I have been trying to understand why it is that so many Westerners - especially in the Establishment, its servants and the intellectual-managerial classes and the mass media; embrace a whole raft of pro-totalitarian strategies and policies; and why they do so with such moralizing zeal.
This zeal can only partly be explained by the self-interest of wanting to grow the single global bureaucracy, and get jobs and status from it - because these people are overall as much in thrall to the evils and abuses of The System as everybody else.
So why do they want it to grow, why do they feel so positively about it? Why do they love Big Brother?
Why do so many such people believe with such passionate zeal in the nonsense of the Climate Change agenda? Why do so many of them regard the European Union (of all things!) as not just the best overall political option, but as absolutely vital to human well-being? Why do they - in sum - so much admire and trust, so rarely criticise, any 'global' agency, any bureaucracy or institution like the UN, WHO, EU, IPCC that merely espouses high sounding Leftist ideas (regardless of what they actually do, and fail to do).
This moralizing zeal has grown tremendously in Britain since the
pro-Brexit vote of 2016. Those who opposed Brexit with righteousness
are exactly the same people who want Global Agencies to implement a
comprehensive system of omni-surveillance and micro-control of 'Carbon'
production and sequestration, and implement a Global system of coercion
to replace current with 'sustainable' energy technologies. To accomplish
this they want the whole world, and (ultimately) every-body and every-thing in it, to come under control of a single,
central, purposive agency.
Why the passion? It is, I believe, driven by fear.
The Leftists, Warmists, Globalists want what they want because they regard world totalitarianism as the solution to those threats which they most fear.
The first fear is of war - because these are the same people who are 'pacifists', loud shouters for 'peace'; and pacifism was perhaps the first Western manifestation of this pro-totalitarian zeal.
Modern pacifists are not against use of coercive force (they approved bombing Syria and other Arab states - they approve the hundreds of assassinations by drone strikes, they approve Antifa violence against patriots, and aggression when practiced by the likes of Extinction Rebellion) - but pacifists want this force to be deployed by Global Agencies against the partisan wishes of (for example) Nation States, or groupings within them who oppose the totalitarian agenda - and thus (They believe) make war more likely.
They so much fear war that they actively desire an international totalitarian regime that (They believe) will make war impossible. If war is the single worst thing, then anything is better than war; and if you believe totalitarianism will stop war - this makes sense.
They now fear Global Warming; and they fear it so much that they want a global totalitarian system to ensure that it cannot happen. The same reasoning applies - 'anything is better than' the planet being consumed by flames (and that, exactly, is the image in Their minds now) - and if totalitarianism is what it takes - so be it...
They project their fear... They fear on-behalf-of the other*: the 'third world', Palestinians; 'minorities', of women, sexual revolutionaries, immigrants, whatever. They fear that 'people' will - if not restrained - attack and oppress all such persons.
Because they fear for The Other, their fear has no knowledge, no reason, no limit - and can never be assuaged. The Other's fear cannot be addressed (indeed it is imagined, not known) - the solution can only be impersonal. Because they fear for The Other; the only possible answer is external, mandatory, comprehensive.
They fear it, because ultimately they feel in themselves the impulse to do so. They therefore seek an im-personal solution, a final solution... A solution that must apply to everyone, everywhere, forever (because it is up-against Human Nature).
A system that works whatever the people who run it, despite the people: thus a total system, that covers all possible eventualities.
So... totalitarianism.
Here is my understanding:
In this Ahrimanic age, Western people fail to recognise evil when it is abstract and systemic, when it is impersonal, numerical, procedural. This is our Achilles Heel. Such evil is not just unrecognised, but regarded as good: hence the prevalence of, and increase in, value-inversion: virtue, beauty and truth are inverted - and sin (especially sexual), calculated ugliness and dishonesty are redefined (among those in-the-know, The Establishment) as 'the new good'.
