It’s hard to believe that people are still taking the covid scam seriously. It’s long past time to ask what purpose covid is serving. In whose interests is the hoax being perpetrated and perpetuated? That is the question. However, an anterior question is, how is this happening? What is it about our political economy that allows this kind of fraud to gain traction and momentum? For this is simply the culmination of a culture of alienation.
A year ago, we were told that we were under attack from a virus that would destroy us and in the face of which we were powerless. All we could do was fear it, hide from it, and hand all political power over to a certain medical cabal. Above all, we learned that it was forbidden to ask questions of the covidists: those implementing an austerity program of unprecendented ruthlessness to combat the magic virus.
For a year now, the covidists have been hiding behind the media’s monotonously artificial questions, calculated to never address a pertinent fact. If you try to get politicians to stand responsible for their policies – even to justify nonsensical by-laws – you are stonewalled. They are afraid of questions and they are hiding from them. No one is responsible. Nothing makes sense.
Like most of the world, we in Ontario are living under a bogus state of emergency. But the fraud of an emergency gives the government an excuse to rule by executive order, authoritarian rule. Similarly, the War Measures Act relegated sweeping powers to the federal government during both world wars to rule by orders-in-council. Today, militaries all over the world are being deployed against their own populations by covidists. That explains why our militaries are, quite exceptionally, not waging war abroad for once. It also explains why the covid emergency cannot be lifted until the powerful have achieved their goals. Until this war is over. Until everyone of us has accepted or been forced into the Great Reset of which almost no one is aware, let alone understands or supports.
When the WHO announced the existence of a global pandemic on 11 March 2020, whichever politicians happened to be in office were invited to assume the role of dictator. Dictator over their own people, but subservient to the transnational elite, whom I will call, simply, the powerful. What happened to those who refused and who called out the pandemic as an obvious fraud?
In May 2020, President Nkurunziza of Burundi dismissed covid19 as nonsensical and expelled the WHO from the country. Several weeks later, he died suddenly of a heart attack. The Guardian and The Financial Times claimed that it was suspected that Nkurunziza had died of covid19, which would have made him the second victim in the country of eleven million. (Conspiracy theories are not only permitted, but run rife among the power-elite.) He was replaced as president by Evariste Ndayishimiye, who firmly committed the country to adopt all measures against the deadly disease. Ndayishimiye had supported President Nkurunziza’s covid policy up to that moment; however, he had a change of heart after his predecessor’s sudden demise. Afterwards, he warned Burundians that they would be treated as severely as sorcerers if they did not follow the repressive new protocols of testing, masking, and isolation … to start.
President Magufuli of Tanzania had his office send five samples to be tested by PCR for SARS-CoV-2. In fact, the samples were of goat, motor oil, papaya, quail, and jackfruit. When four of them were returned as positive for the magic virus and the other inconclusive, he banned the testing kits and called for an investigation. He also questioned the safety and efficacy of covid vaccines and, along with his health minister, announced that there were no plans to recommend their use in Tanzania. Mugufuli said that he would not allow Tanzanians to be used as guinea pigs for vaccine trials by manufacturers. He advised Tanzanians to not live in fear of an alleged virus, but to take common-sense precautions and focus on living healthy lives. Like Nkurunziza, he died of a heart attack.
“Betraying the electorate can make a democratically-elected politician unpopular; betraying the transnational capitalist class is often fatal.” I wrote that sentence in a manuscript that I submitted for peer-review at a university press. The observation was supported by the facts. However, the editor of the publication house quietly removed it from the final draft before sending it to me for approval. The manuscript was four-hundred pages, so it was only by chance that I noticed it was missing and had it reinstated before publication. It is usual for an editor to advise an author when proposing a change to a manuscript. This attempt to change my manuscript unilaterally, (while I alone would be accountable for the published text), was, in my judgement, disturbing. This was one of many experiences that taught me that academia was an arm of the powerful who rule the world. A source in defence of the contested statement at the source of this anecdote would be Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.
