Two Temperaments and the New Slavery
Pragmatic and Utopian Visions
Societal Self-Destruction. Societal self-destruction seems to occur in the West at roughly 100-year intervals. We're in one of those episodes now (August 2022), with America leading the way. Rather suddenly, numerous societal choices were made that predictably, and then demonstratively, caused substantial harm without any benefit. An international cabal of mad scientists using taxpayer funds designed and produced a human-transmissable virus, allegedly for defensive reasons. But in bio-warfare research, defense and offense are indistinguishable. Whether release of this pathogen was intentional or accidental is not clear, though careless bio-safety practices known to exist at the now-famous Wuhan lab made release inevitable. Many biologists warned of just such an eventuality, and the Gates Foundation among others conducted dress-rehearsals for preparedness. Nevertheless an extended panic ensued, to which Western society responded with policies extending fear and panic indefinitely into the future. This response featured an untested, experimental genetic drug designed to bypass the body's immune system and cause it to produce billions of the selfsame particle -- the spike protein -- that the virus itself uses to bind to cells. The ostensible purpose was to generate antibodies in the manner of prior vaccines, but it also generated blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, and deaths in numbers that would have removed prior vaccines from clinical usage. And it didn't prevent infection by or transmission of the virus. Nor could mass house-arrests, and restrictions on public and private gatherings prevent airborne transmission of a 50-nanometer (.0005 mm)-sized particle. Many of these consequences were known in advance, or considered likely, by experts and public health officials, and knowledge of them slowly dribbled out to the general public since then. Why those who knew, and those with responsibility for protecting public health and safety, and eventually all who accepted such manifestly harmful choices did so, can only be attributed to a collective societal self-destruction.
The same year this engineered pathogen was released, 2020, saw riots, assaults, burning, and looting continuously for six months, on a scale previously unknown in America. Local elected officials, as if on cue, gave the rioters carte blanche by reducing police presence and announcing a holiday from enforcement of basic laws meant to protect public safety. Wealthy people such as George Soros, operating through nonprofit (untaxed) networks, channeled hundreds of millions of Dollars to help violent criminals escape prosecution. Universities, schools, and media churned out stories contrived to maximize every brand of inter-group conflict. They fabricated new identities, reifying them with genital-mutilation surgery, to discourage and de-legitimize family formation. Banks and stock investors stripped manufacturers of industrial know-how by exporting jobs in the years leading up to 2017, then recently started enforcing social-credit-style ESG (environmental, social, governance) conditions on access to corporate borrowing. Energy independence, a vital element of national sovereignty, attained in 2018 after a 44-year struggle, was sacrificed to a fantasy of 'sustainable' energy sold to a credulous public.
The New Plantation Owners. The Civil War of 1861 - 65 began with a dispute that was literally written into the U.S. Constitution, a compromise between free and slave States that could no longer be compromised when the Western States were added. Lincoln himself proposed retaining the Fugitive Slave Act in an effort to mollify the slave States, to no avail. The dispute ended only with the military defeat of the plantation owners, who would have been unable to extend their slaveholding system of cotton growing to the Great Plains anyway. Today another set of plantation owners, the tech oligarchs and their hand-in-glove associates among government spies, mass-surveillance, and cognitive-warfare operators, seek total control of our behavior, thought, money, travel, health, and life itself. The end in view, not yet achieved, though articulated as a goal by groups such as the World Economic Forum, is for everyone to serve this system -- in effect, to enslave everyone except the very few self-appointed experts and officials in charge who think they know what's best for humanity.
'But this doesn't feel like slavery', I hear some of you protesting. 'With these wonderful gadgets I can do everything on-line -- buy stuff, learn more than I ever could at school, watch movies, book travel, navigate strange places, get health advice, browse through practically all the world's libraries and museums, share cool info with friends around the world. And so much more. I couldn't live without my mobile phone and computer.' Precisely the point. Virtual and material reality have switched places. We are fast approaching the time when we will spend more time on-line than off, if not already there now. Virtual reality is poised to claim more of our emotional attention than real people do. A few people, still a tiny minority, have marital relations with robots who are highly attuned to their needs, wishes, and fantasies. As for the more standard gadgets, they are undeniably convenient. They vastly expand the scope of what one person alone can accomplish, the range of his acquaintanceship, and the audience for the free expression of his mind.
Oops -- not so fast. Say or write the wrong thing, and you will be canceled, your 'free' expression censored, down-ranked, or deleted entirely. What's the wrong thing? Anything the government of the day deems against its interest. Not the national interest, or the common good, but the specific interests of current occupants of official positions in retaining those positions. As we now know, government agents explicitly instruct social media on whom and what to censor. In recent years, unflattering remarks on vaccine orthodoxy, the 2020 election, the 'woke' agenda, etc. have triggered the wrath of censors. The constantly shifting ground of what is and is not permitted pushes users to censor their own thoughts, in an effort to guess the limits of what's acceptable. Thus is slavery advanced inch by inch.