This is why we have ended-up with a world of ever-expanding, ever-encroaching bureaucracy, a world in which all the individual bureaucracies are linking up to make a Single Master Bureaucracy (that is, totalitarianism). A world where our rulers and opinion-makers nearly all want nothing more than that this system be extended over the whole planet and into the smallest interstices of life.
If the global surveillance and control system were to be put into the hands of a World Emperor with absolute power, the problem would immediately be obvious.
But when the proposal is for a system - for laws and rules, for protocols and procedures, for decision-making by committees and with votes... If the personal, if human judgment and the need for individual goodness are rigorously excluded... Well then Western people cannot perceive the problem.
Mainstream Western Leftists assume - and so deeply that they are not aware of this assumption - that the impersonal is good when its objectives are good, that the impersonal cannot be evilbecause only persons can be evil. They assume that a system can be set up so that it must be good - if adhered to; indedd the only real problem is to ensure that people actually do what they system wants. Hence they regard totalitarianism as both necessary and good.
So, that is it. Our Establishment and ruling class want global totalitarianism essentially because they are in thrall to unexamined Ahrimanic assumptions concerning the nature of good and evil, and because they are prey to free-floating fears that have been moralistically inculcated by the media and authorities.
These are not obvious fears, these fears are insidious because they are inversions and speculations; they are threats as defined by a system which needs unreal hence insoluble threats in order to justify its own perpetual growth.
Real and immediate threats are in fact taboo - and regarded as 'extreme right wing' concerns and 'conspiracy theories' - especially that biggest and worst threat of all, which is precisely the global totalitarian bureaucratic system that the Establishment and its servants are working, on so many fronts simultaneously, to implement: everywhere, and for everything - forever.
*Note added: It is the projection of fear - that is, regarding oneself as fighting on behalf of 'others' which makes Leftism so zealous and labile. After all, to be selfish is so instinctive that we have various natural ways of recognising, compensating, limiting its effects (in ourselves and others). But once fear is projected onto 'the unknown other' it becomes both abstracted and fundamentally ignorant; and also presents itself as universally-altristic. Therefore projected fear is intrinsically (intoxicatingly!) self-righteous. Under such unnatural and artifical conditions working-on second-hand and speculative data; fear expands and spreads without limit or possibility of negative feedback. The resulting state of un-moored, delusional, moralising hysteria; is familiar to all who observe Leftists from a Christian perspective.
A very good analysis. Could this motivation of fear be the reason why women are so much more susceptible to leftist ideology and bureaucratic totalitarianism than men?
ReplyDelete@William, I think so. The standard female response to a Big Threat is to avoid thinking about it and to stop others from reminding her (by trying to silence them). I know, I feel the same thing myself sometimes. I hear a scary noise and have to overcome an impulse in myself *not* to turn around and see what it is.
ReplyDeleteBut this attitude is fatal when applied across a civilisation. Identifying and solving the real problems *requires* individual men to think about them. Big Brother Bureaucracy can't do it; it can only follow (or pretend to follow) procedure. If talk is censored then it all gets harder. And, as our host points out, giant bureaucracy grows according to its own evil logic, distracting us and itself with manufactured problems.
As the beloved disciple quotes Jesus: the devil is a liar and the father of lies. I think we are seeing a very general strategy of lying, as often as possible - as extremely as possible. The more falseness, the more it plays into the plans of evil.
ReplyDeleteLies spread, mutate, and multiply because what's to stop them? Lies are more alluring than truth and are only hindered when believing them gets you killed. (See my earlier comment on vegans, AIDS deniers, etc.)
ReplyDeleteRoman Catholicism arose in a world that was highly unforgiving of irresponsible behavior. Bad weather, crop failures, plagues, invading armies -- the Church gave people hope in desperate times. Whereas in today's world of carefree abundance, every religion evolves into modern progressive liberalism.
Another factor is that people invent and adopt fashionable beliefs because it shows that they care, but they really don't believe and don't care. Their children, however, raised on these beliefs from birth (looking at you, Greta), actually do believe them, and proceed to carry these beliefs to their logical conclusion.