I want to offer two apparently random thoughts…then explain why they’re interdependent.
Most people of my baby-boomer vintage were brought up when we were all far less “well off” than we are today. My brother and I shared a bedroom until I was fourteen and he was eighteen. Until the age of eight, I was a firm Father Christmas believer….because up to that age, if your parents tell you that one ancient morbidly obese piss-artist rosey-cheeked bloke with an award-winning beard could zoom around 2.9 billion homes using only 2-stroke reindeer power in one night laden with a moving annual total of around 120 billion presents in a four-seater sleigh….well then obviously, it must be an eternal truth.
This is the magic of childhood: suspension of disbelief in favour of the warm comfort of miracles.
OK, second thought: by the time my age-group was at Grammar school level, it was time to put aside childish things. The future was going to be vastly improved by science: it would conquer everything from how to get a man back from outer space (1959) to how to hurl the enormous steel Starship Enterprise into the splitting of infinitives (1965) without worrying too much about e=mc2.
I wonder how many of you recall some of the predictions made in that far-off epoch? Electricity would all be free, we would all be bored by too much leisure time, desalination would solve the potable water problem, and in the Eagle comic, Dan Dare Pilot of the Future would do battle with an Alien Treen called The Mekon to sort everything out.
So great was the belief in science, when my brother took up his studies at Unitech, he was required to have a working knowledge of the Russian language – for it was “obvious” (was it not?) that Russia had the edge when it came to technotruth.
The future has arrived on schedule….complete with passengers from the past utterly baffled by what they find…..and yet, fully prepared to believe every word of the “science” forced down their throats as if they might be so many geese undergoing the gavage.
So what follows is an analysis of why this might well be.
I suspect that the desire for comfort certainty is in play here. And the key influences are parental and educational – as influenced by life experiences and their subsequent media consumption.
What our culture has lost is the transition via puberty from infanthood to adult responsibility.
We believe everything our parents tell us when very young. But in the 21st century, the vital transition from blind belief to grown-up philosophical investigation has been usurped by the ridiculous belief in Settled Science. Via this process, eternal infantile belief reigns supreme: a search for discovery becomes a desperate ideological definition of unshakeable absolute truth because all science must be known and mapped.
From roughly1952 until the Present Day we have consumed a diet of wonder drugs, medical miracles and toxic “cures” recommended to us at the same level of discernment as Santa and one red-nosed reindeer beaming light on the world….because the Welfare cod-science State has led far too many people to believe that new science must by definition mean progress. Hence the determination of Leftists to dub their beliefs progressive – that is, not mentally backward.
It’s not just Follow The Science for liberals…it’s follow our science, and all will be well…..because you see, it’s settled.
Yes, settled and yet progressive: timeless and yet ultra-modern, forever and yet always getting better. In a decisively settled sort of way.
So banish from your minds the ludicrously paranoid idea that science is being either reinvented or perverted, for as our once upon a time Prime Minister Doris Jobsdone once memorably remarked, “All these anti-vaxxers are just nuts”: Homo erectus at best, knuckle-dragging monkeys at worst.
Tony Blair summed this bonkers cognitive dissonance up unwittingly when he told the House of Commons, “Education is exactly the same as it always was, only better”.
The unbelievable made believable.
This need to believe the utterly incredible has, since the Baby-boomers in turn had children, grown to pandemic proportions because an entire generation of politicised teachers surgically removed all faith the kids had in their own empirical observations, replacing them with another kind of certainty called correct. Thus, nobody in Form 3B likes little Abigail whose skin is of a darker hue because we British are institutionally racist; the fact that Abi is a vindictive brat is neither here nor there. She is a victim, and we must apologise to her for the sins of our great-grandfathers. Abi accepts this as her birthright and demands that everyone Take the Knee. How to create a Social Monster, lesson 1.
“You can’t say that sort of thing today,” says Wayne. “S’roit,” agrees his significant Other, “in terdayss mult cultwal sy-ettee, thass a dibolokul libtee innit?” Estuary pc has permeated our society to an alarming and often hilarious degree.
