Steven Yates
British author John Derbyshire once penned an article with a similar title for National Review shortly before Bill Buckley fired him (he’s a conservative, not a neocon).
Just recently I ran across that article and thought I’d present my own list, which updates his significantly. Times have changed; but much remains as it ever was — as our current situation testifies. Mine got to be a tad lengthy. Hence two parts. We’ll look at #’s 1 –6 today, and #’s 7 – 12 Friday.
Unpleasant Truth #1: Most of the human race couldn’t care less about freedom. I read somewhere that only a third of colonists supported the American revolution. Another third favored the British. A final third didn’t care, so long as their stomachs were full.
H.L. Mencken wrote in Notes on Democracy(orig. 1926) that “the common man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.” Few freedom believers — conservative, Libertarian, what-have-you — have come to grips with this unhappy fact about the masses. They believe the masses can be educated and motivated to think like they do, and are endlessly frustrated when faced with noncomprehending, TV-watching sheep.
The masses are easily controlled with fear. Hermann Goering’s statement from prison during the Nuremberg Trials is oft-quoted: “Why, of course the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany…. But …it’s the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship….All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
This appears just as true with the present “enemy”: origins of the attacking virus not entirely clear; no one knowing the actual number of infections because not everyone can be tested; the actual mortality rate unclear because of political divisions and known fudging (see my previous article) to get an inflated mortality figure, in the U.S. at least.
Object lesson: tell the masses there’s something lethal out there … show them rows of caskets on TV, as I have seen several times now … then watch the majority fall in line… even with their businesses and workplaces shut down as “inessential,” and over 40 million having applied for unemployment benefits overwhelming those systems.
There are some sterling exceptions. But nothing should be clearer than that the majority of humanity prefers safety/security to liberty.
#2. Blacks and whites will never get along, or trust one another. If affirmative action, set-asides,or other preferential programs worked, we would know it by now. When I was a kid, integrating government (“public”) schools was all the rage. As an idealistic teenager I supported it. But even then I noticed how black kids self-segregated. No one I knew of “hated” them. Some of us were somewhat afraid of them.
We didn’t understand them and they didn’t understand us.
A program was forced on the country, top-down, without the large-scale education or counseling that would have been required for each group to learn about the other, especially what the black kids truly needed, but looking back on that period with 20-20 hindsight, there’s no reason to believe even that would have worked.
The two races are simply different: culturally and physically for sure, and probably — whether anyone likes it or not —intellectually. Anyone who disagrees with that is challenged to produce one example of a black civilization on the order of ancient Greece, or even Rome. Just one.
I can hear the screams of racist! racist! racist! already. (Or maybe it will be white supremacist! multiple times).
Calm down! Focus!
Name one black civilization of significance. Just one.Can you do it? If not, shut up!
Be all this as it may, enough whites are no better. What do we have? Sadistic white cops who brutalize unarmed and handcuffed black men to death (George Floyd being just the most recent example) without any sense of the consequences. In my judgment, the first thing to say about such a cop is that he’s an idiot— down there at box-of-rocks level stupid— in addition to whatever psychopathic tendencies he may have been harboring. Derek Chauvin had numerous complaints against him without consequences, signaling that he could get away with it.
That said, there are plenty of trouble making publicity hounds among blacks. Al Sharpton comes to mind (yes, he showed up on the scene in Minneapolis, right on cue).
And there are globalists — elites — who have been exploiting justifiable black anger over incidents like the one in Minneapolis for years now, funneling money to radical groups because they want to destroy traditional American culture. George Soros comes to mind.
When the history of our once-great nation was written, the bottom line will be that not abolishing slavery in 1776 was our Founding Fathers’ worst blunder. It sowed the seeds for divisions that have haunted us ever since.
The object lesson may be that fundamentally incompatible cultures with different wired-in mindsets cannot be made to mix by force, although again there will be exceptions that prove the general rule. Scarcity makes this worse. When the system seems to dispense, unjustly, more freebies and privileges to one race than to the other,anger will fester. Repeated crises will aggravate the situation until it explodes, well-positioned (and moneyed) opportunists having lit the matches.
#3. Constitutional government is dead. Do I need to belabor this one? Dr. Ron Paul was the last Constitutionalist to hold national office, and he retired in 2013 without a single bill he authored being passed. Often his was the only “No” vote against one or another of innumerable pieces of unconstitutional legislation to cross his desk.
