage and plunder is less than nothing. Minus Nada!
Well written! And exactly what is happening these days. So very sad! If the elites have done this to remain in power it shows weakness and fear, democracy is done out of strength! I do not believe they have done this out of fear, but this is their believe that people are peasants and get treated accordingly. Once this is in place we will live in slavery, and there may be no way out!
“there is now only one, smothering form of modern civilisation that has stretched itself across the face of the globe,”
Yes, ‘modern’ civilization. But we can’t overlook Islam, the non-modern civilization that is on track to take over Europe and the UK by mid century. Sharia is so … retro.
I’m reminded of the movie Demolition Man, where a dystopian Los Angeles is run by a mad scientist who has used computers and psychological conditioning to turn everyone into either a passive, malleable, easily controlled puppet, who live on the surface and appear to be better off, or a complete and utter dissident who live in the sewers and eat rat meat, but are free. Try as he might, the mad scientist never can completely get rid of these people because they simply won’t follow his rules. More than this, his population of compliant sheep are increasingly incapable of acting or thinking outside their sanitized reality, thus they are unable to handle the dissident sewer dwellers who multiply uncontrollably. He finally resorts to unfreezing a frozen murdering psychopath to eliminate his enemies for him, which drives the plot, and then Sylvester Stallone the rogue cop is resurrected to battle him. Hence, the problem the managerialists or whatever you want to call them face. The more they squeeze people into complying with the system, the more people will simply reject it entirely. Prevent people banking, they’ll use barter. Prevent them getting housing, they’ll infest the cities and steal whatever they can (see San Francisco for example). Ban beef, people will eat rats or wildlife or whatever is available. Enforce the rules through digital means, people will eventually shun electronics. We haven’t gotten there yet, but we will. I’d be shocked if there aren’t already underground groups operating in China. What hasn’t dawned on the ‘managerialists’ is that they aren’t just fighting against democracy, or established cultures, religions, values, or any other human created things. At the basic level, they’re fighting nature itself. Nature resists control, human nature included. Humans are no more easily contained or controlled than rats or cockroaches or mosquitoes or any of the other things we would like to get rid of but can’t. It isn’t a question of winning and losing. They will eventually lose, one way or the other. The only question is when and how much damage they do.
Thanks for this Steve. I feel a bit better… I think!
Faced with overwhelming evidence for anyone with sufficient curiosity, inquiry and bullshit detection (like the ludicrous “too big to fail” mantra), I’ve believed this obvious explanation of our decline and ultimate demise for many decades now. Yes, it merely requires a modicum of intelligence, sufficient curiosity and willingness to take your nose out of your cell phone long enough to observe the cesspool of corruption by banks and other financial swindlers that include the endless sequence of BBBB (Booms, Bubbles, Busts and Bailouts) sequences. The late comedian, social critic and brilliant autodidact George Carlin, with his grade nine education, had the casino capitalist American Nightmare and the reasons for dumb and dumber ubiquitous ignorance and stupidity figured out. Democracy is of course a farcical exercise in mindless indoctrination, marketing and toxic bullshit.
George Carlin: The Owners Of This Country – YouTube
On Canada’s phony capitalist democracy, read Bruce Livesey’s The Thieves of Bay Street: How Banks, Brokerages and the Wealthy Steal Billions from Canadians and a few books on offshore tax havens that Canada’s criminal chartered banks facilitate for its corporate and other wealthy clients. Canada is known for its lax financial oversight that results in billions of dollars lost by ordinary Canadians every year to hucksters, scammers, slimy stock market peddlers and other financial con artists. One among several books on the global tax haven abomination is The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by by Gabriel Zucman and Thomas Piketty. And yes, tax evasion is a crime in every country on the planet, but only for the working classes and other members of the wage slave hoi polloi. Did someone say “Skip”? Yeah, and “have a nice day; your call is important to us.” Bullshit!