The pressure that the powerful exert on all arms of the power-elite is not always seen, but it is felt at all levels of the political economy. (Remember that the power-elite are those who work for the powerful: politicians, media, academics, doctors, celebrities, and police. These are the hired hands.) Those politicians who accepted the role of authoritarian leader have not been heart-attacked. They have lost all credibility with the critical-thinking elements of their electorates, but have saved their mortal skins. In the long run, they will wind up either in prison or working as lap dogs for the powerful, depending on whether we are able to stop this nightmare or cross the Rubicon into the Great Reset of 1984/Brave New World.
This present reflection is about authoritarians big and little. The big ones are easy to spot. They are the politicians who have accepted the role of implementing the nightmare that the powerful have been working towards for years. The authoritarians – Premier Ford, Mayor Crombie, Prime Minister Trudeau – follow orders. They keep themselves from getting heart-attacked. Not one of them stood for public office to fight for a vision of living a healthy life on a healthy planet. Then again, they would never have been elected on such a platform. At least, not here; not now.
The magic virus is the excuse for the present covid war. (It is a world war: World War Three. And it should have been easily predicted as the logical conclusion of the two previous world wars.) It is analogous to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, the pretext for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It turned out that Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Even if he had been stockpiling them, it could not have justified war. (Even if a SARS-CoV-2 virus had been isolated, sequenced, and shown to cause a unique disease, there is still no cause for war against all who are said to carry it.) Who was responsible for the invasion and destruction of Iraq? No one. The architects of the war were never held to account. We don’t even know who initially claimed that the weapons existed, beyond unnamed “experts” in the CIA. As is the case with war on the magic virus, all who questioned the weapons-of-mass-destruction thesis were silenced by the power-elite, with the media taking a leading role. This kind of excavation can be carried out for every invasion and intervention since World War Two.
No one is responsible in our political economy. We don’t know who is writing the policies that the power-elite in government are implementing. We can guess, but we don’t know. And, whoever they are, they don’t argue their cases in open forums. They are not responsible to anybody.
It is our undemocratic, representative form of governance that has led us to this sorry state. As we will see, democracy – in the Athenian sense – is a system in which everyone is responsible for their arguments and for the facts they assemble to arrive there. In our system of electoral politics, no one is responsible. No one is held to account. We have created a system in which everyone can evade responsibility for their positions. In the case of covidism, the power-elite isn’t even bothering to pretend to be coherent. And that doesn’t seem to be a problem for much of the population.
Under our current states of emergency, authoritarians have taken over governments around the world. Miriam-Webster defines authoritarianism as “a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people.” As we will see, it is easy to see how representative government has led to authoritarianism.
Authoritarians do not submit themselves to questions. Their orders are enforced without question. And the most ignorant, simple-minded elements of the population are their biggest supporters, for authoritarian is also defined as “blind submission to authority.” These are the little authoritarians that we all encounter every day. They enforce the mask mandates with vigour. They police social-distancing mandates among their neighbours. You will soon despair of debating facts with them. You will discover that they, like their authoritarian leaders, are ignorant of science, medicine, and law. They are intellectually immune. Their rise – voluntary, unremunerated, enthusiastic – in the present state of authoritarian rule is what disturbs me the most. In what follows, I am going to argue that authoritarians (big and little) have been nurtured by our system of representative government. There is nothing surprising here. And, I’m also going to argue that Athenian-style democracy would never have have allowed them the status they are now enjoying. In fact, as we will see at the end of this reflection, these authoritarians were called “idiots” in democratic Athens. Idiot was a precise term that described a citizen who was unwilling or unable to form an argument based on the facts and to defend it publicly. We have given our political economy over to idiots.
