THE CYCLOPIAN VIEW OF THE "COVID APOCALYPSE"

Not an IQ scanner, apparently.

by Colin Liddell

Thanks to Covid and the reaction to Covid, the World seems to be in something of a slow-motion car crash right now. 

Money machines around the World are going "brrrrrh," amassing increasingly huge amounts of future debt—and turbo-charging the crypto markets—while economies are being strangled to death by oppressive rules restricting travel, shopping, hospitality, and just living. 

Only a few big corporations that have pre-conditioned themselves to a dystopian hell-world of isolated pod people supplied by automated warehouses, seem to have benefited. 

And all because a new type of flu seems to be playing—rather gently—the part of Zarathustra's storm: 

“Many too many live and they hang on their branches much too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree! I wish preachers of speedy death would come! They would be the fitting storm and shakers of the trees of life!”

Yes, I can remember the big debates that used to be had about euthanasia and "assisted dying." Dr, Kevorkian, anyone?

But, already we see the problem. However much you may agree with the ideas contained in Nietzsche's passage—i.e. that too many people end up hanging onto life too long—this is no longer the sort of thing that you can easily discuss in a culture that has been intellectually gutted by social media, and a society, where cheap morality, boosted on the rising floodwaters of egalitarianism, anti-this-ism and anti-that-ism, has now gained a tyrannical stranglehold. 

David Cole over at Taki's has a good piece on the sort of people who are empowered by this toxic socio-moral environment. He mentions a certain foul-mouthed "public service" worker—a teacher—whose apparent "belief" in children's safety is the perfect "moral cover" for him to get paid for doing nothing, while also taking the moral high ground and shitting on other people from it:

Two weeks ago, Goldner made the local papers for a fracas that occurred in a Merrimack Valley Facebook foodies group. When a fellow member dared to question “the science” behind school closures, Goldner responded with all the dignity one expects of a 2021 American teacher:

"Yes you’re [sic] fucking asshole of a president lied to you and so now you don’t fucking believe that people are dying at a rate that surpasses 9/11 on a daily basis, and this was fucking preventable. But the number of deaths is reconstructible about 7 fucking ways but fucking morons won’t believe that, yes, people are fucking dying. And so more people die. Fuck you for killing people."

Cole then goes on to make the point that the problem is essentially between a kind of bigoted pseudo-scientific religiosity and the need for policy makers to make complex decisions, based on trade-offs that go beyond mere science.

People like Goldner are empowered by the present order simply because their interests align with those higher up. They all sip from the same chalice of pseudo-scientific religiosity and cheap morality, as it gives them the "whip hand" over their fellow citizens. It is easy to understand why someone like Goldner sees the benefits to himself in this. But the question is: "Why do those above him also see benefits in a system that, economically and politically, is untenable and has already caused massive long-term damage?"  

Most in the Dissident Right, including some voices on this site, perceive some sort of giant conspiracy to "Build Back Better" (bbb = 666), and create a new, globalised society, designed by Klaus Schwab; or simply to give us all poisonous vaccines in order to depopulate the planet in accordance with the Georgia Guidestones or some other "in plain site" totem of the coming Satanic order.

But not only is such a narrative dis-empowering—because what hope could we possibly have against monolithic global elites united in their quest for our degradation or destruction?—it is also based on poor factual analysis of reality.

The reason governments tend to over-apply the lock-down strategy—which is the problem in a nutshell—is because of the increasing complexity of our societies. 

This is then combined with the relative and actual decline in the intelligence of our leadership groups. Yes, the problem is not the growing power of our "evil elites," but instead their increasing stupidity and weakness. 

I could point to the long-running decline in IQ in advanced societies since the late-Victorian period, and I could also point to changes in political culture that mean more of a politician's "intellectual capital" is expended in merely achieving and maintaining his position. But it is simply enough to point to the greater complexities created by our globalised, technologised, multi-cultural world to make this point.

This means that, for those at the top, it is easier than ever before to make serious mistakes. This is why they don't even go there. Instead, they defer to narrowly-focused experts and technocrats, who may well know most of what is known about virology, particular viruses, and how to crash the R-number of infection, but whose remit is not to concern themselves with the wider socio-economic factors.

The politician, whose job it is to concern himself with such factors, increasingly has a reluctance to do so. 

To make complex decisions based on trade-offs, one had to have a wide focus and a relatively deep one, but this stretching of the area of required expertise, combined with the fall in the mental quality of the ruling class, turns our leaders into effective idiots. Their main concern thus becomes how to avoid their own idiocy, at least in the political sense of being blamed for mistakes and failures. 

Much easier than avoiding actual mistakes and failures, which requires real intelligence, is to hide behind the moral shield of cheap morality and stab away with the long, narrow lance of "expert advice." If you hit the wrong target, as you surely will, you can simply say "I was only following expert advice," an interesting inversion of the low-ranking Nazi's old excuse of "I was only following orders."

This is exactly what we see politicians in many countries doing, while all around them economies collapse, debt soars, and lives are ruined, wasted, and stunted. What we are seeing is not the Satanic strength and power of "evil elites," but instead the revelation of the timorous nature of our ruling classes, as well as their internal sense that they are worthless and only there on the ignorance and sufferance of the people they incompetently rule over.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.