Interesting and not a little unsettling. But the difference is that in China the direction comes from the central state, while in the democratic world it doesn’t. There is no legislation or sinister social program behind this over here – and no legislation to back it up. Indeed the UK government clearly objects to it – as much as it dares. Here it is a self-propelling cultural phenomenon emerging from a new mode of morality instigated and inspired by social media. The views of Joe/Jo Bloggs used not to be known further afield than the Dog and Duck or Speaker’s Corner. Now many of us bare our souls to public scrutiny. Even marginally misogynist or racist quips are seen as a window into our souls, even when most of the time they are but clumsy humour with no malice of forethought. So it isn’t the State that is behind cancelling and de-banking, it’s a nouveau puritanism – a pseudo-moral shaming driven by the fear of institutions to be seen to endorse controversial views simply by doing business with those that hold – or merely appear to hold them, in case it gets them a thumbs down on Youtube and affects sales. It is a self-harming societal virus that negates tolerance and seeks to confront and silence non-conformist views. Ask Katherine Stock.
Here though we can fight back – we can shine a light on this virus and root it out by shaming it in the same way it seeks to shame us into obedience to its credo – that’s a precious freedom we still enjoy and absolutely must uphold. Our civilian duty is to call out bigotry and intolerance in all its forms – especially that of the new self-appointed, civilian and business morality police. We may abhor some people’s political views, but our forefathers fought and died for their right to hold them.
Yes, a good take on this article. “Self-propelling cultural phenomena” I like in particular because that does seem to be what it is rather than some devious “elites”.
With many of these controversial issues half the population seems to be supportive of them. The other half who aren’t fulminate and blame “the elites” and think it’s against the will of the people and anti- democratic because either we weren’t asked or because we were asked in the wrong way.
The half that does support whatever policy, thinks the people in charge (not “the elites” note) are just doing the right thing, for once.
Recently I read a history of China, quite a general book as I’m no historian, and I was struck by how during the Mao years when all those people were being killed (supposedly by CCP thugs as this article seems to imply) that actually those “thugs” were ordinary people, mostly peasants, who were carried away by Mao’s rhetoric and fully supported his policies which they stood to gain by. Anyone that questioned these policies (mainly educated, well off types) were seen as traitors and dealt with by mobs very much like the example given here (given as being somehow unique). It didn’t need CCP direction as such. Once the rhetoric (brainwashing, propaganda) had worked its magic even Mao couldn’t stop them.
Reading that made me think how in many ways we are the same. Tech is making what already exists within societies (division, hate) easier to promote. Once this takes hold (and often in democracies it’s started or at least promoted by a political party to garner votes) it’s quite difficult to stop. Which means no-one is in charge at all.
“Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society”
Sorry, but that’s exactly what socialism is.
There is truth in this but I don’t think citizens in the west will accept gradual imposition of a totalitarian state. There is already strong resistance in the USA and UK.
Ultimately it will undermined by failure to improve our lives through misunderstanding reality and making policy mistakes.
(1) The first mistake was advocating neoliberalism in economic and foreign policy. That started wars, suppressed productivity growth and induced the global financial crisis.
(2) Attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewables are a second mistake which is creating energy poverty and inflation.
(3) A third mistake is adopting and implementing critical race theory and gender ideology. This is harming the people it is intended to help.
(4) A fourth mistake was to belief the best way to prevent pandemics was to identify potentially pandemic organisms, bring them into densely occupied cities, and engineer them so that they could infect humans.
The so-called technocratic elite that came up with these policies needs to learn some humility and really listen rather than silence dissenting views.
At the moment it is focusing on silencing these views through bullying and censorship disguised as suppressing misinformation and preventing harm.
But there is a growing backlash against this nonsense.
Anyone who reads this terrifying piece & doesn’t weep & rage deserves their dystopian fate.