Let’s briefly review democratic Athens at its apex. (We will return to it later in the blog.) A citizen of Athens was responsible for his arguments. He had to grasp the facts of any proposed policy facing Athens. He needed to formulate an argument and then present it in the agora, the public space where all political debate took place. There, he had to defend his facts and arguments under the scrutiny of all other citizens. Athenians respected, and distinguished between, eloquence and argumentation: rhetoric and reasoning. This was Athens’ parliament. It was like a Speaker’s Corner, except that it was consequential and the core of the state’s political economy. There were no professional politicians in Athens; rather, every citizen was a politician. When it came time to determine a policy, after everyone had argued their cases, several citizens would be chosen at random, by lot, to sit on the council that would hear various arguments and decide whether or not to pass a proposed law. All citizens had equal standing in the political economy of Athens. While it was more complex, this quick sketch will serve us for the purpose of this blog. Remember, though, that citizens who declined the responsibilities of citizenship described here were labeled “idiots.”
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Throughout the Cold War, we in the capitalist camp were told that we were defending people everywhere from the threat of communism. All people had the inherent right to freedom. Democracy protected that right. We in the capitalist countries chose our governments. We voted them in and out of office. People who did not vote were not free. History had bequeathed to us the sacred duty to free the world from ignorance, poverty, and political oppression. Our “weapons” were democracy and capitalism. Were it not for ruthless tyrants, their corrupt regimes, and uneducated peoples, those would be the only weapons needed. Regrettably, we had to kill millions of people in order to liberate them.
We had liberated the world from fascism during the second world war. The heroes who had saved us were our parents and teachers and neighbours and journalists and politicians and writers and filmmakers and priests and business leaders. They were always looking over our shoulders, ready to euthanize any unwanted question. And, over their shoulders, an earlier generation hovered, having saved the world for, once again, democracy.
If you needed proof of the power of the electorate, you could look at the elation of political winners and the despair of those whom we had voted out of office. Elections were living proof of our freedom and our power. The engagement of the civilian population in the electoral process meant that the politicians and parties that vied to occupy government had their defenders everywhere. You could debate issues, but you could not question the system. Democracy was sacred. But when had it become sacred? How and why?
The current democratic system grew out of the struggles for political and economic power throughout Europe and North America during the eighteenth century. The French Revolution and the War of Independence that led to the creation of the United States were two important battlegrounds. The outcome of those struggles would determine who would govern, and how. What did the victors want? What were they fighting against? James Madison, in 1787, articulated the perspective of those who would eventually be honoured as the founding fathers of the modern world: “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
On both sides of the Atlantic, men like Madison with political and economic ambitions identified democracy as the greatest threat to their interests. Those with a classical education had read the Greek philosophers. Their reference for democracy was Athens where, in the sixth century BC, the people overthrew a corrupt oligarchy that was attempting to enslave them on the basis of their unpayable debts. Having liberated themselves from the oligarchs, they created a system in which it was the duty of each citizen to participate fully in political life. The subsequent ten generations of citizens (or demos) of Athens refined their democratic system of government. They identified different types of power and understood that some positions were best filled by drawing lots from among the population at large. (In fact, certain posts were occupied for only several hours, to eliminate the possibility of bribery.) A citizen could be a furniture maker one day and a legislator the next. It was the duty of every citizen to participate in the political life of the city. Politics was unlike other skills and disciplines that required special training because it affected everybody. Every citizen was also a politician, accountable for his positions and, potentially, responsible for passing laws. Those who refused to accept their civic responsibility (meaning the work that we today relegate to professional politicians) were called idiots.