Arguably the U.S. got off track at the start here as well. The Founders’ second worst blunder was allowing Alexander Hamilton to create the private Bank of the United States when the Constitution explicitly authorized Congress to “coin money and regulate the value thereof….”
Lincoln’s War centralized the country; “these United States” ceased to be a federated republic and became a nation state no different than European nation states.
Bankers and their allies did the rest. The Gilded Age saw the rise and consolidation of what was then called the Money Power aggregated in private corporations. The progressive movement of the time (directed by the British Fabian Society) was never more than controlled opposition. Their man Woodrow Wilson, who was also the bankers’ man, signed the legislation creating the Federal Reserve in 1913.
The U.S. has been a Money Power oligarchy ever since. Just like Europe.
The well-networked extended families of globalist elites (Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans; et al) understood that if you want controlled masses, you control the information that reaches them. Hence establishing controls over corporate media and government (“public”) schools which has continued ever since … even as they produced generations who cannot write grammatical sentences or walk up to a world map and find Iraq or Ukraine.
Few university students have any idea of the Constitution. I used to ask students to name the rights enumerated in the First Amendment. Most couldn’t identify any, or tell me where they could find the First Amendment.These people were old enough to vote.
With an uninformed and ignorant public, Congress can pass, and the president can sign, anything they want. The occasional Ron Paul will sound like a kook. When Nancy Pelosi was asked where the Constitution authorized the federal government to force people to purchase health insurance, she snarled, “Are you kidding?”
And today, when some pseudo-scholarat long-since-compromised Harvard says forcing you to get a Covid-19 vaccine against your will is authorized by the Constitution, few know how to answer him, because those few have been consigned to society’s margins.
By that time it will be too late, anyway. How far do you think you are going to get, trying to reasonabout what is or isn’t constitutional with men (maybe a few women) who have guns at your head (or this equivalent: either get the Covid-19 vaccine as an “immunity passport” or be refused readmission to the economy).
#4. Capitalism as it actually exists cannot deliver quality health care for all. This one will be tough for most of the freedom-minded, because they confuse freedom with capitalism as it actually exists, their minds paralyzed by a term used by Ayn Rand or Libertarian treatises by career academics. And they rely on a streamlined academic ideal that simply does not exist on a large scale anywhere.
Capitalism in the messy real world just means any political economy allowing — requiring — capital accumulation. Neither its founders nor its primary beneficiaries have ever been Libertarian intellectuals.
Regarding health care, the matter is really quite simple. People—corporate elites as well as masses—respond to incentives. In a materialist society and for moneyed interests, profit is the strongest incentive. Consumer spending generates profits. Saving does not. Hence the manufacture of incentives to spend (and the means), and penalties visited upon savers: inflation, low interest rates, etc., destroying the value of savings.
No one profits from a healthy population. Healthy people do not need to lavish huge sums of money on doctors, clinics, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurance policies, etc.; and other things being equal, probably would not.
A healthy population would render the cartel conveniently called Big Pharma obsolete. It would also quickly place Big Food in check.
Food corporations profit from adding mildly addictive flavor enhancers to already-unhealthy processed foods. This keeps unwitting consumers coming back.
The net result of bad food, pharmaceuticals for this or that invented malady —added to the stress-inducing lifestyle of the average employee or job seeker, the average entrepreneur, or even probably the average government bureaucrat during times like these—is the sickliest and most lethargic population in human history, suffering from obesity and its complications such as diabetes, cardiovascular problems, breathing disorders, mental illnesses, dementias, and so on. Not to mention alcoholism and substance abuse generally.
A lethargic population is an easily-controlled population. Corporations want this as much as governments. Libertarians and conservatives who believe otherwise are delusional.
I’ve elsewhere advocated Primary Prevention. I’m sometimes told, Primary Prevention is not profitable and hence not marketable. This is supposed to militate against it. What it militates against is a political economy that values profit, marketability, and spin over health.
#5. Evil and filth are very marketable. Back in 2005, columnist and author David Kupelian published a book entitled The Marketing of Evil. Every Libertarian, Austrian School economist, and some who self-identify as conservatives should read this book, which shows among other things how mass media (private corporations all) have furthered the agendas of abortionists, homosexual activists, gender-benders, and indeed all who profit from long term moral collapse — and how the online “free market” has made pornography the biggest money-making industry on the Internet (hundreds of millions per year!).
