Fear and loathing on the road to having fewer nice things
Conspiracies about the WEF et al aren't real ... but something is definitely up
A word for our times ...
contumacy
[ kon-too-muh-see]
noun, plural con·tu·ma·cies
stubborn perverseness or rebelliousness; wilful and obstinate resistance or disobedience to authority.
Contumacy as an inevitable consequence of … things
I guess it was the internet that made contumacy into a popular lifestyle choice.
It's now cool to be contrarian. Anti-establishment. Heterodox. Insubordinate. To resist.
It's a façon d'être. A way of being. And also, self-evidently, often something of a conceit.
Reputations are made and careers built on rejecting doctrine. Modelling and encouraging contumacy is a business model now. So times are good for the pied pipers of Covid contrarianism, climate change deniers and those who weave grand unifying conspiracy theories in return for ad revenue.
But why?
Counter-intuitively, contumacy may represent a source of positive feelings, like hope, pride and reassurance when life is feeling kind of hollow and there's nothing nice to believe in, like heaven or a happy future of even greater abundance than we already enjoy.
It's also an understandable reaction to the authoritarian hectoring from an unelected self-appointed class of world guardians.
Who do we have to thank for this? For starters, that would be the targets of it...
"Good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding"
Albert Camus (from The Plague)
Many of us have grown weary and sceptical of the new aristocracy, who fly into places on their private jets to opine and chide, produce reports about coming catastrophe and what we must all go without to avert disaster. Everyone sees them doing nicely for themselves as they stentoriously prescribe what looks to a significant and growing minority like a miserable future.
As ever, it's all a hot mess of everyone having a point but preferring to retreat into their own fortified camps just to sneer at the other side.
You have to be rampantly pilled not to acknowledge that there are genuine issues arising for a planet with eight billion people and rapidly diminishing affordably accessible resources. Or rabidly optimistic to think that 25,000+ terrawatt-hours is doable indefinitely, without changing much except how you generate it.
But when those who bang on about all this are lacking in any kind of earned legitimacy it's hardly a surprise when people won't listen. The problem isn't that they're straight up lying. The problem is who they are and how they go about their self-appointed mission to save us all.
There is, of course, something that feels off about the likes of Klaus Schwab, the Davos attendees and all those 'thinkers' at the UN who are plotting their big ideas about how to build a brighter future for mankind. I feel it too. I really do.
Cards on the table.
I don't think that Klaus Schwab and all the other 'elites' who sit around figuring out what's going to be best for us are evil geniuses, conspiring to impose a life of servitude on the masses.
I mostly think they're bumbling, self-regarding silk stockings who lucked into well remunerated but essentially unproductive roles, mostly thanks to natal circumstances, posh educations, networking skills and the proliferation of a vast non-governmental leadership industrial complex. They come across like the priests of the Temples of Syrinx. But they aren’t all that.
It's frustrating, because these temples that irritate so many of us now were originally built for good reasons, since the first half of the 20th century was such a mess. I'm disinclined to condemn the motivations that led to this complex arising. Who wouldn't have invented the UN, back in 1945? Who wouldn't want a WHO to tackle malaria, TB or HIV on a planet-wide scale?
How strange, though, that these people who would seek to direct our lives are so detached from actual humanity and so catastrophically incompetent at their own reputation management.
Why, it's almost as if wisdom turns out not to be a default property of the highly educated and high status person.
My default assumption is that they're basically well-meaning (if largely self-serving), but so disconnected from reality that their contribution to any conversation about what 'good' looks like for the lives of most people is worthless. So completely tone deaf, in their detachment, that they're incapable of grasping how they might appear. Call me just a PR flack, if you wish, because that’s what I am. Here to tell you that perceptions often matter more than reality.
If Klaus Schwab was really interested in the common good he would retire from public life at this point and Davos would be cancelled forever. If you're doing more harm than good, and you care, that's what you do.
But it's doubtless fun to be them. Coming up with their 'big ideas' about the rest of us owning nothing and being happy, then sitting back and rolling their eyes at the ingratitude shown for these noble endeavours by people who think they're drinking the blood of children all day. They don't need blood-based refreshments. Haven't you seen the dinner menus for their 'sustainable' Annual Meeting?
The World Economic Forum seems deeply shit to me. Not because it's evil. Just shit in the way that most 'intellectual' group pursuits are shit. Self-importantly head-fucking questions that no one asked them to answer. Applying simplistic technocratic linear engineering solutions to intensely complex problems as if someone asked them to invent just another machine, but more efficient than the previous machine.
The existence of the World Economic Forum and its puerile tinkering with big directional policy arcs, while communicating its endeavours in unforgivably incompetent ways, is just a regrettable inevitability when actual philosophy is so out of fashion and you've got lots of clever people who misidentify their narcissistic impulses as some kind of intellectual noblesse oblige.
We're rich and clever. Look at the pieces of paper that say how cleverly we learned things when we were young. We are intellectuals and we have a duty. We owe it to the little people to grace them with our genius prescriptions for a beautiful future.
Bless them. The pointless fuckers. That's pretty much where I land on this.