Classical Athens looms large in any discussion of democracy, but human communities throughout history have created systems of self-governance. The history of imperialism and capitalism is the story of the destruction of all independent systems and their absorption into global capitalism. It is ironic that, during the Cold War, capitalist expansion was carried out in the name of democracy, whereas the goal was to eradicate self-governance. This apparent contradiction is resolved once we return to the Enlightenment to understand the struggles for power that resulted in representative electoral systems that we now call democracies. In the eighteenth century, the word “democrat” was used tactically to disqualify an opponent from public life. “Democrat” was to the age of revolutions what “communist” would be to the Cold War, “terrorist” was to the New World Order, and “antivaxxer” is today. Those in positions of power used it to disqualify and intimidate their opponents. Those who embraced it knew that they were the enemies of the elite. Over the centuries, that elite appropriated the label of their defeated enemies who fought and died for the lost cause of “democracy.” To make sense of the Cold War and what is happening today, in the context of covidism, we need first to understand the history of democracy, both the system and the word.
Historian Francis Dupuis-Déri has traced the history of the word “democracy” from its origins in ancient Greece to its mutations during the political and economic struggles that culminated in the establishment of representative governments in the United States and France and the rest of the Western world. Political scientist Bernard Manin has also explored how economic and political elites established representative governments to serve their interests in the eighteenth century. He traces the transformations of that system from its origins in which a small number of propertied electors chose their representatives, through the rise of political parties that established policy platforms, the expansion of the franchise, to the recent advent of celebrity democracy, whereby all attention is focused on the electability of the party leader. Throughout, both scholars show us that democracy was the last thing that the elites of England, France, and the United States wanted. (I add Canada to that list.) They knew that democracy was incompatible with their class ambitions. In fact, Athens terrified them, as did the peasants and workers who rose up to overthrow the corrupt feudal system and clear the way for them to seize power. That elite of merchants, bankers, jurists, manufacturers, administrators, and parliamentarians wanted to rid themselves of the old order, but without ceding anything to the people. (This would also be the goal of colonial elites seeking independence from imperial metropolitan centres, while maintaining their power in relation to the subordinate classes and Indigenous populations.) Their most effective tool was representative government, that we call democracy today. In the eighteenth century, however, no one confused representative, electoral government with democracy. In fact, they were defined against each other. So, how did “democracy” come to signify its opposite?
We do not need to return to classical Greece to study democracy. In the Middle Ages in Europe, monarchs and nobles did not interfere easily with life at the local level. In France, local assemblies dealt with all practical matters. Men and women from sixty percent of the households of villages sat on such assemblies. When important issues were being decided, participation was mandatory. Ten people were sufficient to constitute “a people” and form an assembly. Guilds controlled the production process, including the rights and obligations of producers. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monarchies evolved into states that developed strategies to redirect local resources to a central authority. Local assemblies resisted these attempts to control village life. Eventually, monarchs prohibited local assemblies and appointed their own representatives to rule. The people lost control of their communities to the new state apparatus. (Eventually, “a people” would come to mean “a nation,” subject to the same state that had destroyed the local assemblies.) In order to justify the usurpation of power, the new elite claimed that the assemblies were dangerous because they were controlled by the ignorant poor. The “people” had to be discredited as incapable of controlling their own communities. By the eighteenth century, the word democracy was used by the French elite to designate a slightly modified form of anarchy, invoking disorder. (In fact, anarchies have always been the most orderly of political systems.) By disparaging the peasants of Europe, the elite justified their rule over them; the same strategy was being pursued throughout the world. Amerindians were said to be savages (noble or ruthless) in need of tutelage, whereas they had governed themselves for untold generations. In fact, contemporary, sympathetic Europeans often remarked on the democratic practices of North American Amerindian nations. That tactic was repeated and reinforced throughout the Cold War as the capitalist, imperialist elite justified world conquest. The first step in cases of capitalist expansion during the Cold War was a propaganda assault on the targeted people. While the tactics and rhetoric varied, those who resisted the capitalist empire were always deficient. Now, anyone resisting covidism is an enemy of science, medicine, and the health and well-being of everybody.