The trouble is, most of us are kept just comfortable enough, & yet just ‘on edge’ enough to be unable to take decisive action against the tide. So we do nothing. One of the reasons is that we have so many places to ‘rage against the machine’ online that our railings ‘lose the name of action’. (Sorry about all the cliche quotes but they are just so apt)
So, as much as we are able to access so much information this way, we can also vent our emotion & indignation to help us cope. As if that’s somehow enough.
It isn’t. And if we don’t take affirmative action of some kind (what, how? I don’t know. There’s the rub -argh) then human life will inexorably become less & less valuable as the ‘discredited’ lose everything & the rest of us pass by looking the other way.
I used to feel sorry that I wouldn’t live forever, anticipating the amazing things that we humans would discover to make life better for humans on earth. I assumed that the warnings of Orwell & H G Wells & Asimov (& Rachel Carson too for her environmental warnings) would be heeded & that technology would develop in a benign way. But of course that would depend entirely on the benevolent & benign purposes of the humans deploying it. As we are already seeing with AI.
I’m beginning to feel glad now that I won’t be around to see how this goes..
We are like rabbits in the headlights. We need to find our will to screw our courage to the sticking place (no more apologies) & to hope desperately that we won’t fail..
I reckon at least 90% of the population will revel in the new dispensation. A few grumpy old men and women can be ignored and there could be ‘Squid Games’ for the still active subversives.
“We forge the chains we wear in life.”*
(*Charles Dickens,1812-1870.)
Oh ye of little faith, has it occurred to you why this is happening? Everything happens for a reason. There is Nature’s Law, and consequences for violating those laws. Nature’s Creator has given you free will: it is all that is required for anyone to live in freedom. Anyone can choose today to live in faith not fear, now and forever. The “West” has forgotten, turned its back on the true source of freedom, worshipping money and power instead, living in fear like cowards afraid to die. Why? Because they have no faith beyond believing in life from “cradle ‘till death”. The power of darkness relies upon blocking out the Light Of The World, and fear is the tool it uses to succeed. Freedom is not free. Jesus Christ not only died on the cross for us, he forgave us of our sins, if we choose to believe and have faith, to put God first in all things, and live now and forever without fear, amen “There is nothing to fear, but fear itself.” Choose now, choose wisely, because the freedom of your children and those not yet born of every nation relies upon you. One man with faith makes a majority. The power of almighty God is greater than all the armies on the face of the earth combined. To know Him is to know true power, and that is what they fear. Now stop with your fear and be courageous: live free or die!
…An important piece, which complements Matthew Crawford’s analysis at Archedelia. Part 1 of which is at: https://mcrawford.substack.com/p/minoritarian-moralism?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Technology reality is worse than what the article describes in Western countries.
Tech controls aren’t limited to state-held tools to achieve a cohesive, long-term outcome of e.g. Covid vaccinations, or the forced praising of Aborigine achievements/victimhood.
Opportunity makes thieves everywhere, including in Western government entities, where insiders understand both: the power tech control bestows on those who wield it, and the impossibility (1) of proving that an act is a cyber-crime, let alone proving an individual’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
The constraints of physical space don’t apply in cyber-space, Ockham’s Razor leads to false negatives. Since the Internet is everywhere, tech dystopia has no boundaries (2).
Any punishment is after the fact anyway.
Brain-damage is rarely reversible and the dead will remain dead: Wi-Fi enabled and hence hackable pacemakers and insulin pumps being trivial options for permanently neutralising a person without any risk of prosecution.
Eliminating incorruptible police officers, competitors, or any random person can be done via making the person fail, making them look incompetent, unreliable, poorly resourced. Inducing financial hardship as well as phantom health issues (3 – “Havana Syndrome”?) are amongst the control capabilities I have had the dubious honour of experiencing since 2009. See a sample list in a separate comment marked (5).
Look up my name to see an assortment of devastating crimes in Melbourne, Australia since 2009 that don’t show up in any statistics.
