Faberge Dolls of Political, Social and Personal Crisis
Over the past few years, a tidal wave of populist and anti-establishment furor has rolled over the great democracies and beyond. Nobody among us bottom feeders knows who represents that establishment—whether old white men from Bavaria, Vatican Templars, Marxist professors and their deep state flunkies or reptilians—yet we have seen the rise of a Tea Party, an Occupy Wall Street, prolonged Antifa, BLM, Defund the Police, and Cancel Culture street warfare in America; a Trucker Convoy in Canada; anti-China protests in Hong Kong; an Arab Spring; an Extinction Rebellion in Europe; a perpetual Yellow Vest protest in France; a Farmers’ Rebellion in the Netherlands; a Brexit in Britain—which a group of invisibles tried to reverse in defiance of the public will; and the actual reversal of the election of a populist President of the USA. Shadowy characters cancel an election in Romania and block voter-approved populists from sharing power in Western Europe; icon hunters destroy statues of history’s great figures; and mysterious bureaucrats with their social media armies change street names and cleanse school texts to make those heroes disappear from memory. Masters of the universe who run the world’s massive corporations declare masculinity toxic in their television ads and make appearances in white privilege DEI supremacy detox courses. Social revolution, backed by mysterious international figures with outsized wallets and grudges, overtakes economics in the university curriculum. You may smell a rat.
Bizarre behavior of all sorts is welcomed by the fringe as a breath of fresh air—a release of frustration pent up from centuries of patriarchy—while street-level authority has disappeared. Intersectionals and Bipocs are lured onto the war path against modern Joan of Ableists. Language mirrors our new extremism and is recruited to classify right-of-Marx reactionaries as either creepy or toxic. Employers are warned not to hire populists, companies not to invest in them, and shoppers to boycott them. Sycophancy, jingoism and querdenken carry the day. Angry factions appear to outnumber citizens who see the world as a good place, and we live in fear of uniforms again. I don’t give a fuck, though not fit to be a philosophy of life, is proclaimed on bumper stickers and T-shirts, in songs and on book covers everywhere. A teenaged girl emulates her heroes on the silver screen and screams her rage at world leaders on the floor of the United Nations and at Big Climate symposia. Children authorize needles in their own arms and hormone treatments for sex changes; three-year-old girls can sport knitted penises to allow them to feel like boys, while grown (white) men are labeled toxic and appear in movies naked and vomiting to punish them for mansplaining and -spreading. In one of the world’s great cities, a government-sanctioned statue of Medusa is erected holding the severed head of a man to appease fanatics. Social media has given a voice to people of no account throughout history to air grievances they are said to have held in their bosom for centuries.
And even as the hell fires rage, along comes C—concocted by nature or a government laboratory nobody knows or dares admit—giving apparatchiks the moral authority to use wartime tactics against their so-called voters. Britain, the inventor of the Magna Carta and the modern parliament, sets up a real live Ministry of Fear (á la Graham Greene) to terrorize people into obeying government edicts. Canada, once a beacon of sobriety, freezes bank accounts of dissenters; criminalizes hate, especially if directed at its leader on social media; and sends SWAT teams to arrest priests for selling hope and giving food away rather than selling it from big box warehouses. Australia, once a great Western democracy, sends voters to internment camps, seeks permanent powers to enact war measures even in the absence of war all while enforcing voting at the gunpoint of state authority in its relentless goosestep toward a perfect social order. The European Union proudly rolls out a vaccine passport because yellow stars and armbands can be stripped off with one’s clothing; and a shaved head and tattooed number on a forearm might make the skeptical among us pour out our cup of koolaid. The message seems to be, You WILL believe the lie and play the game! It is for your own good.
In this economic and cultural wasteland, the natural injustices of Darwinian capitalism, Goebbelsian propaganda and Orwellian government pile more unrest on top of debt and default, unemployment and quarantining, and nobody knows the way forward. Millions are dead and the world economy so crippled that, according to scientists, the Earth even stops vibrating amid the silence and inactivity. Retail sales plunge, half of rents go unpaid, and cites flirt with bankruptcy. Offices and factories, bars and restaurants are closed. Travel and tourism, sports and entertainment are in total collapse. A third of small businesses expect to go under without assistance amid a massive wealth transfer to public payrolls and the largest corporations. The average citizen owes nearly a year’s income to lenders and loan sharks, and fifteen percent of the population lives in poverty. The dumbing down of the population, long underway under the left wing’s assault on merit and intellectual competition, picks up pace as schools shut their doors. The vaunted credit card is maxed out, so the nation cannot financialize its way out of the mess. Cash is vilified in the new regime, which depends for its existence on the taxation–profit–insurance game matched against the DNA–social score–credit registry. Quantitative easing, or money printing, has left the currency on the precipice, and only a false sense among international investors that there is nowhere else safe enough to park massive piles of plunder keeps the house of cards from collapsing.