The first test of the global plantation was the coronavirus 'plandemic', as it is often called. It involved several concurrent experiments. The medical experiment, the first-ever clinical trial of an untested drug on the uninformed global populace, was designed to test the safety and efficacy of the new mRNA technology. Though scheduled to continue through October 2023, the answers are already clear: The mRNA technology is both unsafe and ineffective. A second experiment involved the engineering of consent through a massive multi-tiered campaign of fear and social pressure, or cognitive warfare. This was moderately successful, as it obtained the cooperation or passive acquiescence of about two-thirds of the global population. A third experiment involved the use of tracking apps to enforce compliance with restrictions on travel. All of these experiments tested the limits of on-line coercion, the ability to enforce compliance with instructions issued without previously recognized authority. These experiments could be considered successful if anyone complied. In fact, rates of compliance were about 50 percent, reinforced by threats of job loss and social pressure. The results are undoubtedly being sifted to improve messaging and coercive practices, so as to increase rates of compliance with future diktats.
Our hypothetical user might acknowledge a certain loss of freedom, but accept it as required by emergency conditions. Perhaps it still doesn't feel like slavery, since the work to be performed under compulsion doesn't involve much effort, and besides it's characterized as for 'one's own good' and that of society. The work involves nothing more than passive acquiescence to a medical and social experiment. The key feature of the experiment, considered in terms of the freedom/slavery continuum, is lack of consent. If large numbers of people can be induced or coerced into complying without understanding their role as experimental subjects, then what would otherwise be a serious impediment to further extensions of arbitrary authority, and more overt enslavement, is effectively neutralized. The enslavement underway today is still a work-in-progress neither complete nor unstoppable.
Pragmatic and Utopian Visions. Like the causes of the 1861 - 65 Civil War, the causes of the current conflict are immanent in two opposing temperaments or visions of the future that have become integrated into the structure of American society. (These two visions are not enshrined in the Constitution or in any other written document, but are ways of perceiving the world and and acting in it that are second-nature to their beholders.) Both of these visions have deep roots in American philosophical traditions. One vision is pragmatic yet instinctual, empirical, focused on learning from experience, skeptical of ideology and general principles, and favors adjusting action according to observed results. This vision is associated with Charles Sanders Pierce and William James, and with Midwestern business, industrial, and farming practices. Another vision is utopian, abstract, experimental, expansive, innovative, disruptive, change-oriented, and disinclined to consider the mere existence of current practices as an argument in their favor. This vision is associated with objective, scientific, and statistical analyses deriving their rationale from (purported) independence from personal preferences. It is typically favored by academics and professional experts in specialized disciplines remote from everyday affairs.
Both visions are touched by ideologies, each in its own way. The pragmatic vision is inherently conservative, wary of innovation, lest abandonment of traditional practices and arrangements lead to chaos. The utopian vision is particularly receptive to all-encompassing systems that seem to make sense of a wide variety of phenomena. It is also inclined to grant more salient reality to aspirational ideals than to existing arrangements.
It might seem odd that different styles of mind would bring an entire society to the brink of civil war, but for the fact that these different styles are built into organizational structures and career paths. Business, as practiced in a competitive market system, is preeminently a pragmatic, seat-of-the-pants endeavor. Success rewards those who are adept at designing, making, and marketing profitable products and services preferred by customers. Successful enterprises are thus composed of people who think and act pragmatically. Likewise the academic or scientific style of mind is built into the vast structure of higher education which is intertwined with government through research grants, careers, and a proliferating array of conditions and enforcement mechanisms attached to government funding. There, success rewards the acquisition of specialized expertise, and the ability to leverage it to grow organizational responsibilities and budgets. People whose styles of mind match these requirements join these organizations. So the existence of radically different types of people, very much at odds with each other in their ways of thinking and acting, and in their perceptions of what is best for the overall society, is no accident.
Making Work Less Fateful. Add to this the nearly total congruence of self-esteem and work, due to the de-legitimization of family life that has occurred, and the atrophy of private life in general due to mass surveillance, and careers become far more fateful. Not only livelihood, but self-esteem and moral status, have gotten wrapped-up in work to a greater degree than when alternate sources of validation were available. Family life, friendships, cultural pursuits, sports, recreation were once places of refuge for those lacking the requisite talents. Such 'off-site' activities have become peripheral. Work identities matter so much now that the mere threat of job loss is enough to compel injection of an untested, experimental drug with significant risk of death, disability, and immune-system damage.
Because ideologies have infiltrated both the pragmatic and utopian visions of the future, conflict has become intractable. But this is all a misunderstanding. Work does not have to be so fateful. If self-esteem and virtue could again be found in other endeavors besides work, the death-grip of ideology could be pried loose from the pragmatic and utopian visions. Those visions, and others, could be freed to populate the endeavors they are best suited for. The cycle of individual and societal self-destruction would be broken. And peace would reign in the land. For a while, anyway.