I became a crime victim to be discredited and consequently isolated via the use of tech not known yet (3) to civilian experts via bizarre crimes as a public servant witness to crimes endangering public safety and security in 2009 in Melbourne, Australia. I naively tried to report crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/worse to the executive of the Victorian Electoral Commission first and then to Victoria Police, when it was me, the crime witness who had to resign and leave my job.
I only learned in 2019 that discrediting crime witnesses via bizarre crimes is a standard strategy by Australia’s corrupt police (4).
I have owned my home in a leafy suburb of million $ homes in Melbourne, Australia, in the electorate of Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security and Home Affairs Clare O’Neil since 2001. Clare O’Neil has been our MP since 2013. She ignored my pleas for help to stop a stalker ex-coworker’s crimes against me when Victoria Police trivialised crimes against me/refused to assist. I never even dated the stalker.
Clare O’Neil may have been woken up in 2022 by the Optus and Medibank data-breaches affecting about one third of Australia’s population.
Having been appointed as the Minister for Cyber Security and Home Affairs on 1 June 2022, Ms O’Neil was shocked to discover in October 2022 that Australia had no cyber-response capabilities to the extent, she harangued the previous government for several months. What was she doing on the job between June and October 2022 you ask?
Clare O’Neil cheerfully makes declarations like 100 Australian hackers from our police and from the Australian Signals Directorate will stop cyber-criminals globally no less via hack-back before they could harm Australian interests, Australia will become the world’s most cyber-secure country by 2030, and celebrating Indigenous ICT that involves culturally appropriate SOCs. And, since Australia is a trusted ally to the US, UK – we are part of the Five Eyes, AUKUS, and who knows what else, technology is pouring into Australia to the obvious delight of our organised crime participants.
#ididnotstaysilent
—
(1) Except for ransomware attacks, theft, child-sexual-abuse, etc.
(2) Avoiding technology no longer offers protection.
I learned this in 2019 while I was forced to fight at court in an admitted silencing attempt in Melbourne, Australia. Since using tech not known to civilian experts let alone expected to be used by Australia’s law-enforcement to silence a public servant witness to serious crimes, while forcing the witness to fight at court in an admitted silencing attempt is way beyond what anyone would want to imagine in a city like Melbourne in a country like Australia, I cannot write more here about what I have been experiencing intermittently since.
I am risking ridicule and attacks because I cannot bear the burden of silence. I have been making public interest disclosures for years as I realised that Australia’s fake facade of law and order is based on crime hiding, terrorising crime witnesses and victims into silent oblivion. Look up my name to see details from Facebook to LinkedIn and everything in between.
I am so outraged and so horrified about Australia’s hidden barbarity, I have no fear. Living in Australia is a hard earned privilege for me. My family and I paid an extremely high price expecting to be able to live in a peaceful country of law and order 35 years ago. Crime hiding in Australia is so perfect, I lived within a 10km radius 1988-2008 from where the stalker’s crime-spree against me started in 2009 and knew nothing about Australia’s absurd crime reality.
(3) Ongoing from
2009 mobile phone remote restart/sabotage >=12x/day, laptop turned back on remotely after being turned off routinely
2011 smart-meter hacking, cutting off power to circuits, devices as a form of harassment, e.g. turning off power to my tenants’ fridge in a heatwave
2015 car electronics’ hacking, fake caller-ID calls/text messages, blocking calls/messages, muting/distorting phone audio, disconnecting calls/muting one or both sides, fake message received notifications, battery had to be removed from my Android phone to stop it being used to harass me overnight
2016 iPhone 6/6s hacking & sabotage
2016 being logged off mid-sentence from my Mac computer at a workplace after the VEC
2019 air-gap breaching + whatever causes variations of “Havana Syndrome” type incidents
2022 Faraday Cage penetration
(4) “Victoria Police Corruption“, Raymond T. Hoser, Kotabi, 1999. ISBN 0-9586769-6-8
“Victoria Police Corruption 2”, Raymond T. Hoser, Kotabi, 2000. ISBN 0-9586769-7-6
(5) see separate comment
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