Unleashed into this perfect storm of social, economic and political upheaval is a barrage of soul-crushing technologies co-opted by government and corporations. Our identity and psych profile are captured through DNA, voice and gait prints, facial recognition and phrenology, and our whereabouts are permanently tracked with vibrating wristbands, contact tracing and locator beacons. We are trapped—and identifiable by the speed of our response to the vaccine edicts. Western governments set up camps and take political prisoners for the first time since WWII. Show trials are back, as are the Mao-era public self-shaming confessions of guilt, real or otherwise. Hardly a week goes by without another contribution to the weapons of taxation, regulation and information employed by governments to squeeze money and obedience out of its citizens. The only ingredient missing to create our very own people’s republic is declaring the state of emergency permanent in order to embolden the authorities to keep thinking outside the rulebook to stave off financial and moral bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Amnesty International is silent. Journalists who were once our eyes and ears on the world reported the basic facts from both sides of the political spectrum. Now we grope in the dark for alternative news sources or just withdraw from the world.
Our Western world is sick. Titans at the top of the pyramid are sick with power. We proles at the bottom are sick with fear—fear of moral terrorism; fear of AI and IoT in the hands of the police state; fear of killer algorithms in the stock and crypto markets; fear of corrupted food, medicine and aerial spraying; fear of environmental doomsday; fear of linguistic and cultural witch hunts; fear of shapeshifters, and fear of everything else in between. We live under a siege mentality: inflation, cyber threats, government authority, cultural destruction, gender and pedo wars against children. . . the list is long. Our only comfort for many years was that government and corporations, communism and capitalism were in a balance of power (BOP) under the threat of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Now they have joined forces, and we the people find ourselves in a very scary place with no sanctuary—not even the houses of worship, who may just be another player in the game of world domination. Is this simply the first reign of terror by our new globalist rulers, or is it a revolution?
Does humanity have an archenemy among the deeply entrenched tribes, families and clubs who began the whole race for land and resources, fair and unfair advantage centuries ago? Are families—with even less accountability than cartels, corporations and government—the culprit? Or is the archenemy hiding behind NGOs, which need no permission from voters to make money or wield influence? Who are the big names behind banking and insurance, banana republic puppets, mercantilists of the war machine and privateers of world heavy industry? Years of inheritance, the distortions of government interference and crony capitalism, and sheer Darwinian instinct have created pools of incredible wealth and power. The individual has none except for that granted by the oligarchs. And the only reason the group might be so generous is to stave off rebellion or for some long-lost sense that it is the right thing to do. After all, the smallest components of society are its individuals, and it was once said that healthy individuals make for a healthy society. Cripple the individual and you cripple society.
We are adrift on the open seas of identity, morality and risk with no sail, no rudder and no engine on our raft—swirling around a Bermuda Triangle of personal, social and political self-destruction marked with aggressive words and deeds better left unspoken and undone. We are in trouble and need answers, and if we do not find some, they will be foisted upon us by people with a clearer vision of what they want from life—world domination, for example, or control over some elixir to be injected for our own good. We are broken and need to rebuild, yet all our attention is focused on social justice. Was it Alexis de Tocqueville who said, Freedom and equality will always be at odds? Who said, Justice is a cold virtue? Was it Lucas, the Oxford philosopher? Halldór Laxness, the Icelandic novelist, questioned in his novel World Light if it was possible to fight for justice until no one was left alive on Earth. And who is to blame anyway? Huxley said, “The nation-state cannot be fixed or changed because it doesn’t exist except as a projection of the individual’s secret wishes and intentions.” Step back a moment, and one can imagine all the current social calamity being swept away in a day if the people pulling the strings cut off the money to the agents provocateurs and stopped sticking pins in the voodoo doll.