Within the Western political discourse of the eighteenth century, the three pure forms of government were monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Aristotle and Cicero taught that a republic balanced the power of the three groups: the monarch should hold executive power, while there should be a senate for the aristocrats and a tribune of the people. It was the lower house that vexed the framers of the American constitution. And, across the Atlantic, the same problem confronted the new French power makers. In both cases, a new elite had taken advantage of the people’s rage against the corrupt monarchies of England and France to assume power in their place. But now, those elites were distancing themselves from the very people whose anger they had ridden to power. The people were ignorant, irrational, and dangerous. (The same miscreants question covidism two-and-a-half centuries later, except that they can come from any class.) Democracy was an impossible form of government, for the people needed to be led by their betters. And, on both sides of the Atlantic, the new rulers claimed that there existed a kind of “natural aristocracy” whose destiny was to govern lesser men. When the American colonies broke from the British Crown in 1776, Abigail Adams argued that the new independent administrations should institute female suffrage. Her husband, John Adams, responded that there would be no end to the demands of various groups for a voice in governance if women were allowed to vote: Amerindians, blacks, and the indebted plebes would also demand a say in government, which he took to be absurd at face value. At this point, founding fathers like Madison and Adams could not even imagine subordinate groups choosing their betters, let alone contributing within a democratic system.
In France and in the new American states, elites championed the idea of a republic as the most effective form of government. Not Greece, but Rome. They used the word democracy to signify the lower classes, the mass of the male population. A democracy, they said, referred to mob rule, not a system in which everyone shared responsibility for governance, as had been the case in Athens. The founding fathers wanted an aristocracy, not a democracy. Until the eighteenth century, elections had always been associated with an aristocracy. The elite had good reasons to fear the people who had fought to defeat King George III. In the American colonies, the people were heavily indebted. They wanted relief from those debts that were held by the new, “natural” aristocracy. They wanted to be free from debt while the elites wanted to be free of the British crown. Only the elites succeeded.
In France, the peasants wanted to be free of the corrupt aristocratic order but, more importantly, they wanted control of their harvests. Traditionally, the peasants had first claim on the grains that were sold at the local markets. The monarch, through his police, protected that right. The merchants, however, wanted to claim those harvests to trade on the international market. Without the king’s protection, the peasants lost their traditional rights to the fruits of their cultivation. The merchants, assuming their place among the “natural aristocracy,” amassed fortunes while the people starved. In both America and France, the new elites profited on the backs of the people who had overturned the old order. And, in both cases, the new rulers disparaged them as ignorant, superstitious, dangerous people who needed to be governed. The new republics not only excluded the majority of the population from government, but also distanced governance as far as possible from the people. As we have seen, this process began generations earlier in Europe when local assemblies were outlawed. Now, a small elite was taking power in the name of the republic. In America, the new elite created a federal level of government, the United States, that distanced the indebted people from the halls of power. This tendency to distance power from the people would continue until the present day in proportion to the wealth and power amassed by the natural aristocracy. Our question remains: how could all of this be accomplished in the name of democracy? When did the natural aristocracy become democratic? And what did that “democracy” mean?