In terms of value, this blob's most positive contribution to public wellbeing now is news copy, entertainment and sociable diversion for the subset of society who embrace contumacy as a way of life.
People who enjoy a nice get-together, resisting future enslavement, on the streets of charming towns like Oxford.
The inspiration for this meditation was a fascinating episode of the QAnon Anonymous show, reporting from a protest in Britain about '15 minute cities'. It's long. It's revealing. It's here, if you fancy it. Fortunately it's one of the free episodes and I promise you it's a keeper.
As one of the QAA crew interviews attendees a theme emerges.
The protesters can't really explain what's so bad about restricting car use in congested cities. They just know that this kind of thing is all part of a plot to enslave them. A big plot, which ultimately seeks to impose a worldwide government while taking all their nice things away.
We're not really talking swivel-eyed loons here. These are ordinary, reasonably normal sounding, mostly middle-aged, men and (especially, it seems) women who feel that something is afoot that they don't like. And so they've back-filled the vacuum in their ability to express this unease by regurgitating lots of dystopian speculations they found on the internet.
I can't get behind most of it. The stuff about adrenochrome. Or reducing the world population to 500 million, by forcing people to take mRNA vaccines. The plan to enslave everyone. It's all self-evidently fantastical and mostly only bothers me insofar as it gets in the way of what really does seem like a legitimate worry; the growing energy I sense among the priests for top-down control without democratic consultation.
You don't get where I am without knowing what it's like to have a modern ideologically liberal worldview
I was once in good standing as a member of the comfortable, educated classes - for whom most things about 21st century western liberal culture seem agreeable and wise. We reflexively mocked these kind of people. I did it all the time on Twitter, especially, but also in person as a social ritual with fellow members of the comfortable, educated class.
It was a while before I realised that the comfortable, educated classes - for whom most things about 21st century western liberal culture seem agreeable and wise - aren't always actually the sharpest tools in the box, though.
Like the WEF, we have a tendency to have no experience at all of the inconveniences experienced by other people in less comfortable positions from measures that are supposed to save the world.
We're the people who say things like 'I had a great pandemic' (I know, because I was always saying it). Tapping away on the laptop for a solid day fee and spending nothing on transport because the borders were closed, while couriers delivered lots of stuff to my door.
While not exactly identifying now as post-liberal, I do share much of the scepticism that seems to lead otherwise ok people into weird places, in search of a narrative that might make sense of why so many bad things happen on the watch of so-called 'elites'.
It's a curious feeling when you become 'post-partisan' and gradually see the madness. It's a frustrating feeling to see that these technocratic zealots are really bumbling, arrogant, solipsistic incompetents when people who sense that something is very 'off' default to regarding them as evil geniuses.
I too largely despise what this blob has become. It's just that I differ with the other haters on why.
My more conspiratorially-inclined comrades in distaste go straight to this interpretation:
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule"
H.L. Mencken (Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks)
Whereas I'm fairly confident that it's all a bit less exciting than that. So I lean more towards C.S. Lewis.
"Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
(God in the Dock: Essays on Theology)
See, also, the Great Awokening and the Brahmin left's mission to emancipate the nasty brutish commoners who think that women don’t have x and y chromosomes and that it's actual Nazism to believe that economic migrants from Albania aren't really refugees.
Even if the internet started it, it's really technocracy that begets contumacy
Who would ever have dreamed that technical know-how might be insufficient to reassure people that the best recommended courses of action are made with their interests at heart?
There's that meme about the passengers flying the plane. As if the only thing worth discussing about an air journey is which controls to operate and how, in order that the plan to fly from A to B is executed.
The flippant aha, so you'd get the plumber to take your tooth out then.
Because when people are sceptical about technical solutions to things they must be stupid.
But they noticed that the banks were blown up by people with all the know-how about how to make banks work and now they're told they won't have nice things because it will burn up the planet. The bankers made the banks work. It's just that they made the banks work for them. Which is the default assumption now, for every field of expertise.
It's not that they're right.
They are convinced that Covid vaccines are a 100% bad faith con to make money - at best - and a form of genocide, at worst. Neither of these things are remotely plausible.
It's that contumacy offers the reassurance that they aren't fooling you. And you're better than the sheeple. I see ‘proudly’ unvaccinated people on LinkedIn self-describe as 'pureblood'. They are not being ironic. Their pure bloodedness is now as much a part of their identity as a self-identified gender is for someone who thinks they were somehow wrongly identified as a girl or boy at birth.
Which is how the people who end up driving themselves nuts with conspiracies about world government and the people who think that every problem has a technological solution, inevitably involving control and manipulation of material reality, wind up deserving each other.
The learned are now priests and we are expected to naturally defer to them. And yet the learned are often really stupid, because they are learned in just one area.
Domain area knowledge is essential for effective functioning in all kinds of fields. Airline pilots and dentists are trivially obvious examples. But while domain area knowledge is necessary it is often not sufficient. Again, those people in Oxford know this, even if they are incapable of expressing it. Just as they know that 'experts' are curiously prone to feeling entitled to deference that is not earned and an impulse to impose their expertise in the form of control.