All you have to do to see live porn is attend a Miley Cyrus show.
Real musicians dare not give up their day jobs (if they have them).
Other entire industries have been bent to satisfy the most prurient tastes. Would-be participants do not choose this “freely.” What happens to the stand-up comic who does not fill his routines with sexual and scatological references? Short-attention-spanned audiences addicted to such things go elsewhere, and he goes back to driving a Uber. What happens to authors who try to pen thoughtful, nuanced essays — as opposed to short pieces of single-sentence paragraphs, lots of “white space,” written at a fifth grade level? You have to ask?
Libertarians love the idea of free markets, as I noted in passing above. Their Utopia is that of the world as a single, borderless marketplace where all exchanges are voluntary and no one ever coerces anyone else.
I doubt this would be possible even in a Christian civilization, but were Christianity the dominant worldview, our actual state of affairs would definitely be better.
If you disagree, consider the mindset that existed in the mid-1930s. With the country in the throes of the Great Depression, it was by any economic measure one of our worst hours. There were no jobs, there was no money, and people literally starved to death.
But listen to the big bands from that era. Upbeat, even cheerful and celebratory of life and love; in a word, optimistic. Communicating through music that better times were coming because ultimately God is in control.
In the 1930s, whatever its faults, we still had an essentially Christian civilization — outside, that is, the intellectual and highbrow journalistic centers that had embraced Darwinism, and artistic and literary ones that had embraced nihilism — materialism at the core of each.
No one in his right mind thinks we have a Christian civilization today. Not when churches are shuttered as “inessential” and one is even burned down for ignoring government-corporate stay-at-home policy, a message left reading: “Bet you stay home now you hypokrits [sic]!”
Given the present cultural mindset, I don’t believe the West will survive a Greater Depression.
#6. Socialism and Big Government are popular — but the elites are NOT socialists! Bernie Sanders openly promoted socialism. He would have won the 2016 Democratic Party nomination had the DNC not cheated for Hillary Clinton. The DNC elites weren’t about to allow Sanders in this go round, either. They would have backed Trump.
And like it or not, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now a heroine to her generation. Later millennials (those born in the 1990s) and Gen Z-ers (born since 9/11) love proposals like Universal Basic Income (UBI) and the Green New Deal.
They’ve turned against capitalism. Against, that is, the system encircling them, not an academic fairy tale no one has ever seen. The system encircling them has left them buried in student loan debt and forced into the low-wage “gig” economy.
Oligarchism resulted in Wall Street and Main Street becoming separate systems. So millennials see leviathan banks and other corporations prospering and driving the Dow into the stratosphere with stock buybacks while they struggle to survive. (More than a few Gen-Xers and Boomers such as myself see the same thing, trust me.)
Today, the masses wait on government stimulus checks—their livelihoods having been upended in the Great Coronavirus Hysteria of 2020, one might call it. Even Trump signed off on this. What else could he do?
The really unpleasant truth is that this is not heading toward socialism but what I call techno-feudalism. AOC and her crowd are — sadly — useful idiots.
Socialism purported to be about equitable distribution. Transnational elites or globalists don’t care about equitable distribution. They care about power.
Under techno-feudalism, for all practical purposes the masses will be property of their neo-feudal lords. They will be counted, ID’d, monitored, and “somatized” with ever-larger and faster interactive screens in the planned technocratic order.
Outside the providence of the elites, there will be little stability. There may be “gigs” although many of those will disappear with driverless vehicles. There may be UBI, although it won’t keep up with price inflation. Cash transactions will be eliminated. UBI won’t be handed out with no strings attached. Like much else, it will be used to control. Dissent from a dominant narrative and you risk being cut off.
The centerpiece of a techno-feudalist order will be a World Government that services global corporations, using whatever means are available (technological, psychological) to keep the masses pacified and obedient.
As far as I can tell, 2030 is now the target year. Most if not all the ideals listed in that document are pure fantasy, of course. A zero-poverty world is not achievable through globalist centralization. What will be achieved instead is slavery for all except the globalists and well-positioned technocrats and administrators, and perhaps a few designated entertainers.
The ground is presently being laid during “cautious” reopenings for myriad new controls on people and whichever small businesses survive the present calamity. Most, again out of fear (see #1 again), will accept the controls without question. They will not be removed and one thing will lead to another, as it always has.
Part 2 will appear Friday, 12th of June, 2020.
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E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