The founding fathers of both France and the United States were explicit about their intentions. Representative government would keep power out of the hands of the people. The very act of voting confirms the subordinate role of the voter. You vote for somebody who is better than you, wiser, more capable of governing. In any case, the electorate was initially confined to a small group of propertied citizens: the mass of the people who had aspirations of freedom from debt was allowed nowhere near the vote. That is why the word “democracy” does not appear in either the Bill of Rights or the Constitution. It was a bad word. Slowly, throughout the nineteenth century, the word “democratic” came to be appropriated by aspiring politicians. The word referred to those who were left over once the natural aristocracy had assumed its place: the third and by far the largest of the political groupings identified by America’s founding fathers, the people. As the vote was extended to them in all of the Western countries, the system of representative government came to be called democracy by the natural aristocracy that increasingly understood that they had nothing to fear as long as the people voted them into power. For aspiring politicians, the game of politics was real and power was consequential. However, the class system would be consolidated through representative government, increasingly called democracy. In fact, this new “democracy” was the perfect cover for aristocratic rule. Regardless of which candidates assumed the actual seats in any level of government – the monarchy (presidency), aristocracy (the senate), and democracy (house of representatives) – the system had relegated the people (the demos) to the exercise of a franchise. They were to vote for their leaders and never participate in government. But the natural aristocracy would flatter the people that they had enormous power through the vote. Rather than see it as an act of submission, voters saw the vote as a sign of their status in society. Throughout all of the Western world, the franchise became the key political struggle for subordinate groups. Men without property, all women, racial minorities, Amerindians, and immigrants all fought for the right to vote. Nothing could have validated the vote more than the struggle to achieve it. However, as the franchise expanded, subordinate groups were in fact confirming their status as – in the language of democratic Athens – idiots. Eventually, anyone from any subordinate class could become a professional politician, as long as he or she accepted the role of natural aristocrat, a leader of voters. In reality, politicians have always been chosen by the powerful before the voters are allowed to elect them. Politicians are that part of the power-elite whose job is to control the state and all its legal apparatus in favour of the powerful. A wildcard like Trump (hardly a representative of the powerless) was far too dangerous for the powerful. However, his greatest sin was calling out the fake news of the mainstream media. They never expected him and couldn’t deal with his defiance.
The history of democracy shows us that intelligent and courageous people can devote their energies to causes that ultimately reinforce the world that they want to change. Those in power know when they are being threatened. And they know how to eliminate a threat. Democracy has not been a threat for two hundred years for the simple reason that it does not exist. In perverting the word democracy to mean representative government, the natural aristocracy colonized the minds of those who accepted the role of “natural followers.” Those who were not so easily co-opted have had to struggle not only against their victors, but against language itself. The elite has the ability to manipulate public discourse; an example of that power is the use of the word “elite” in this sentence to describe the natural aristocracy. Who chose the word “elite” for me to describe the class that is decimating the planet? It is said that the victors write history, but they also have an inordinate amount of power over the language that is available to write it.
The vote is defended most passionately by the middle class that has no power to influence the course of political economy. It has always filled an administrative position, doing the bidding of the powerful. However, it was flattered into believing that, through the vote, it was determining, not only domestic, but, global politics. It mistakenly believed that it was paying for military and developmental interventions through its taxes. In reality, the powerful has had critical control over everything, including what people believed to be true. Having accepted the concept of the “natural aristocracy,” rechristened democratic leaders, the population of voters looks to it for answers. And accepting the debate as framed by the power-elite is the necessary condition for entering its ranks. Still, you’re nowhere near the powerful, whose identities you’ll never know. Athenian citizens would never have been fooled. They would have called us all idiots.
So, before we go forward, let us go back. Imagine that the Enlightenment had laid the foundation for democratic systems of government. What if Athens, and not Rome, had inspired the modern world? Moreover, imagine that the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century had surpassed Athens in their commitment to democracy. The glaring weakness of Athens was that only free males could be citizens. Slaves and women were excluded from the responsibilities of citizenship. Such exclusions were self-imposed constraints on Athenian democracy. The principle of democracy need admit no exclusions. Imagine that citizenship had been defined in terms of the responsibility of all citizens to contribute to governance. In our actual system, subordinate groups that have achieved the vote continue to protest their exclusion from power. However, in a system in which key legislative positions were filled by lot, or randomly, the question of the political power of a segment of the population (or a segment of a segment) would no longer be relevant. (Watch identity politics disappear.) All social groups would have access to power in direct proportion to their actual numbers. Debates about whether the feminist movement is racist, homophobic, or sufficiently class conscious would be irrelevant in the context of a system where all citizens are equally likely to be called to serve and, in any case, are equally responsible for their positions. How much more difficult would it be to build an empire based on the racial subjugation of certain people abroad when the same racial group cannot be excluded from actual power at home? Would it be as easy to appropriate resources throughout the world in the face of the real political power of Indigenous peoples in North America? How much power could the business class accumulate when waged workers had legislative power commensurate with their actual numbers?