Person x is a fluid dynamics expert and she says that masks prevent the spread of Covid-19, therefore we should all wear masks is a classically weak technocratic argument, but appeals to a desire for control. It's about making people do what you think they should do.
Always beware of shoulds and musts on the basis of what experts in one narrow domain insist. The thought experiments to prove that fluid dynamics is not the domain to rely on for masking policy are too simple to waste space on here. But a similar case that's closer to my heart is worth outlining.
Intentionally created false information is a demand-led, not a supply-side issue - but try telling that to the priests in the emerging disinformation diagnosis and control complex.
It's one of my personal favourite examples of how the technocratic expert approach can be lamentably simplistic in its linearity.
Fake news is bad. Therefore we must stop the fake news. We are experts who know what disinformation and good information are and therefore you must appoint us to instruct you on which information is permitted to reach the public, so that they are not misinformed and then do bad things.
These experts might know a lot but they still rely just as much on their priors, their intuitions rather than evidence, as the people on whom they seek to impose their will.
It doesn't matter that there is next to no evidence for bad downstream effects for false information per se.1
Nor does it matter that there is evidence that many people who share 'fake news' know that it's 'fake news'. Like the Trump supporters in particular who were sharing stupid stories about things like the Pope endorsing their guy in 2016 knowing full well that it was nonsense. Fun nonsense that got Hillary supporters mad.
None of this pesky absence of evidence matters to them, because they are the experts and they feel that disinformation is bad and harmful and changes the minds of people who weren't already predisposed to thinking batshit crazy things.2
Just as those Oxford protesters suspect, there's always money to be made, self-interest to serve and control to be exerted when you outsource your policy-making to experts with domain area knowledge, but little wisdom.
It reminds me of the 'Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect', in which you find some news that you know to be bullshit, because you know some background, then turn the page and accept everything you see there - on which you have no background.
So, even though the conspiracy-minded folk believe some crazy stuff, I'm with them in their broader unease about those who seek to control us, who nobody ever gets the chance to vote into or out of their positions of influence.
The technocrats of the transnational non-governmental blob promise that everything would be fine as long as you'd do as you're told. Because we all love that, don't we. And the crazies look back at them, recognising something that just doesn't sit right, because the people in the blob just keep being wrong and dishonest and narrow in their thinking.
The biggest - but albeit understandable - mistake of the conspiracy-minded is to comfort themselves with the idea that the priests are genuinely evil. Because that's weirdly better than the reality, which is that they're the same incompetents who blew up the banks and said Saddam had WMDs and then moved on, without consequences.
The people who enjoy gathering together in places where local councils want to make car use a bit less convenient and talk about elites drinking children's blood and plotting to enslave all of humanity, are kind of driven there by the absence of any kind of serious conversation about what's really happening. The stuff that's much more beautifully articulated by people like Paul Kingsnorth in
and whoever writes the lovely than by me.The 'climate crisis' could be a good way of finding different ways to be. But, no. It must be 'solved'.
When you're watched over with infinite love and grace by an unassailable technocratic machine that counts meaning as nothing, it's impossible to counter its march with any argument. Because it just is. Meaning means nothing in the discourse. Riding our problems out is only ever sold to us in terms of what we'll have to give up.
And they’re surprised when it doesn’t go well.
I have little enthusiasm for the posturing represented by the UN's infamous Agenda 2030, not because I think that the 17 goals aren't worthy of pursuing, but because I do think that people are entitled to sign up or not sign up to them. Not to be signed up to them without consultation. The same goes for the WEF and its group 'thought leadership' masturbation sessions and reports. There's nothing inherently wrong that I sense in much of it, more the impression of goals being imposed by ... who, exactly? The threat of loss for you because we know best.
In their way, they are just as uni-dimensional in their thinking - albeit in a different way - as the people who say 'aha, plants and trees need CO2 so more CO2 is actually good for the environment'.
I wish both sides would stop this and start discussing it instead. But that would mean intelligent and courageous leaders daring to lead conversations and the absence of those is a whole other can of worms.
And it would also involve us thinking about how we are and how we could be. Questions that mean nothing to technocrats, or other ideologues. And we just aren't geared to thinking like that.
We should always distinguish between false information itself and incitement to violence. There's plenty of evidence that when false information is used to actively incite violence it leads to violent consequences. As we saw in Myanmar and elsewhere, stemming from activist behaviour on Facebook. It would be predictable here for the usual suspects to conflate the two, when they are separate.
Richard Hanania has a refreshing opinion this week on overblown fears around the inevitable proliferation of AI-driven 'deepfakes'. If you're one of those who believe that control of information is necessary for democracy itself his piece might offer some sober reassurance. It may seem flippant, but at this point I've found that a reliable rule of thumb is that if Charlie Warzel is worried about something that's a problem for him, not me. And, no, the Pope's fake coat was not about people believing stuff really, because this stuff is really about entertainment and mimetic stupidity.
Mike, This is an excellent, balanced piece in an area where there is virtually never any balance. Agrees with Eugyppius in many ways although drawn from a very different perspective. Many thanks.