Show is almost always better than tell. One small headline to start a Tuesday, one giant leap backwards for the species.
It’s an outstanding lulu: take two really normal, innocent everyday average damaged Royal people, get them interviewed on prime time by a woman famous largely for eating disorders, and then ask grown adults whose life is based on unreal pretence what they think.
We know the answer already, because almost every man-jack of them voted to put a cryogenic experiment in the White House, and so they will see Meghan Sparkle as a martyr to the cause of Black Jive Chatter, and Gingerbred as his mother’s son following in the long Spencer tradition of neurotic and self-destructive saccharine syrup.
It’s not what they think. They don’t think. But billions look up to famous people. That’s what we’re dealing with here: Blair’s children chucking gladioli at Diana’s hearse….when she wasn’t even in it.
Oprah Winfrey started in ‘reality television’ – the name itself is an inversion of all things genuine – and over time she has become just another famous-for-being-famous face selling lachrymose Reasons to Believe about other familiar faces who have very little interesting to say.
Over the last year, we have been offered multivariate Reasons to Believe: that benign is deadly, useless is essential, vaccination is immunisation, all cost/benefit analyses are Nazi eugenics, untested is safe, and control is not bullying.
Initially billed as “experts”, the media plaster the faces of these dissemblers everywhere until they become self-fulfilling – that is, another famous face and thus automatically worthy of our respect. Meghan Sussex is one of their number: she controls Harry, she bullies her staff and she wants revenge against all those unable to share her colour. But like all those Covid experts, her assertions are based on hearsay. Like Alastair Campbell throughout Brexit, she makes up lots of Good Lies.
Contrarianism based on empirical analysis is not only disappearing fast: it is being being bullied as never before in the history of Homo sapiens. And the single biggest factor enabling success in that process is information technology. This simple diagram acts as the framework from which to debate how the stampeding of a skatty Herd can be handled by just a few cowboys:
Eighty-five years ago, the Sovyet and the Nazi Party had radio and press for propaganda, limited phone-tapping technology and very few ‘bugs’ for snooping, plus only time-delayed censorship. But even with such bows and arrows, they had more than enough to strike fear through rumour – about concentration camps and gulags. Near-complete obedience was thus, even then, within their reach.
Look today at how things have changed. Goebbels had to nationalise the German media – but the current shower have willingly gone over to State PR (as Orwell would’ve said): bereft of money thanks to the www revolution, they’ve eschewed investigation in favour of distortion. Now they have a new set of rivals – the soi-disant social media and their vast bank of surveillance background to the pernicious work of GCHQ, the NSA, Eurocop and the ever-expanding French sureté.
Technology was always the focus of Twentieth Century anti-dystopian philosophers. They have been vindicated to an extent that only the pig-ignorant ideology Soldaten miss.
Censorship that once required an army of bureaucrats now requires little more than the index finger of one faceless, secretly ugly hobgoblin hovering over a button at Twitter, Facebook, The Daily Beast, the Guardian or the New York Times….the unaccountable, as it were, in pursuit of the unacceptable.
Surveillance? It has expanded beyond microphones to cameras, meters, emails, social media interaction, smart cards and supermarket loyalty schemes: in 2021, anyone who wants information can find out what you look like, when you shower, who you know, every opinion you express, where you are and what you eat.
They know everything about us, but we know nothing about them. There are four reasons for this: first, they’re devious chancers skilled in the art of credible mendacity; second, intermediaries like Winfrey (and their media bosses) helped sell them to us with near-zero critical faculty; third, techno-empowered secret servants of the State ensure all naysayers are demoted, deplatformed or otherwise silenced; and last but by no means least, respect for celebrity reduces most people to four-year olds who believe that one bloke with a white beard delivers presents to 7.8 billion homes in one night.
It is a reversion to the infantile religious belief systems of mediaeval serfs. We’ve had Covid in the role of Hell, Trump as the Devil, Biden as St Joseph du Sacré-Coeur, King Boris slaying the Barnier Serpent, Opah Klaus as the Tooth Fairy, Magic Macron in the role of Joan of Arc, and that slayer of the Infidel Islamophobes, Sadiq Khan. And needless to say, none of it is silly conspiracy theory. Perish the thought: for in the US, the UK, London and France, there is no Opposition.
It feels dark and lonely out there at times. The success of the charade seems assured: they have the power, the weaponry and the Belief. But defeatism is badly in need of a reality check. Pause for a moment every day from now on, and remember these probabilities in our favour:
- BoJo is already back-tracking on Lockdown exit, the Pharma loons are staying his hand again, and we’ve already had a Budget whose dire effects will become increasingly apparent
- Employers will cut back, wages will be static (see Nurses’ “reward”) and unemployment will get much higher very quickly
- Biden’s repressive spendaholism will encourage more violence and leave the Dollar open to challenge
- Both the Dow and the FTSE are ludicrously over-valued, and getting harder to control
- The switch to electronic money is being rushed and, once again, displaying zero awareness of cultural psychology
- Those aware of the utter nonsense that is Covid may be in the minority, but we are still talking about vast numbers of people: probably eight million in the UK and forty-five million in the States. That’s a lot of people outside the cage – and gradually realising the ineffectual dangers involved in “vaccines”
- The sociopaths, megalomaniacs and outright psychos will do what all such people do in the end: over-reach themselves through sheer overconfidence in themselves and detestation of the plebs. Once poverty starts to bite, a few journalists or MPs break ranks and frontline medics start to publish papers that can’t be ignored, the cracks will begin to appear.
The only option for people who accept our very real and present danger is to act as a catalyst in the process of élite self-destruction. In my opinion, the last thing any sort of Movement requires is either overt violence (that’s exactly what they want – an excuse for repression) or celebrity (they always get nobbled, and they always cave in) or indeed the goal of political power: for this last term has become a risible oxymoron.
What’s required here is not votes, but access to information media; not marches, but surprise nuisance value; not slavish chants, but sincerity that breeds sympathy; and not fulmination from the sofa, but rather foresight about the coming nightmare.
Above all, we need to be imaginative, unexpected, innovative, positive and persuasive. The governing classes in the West are not frightened enough. They do not fear violence: they fear only losing control of our minds.
Stay tuned.
The Slog 