There can be enormous resistance to the principles of democracy among the citizens of Western representative systems. People who are proud to vote for their leaders often react aggressively to the claim that democracy actually implies the active participation of every citizen in governance. Not the vote, which abdicates power, but power itself. Not only power, but the accountability that accompanies it. Representative government has bred a legion of outraged voters who rail in impotence against politicians who they mistakenly assume are the powerful, rather than the power-elite who work for them. However, they are comfortable in their impotence. They vote for leaders that they hold in contempt. They never have to stand accountable for their vote. Or their anger. However, were every citizen potentially a legislator, then we could expect a more engaged and serious citizenry. In fact, in the present representative system, neither elected politicians nor the powerful, at whose pleasure they serve, are held to account for the consequences of their actions. No one is responsible. In a democracy, everyone is responsible.
Defenders of the current “democratic” system believe that the vote is a sacred duty. Typically, they respond to the notion that they could actually participate in governance in the manner of the Athenians as patently absurd. At the same time, they accept one of our continuities with ancient Greece: the jury system, in which citizens are chosen at random to judge important issues of law. It is assumed that, once informed of the issues, all citizens are capable of rendering a sound judgment. However, people vigorously oppose the same principle when it comes to passing the laws that they may be called upon to apply. A common retort is that people are too ignorant to be capable of governing. Which people do they have in mind. Themselves? Who specifically is too ignorant? Are they following John Adams who claimed that the idea of women voting was absurd? It would be fascinating to see the images conjured in the minds of those who claim that people are not fit to govern. How could people who are unfit to govern be fit to vote?
But the charge that the electorate is too ignorant to be trusted with the vote has more ominous implications. Who is responsible for an ignorant population? In fact, who is responsible for ignorant politicians? For ignorance? The natural aristocracy has the power to sanction favourable historical narratives and erase others. The academic and media arms of the power-elite explain current events. All in the service of the powerful for whom they work. The core problem is not an ignorant electorate, but a devious and ruthless ruling class, the natural aristocracy that I call the powerful. In any case, what difference does it make how educated and informed voters are if they have no power? More problematic is the issue of who is doing the educating. Whom do natural followers look to for leadership? The issue is power, not education.
The clearest and most concise description of the modus operandi of the power-elite in the democratic era comes from an aide to President George W. Bush. Journalist Ron Suskind quoted the aid as making a distinction between the reality-based community and historical actors. Reality-based people judiciously study facts to understand and inform. However, according to the aid, in conversation with Suskind, “’That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously – as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’” The aid was mistaken in believing that the methodology was unique to the Bush administration. He was describing how the power-elite earns its bread and saves its skin. The power-elite work for the powerful and, if they do their job, no one will ever know where the truth actually was. What we call “official” history is an infinite regression of invented realities. But Bush’s aid begs the question: how do inveterate liars know where the truth is? If they invent facts to justify their actions, based on the “invented realities” of their predecessors, what could “truth” possibly mean to them?
In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, 1984, Winston Smith is subsumed in a world of propaganda that will be immediately recognizable to critical analysts of covidism. The power-elite control all of the official channels of information. Everyone needs to believe the invented reality that serves Big Brother and that Big Brother serves. In fact, survival in 1984 depends upon extinguishing one’s capacity for critical thinking. But Winston Smith struggles heroically to maintain sovereignty over his mind, to retain that one place of freedom. Finally, Big Brother focuses all of his efforts to destroy the intellectual independence that Winston had so nobly protected. Until his spiritual death, Winston despaired for the future. Afterwards, Winston was left without any critical faculties, a true follower. Literally, beyond despair.
The loss of Winston’s soul is far more painful than his physical death could ever have been. We are all Winston Smith in the era of covidism.