Men can be Women. She’s can be They’s. Afro hairstyles are cultural appropriation, Japanese globalists wearing suits aren’t. Black lives matter, only white people are racist, diversity is strength, the EU is a force for good, only bad people voted for Brexit, Putin is mad, dying, a delusional megalomaniac and eats babies, Covid was a disease of the unvaccinated, herd immunity is achieved at around 35-40% but nobody is safe until everyone is vaccinated using a vaccine that very obviously does not stop the spread of infection…..this exercise in turning ‘is and isn’t’ upside down and inside out can (we now see) works on everyone who has been processed like some kind of frankfurter through our re-education system.
Early on during the last three years, it reached its ultimate apogee from Planet Earth by the creation of a claim of veritable genius: we’re following the science.
Here’s why I say “genius”: in the midst of all that cramming with politicised correctness, any real level of understood knowledge has been diluted beyond all use or recognition. My daughters both went to ‘good’ schools: they both have GCSE French, and neither of them can speak a word of it. A University student yelling slogans condemning the Brexit result was asked what the EU had given us: “Wull…er, de NHS fer one fing”, she answered proudly.
In a world where people struggle with the Seven times multiplication table and 63% of 18 year olds think whales are fish, the number of people who understand virology, levels of mask protection or the theory of lockdown transmission is positively homaeopathic. In such a context, Chris Whitty could stalk the editor of Science Magazine, claim he was following science – and get clean away with it.
We could use vaccines that offer neither immunity nor safety. We could shrug off 30-70 per cent increases in early death as completely normal. We could apply ‘death from Covid’ to deaths in reality caused by vaccine injury.
We can be absolutely certain about that, because it’s precisely what we tolerated and accepted. But above all, the genius lies in an implied smear of the 1in8 as not following science.
We were, as it happens, following our primary sense instincts. But in Hollywood, inside the BBC, on every page of The Guardian/New York Times/Washpost, in the Atlantic magazine, within the Brussels soi-disant elite, at the UN, at the World Health Organisation and among the muddled opportunists of Davos, instincts are Bad Karma, man – caveman stuff. And primary senses are so six millenniums ago, baby: they are Mr & Mrs Ug, worshipping fire, wall art about hunting and fear of the big cats’ cunning. Just simply toooo conservative……me Tarzan you Jane, and all that.
I’ve posted over and over again about the flight by our species from reality, from the sensory, from the natural – and from all things we are persuaded to fear – since the assumptions about science triumphed around the start of the 1980s.
Globalism was one of these assumptive “futures” – an invention of Ted Levitt quickly adopted by those doyens of opportunism, Saatchi & Saatchi – without a scintilla of evidence to support it on economic, fiscal or socio-anthropological bases. It has laid the basis for eternal war in all its guises, digitopia designed to steal honestly earned money, and destruction of capitalist wealth creation as a means of handing all power over the individual to the State.
Why am I writing about this? Because a whiff of overconfidence among the 1in8 is in the air…..purely on the basis of Covid having gone into neutral, not much happening on the Ukrainian front and a sensible scorpion putting Matt Hancock in hospital.
The banks have got their ducks in a row on digitopia, our education system is awful, the NHS is close to collapse, Hunt is running what’s left of the economy, Fishy Rishy is running the country, and not one of the questions we’d all like answers to has been asked (let alone answered) because Labour is a big part of the problem – a giant Fifth Column stretching all the way back to Dover, where the Gullibles are cheering on the arrival of every dinghy full of terror tourists.
A combination of long-term correctness compliance, captive media and infantile post- empirical beliefs has created divisive apathy alongside woeful ignorance. The idea that with ‘one more heave’ the Walls of Jericho will crumble into dust is risible. Big They has control of the weaponry, the surveillance technology, the mainstream media, the fear factors and – in the universal Smartphone – every distraction possible to hide the fact that the banks can steal our money, control our food supply, and make energy unaffordable.
And you think we’re winning?
When not trying to stop French banks from paying standing orders to globalist energy gangsters, John Ward potters about along the sea shores of Gambia, avoiding the sale of sea shells on the grounds that nobody wants them. As he potters, he ponders on the best way to invest money without the involvement of banking in any shape or form.
The Slog 