There is a weird complacency in the comfortable middle class in this country that I believe is rooted in this country's experience of the 20th century. They don't see the slide into tyranny because they have been steeped in the belief that that is what happens in other countries and that we are somehow different. So fascism and communism swept continental Europe and we stood apart and fought against it - and won. We defeated the Nazis, the Berlin Wall eventually came down etc etc. Many people do not understand that we fall under the spell of tyrants just as easily as our continental cousins - we just haven't been tested yet. Except the covid madness did show that British people were quite capable of believing nonsense and turning in their neighbours to the authorities. Now our current regime is showing dangerous tendencies. The mask of reasonableness keeps slipping, showing a scary monster beneath. People are not sure....wait, what? Did you see? Can you believe? Hold on, is that....? We are on the brink. The next GE is the test. I for one am planning an escape route because I do not believe that my fellow countrymen are easily roused from their complacency - their smug belief that, we are not like that, that it couldn't happen here. The Reds are most definitely under the bed and pulling the covers off.
I'm so glad you agree. My 'comfortable middle class' friends think I've lost the plot, so I'm beginning to wonder if I'm overreacting, but I always think of the Jews in 1930's Germany convincing themselves that nothing could get too bad because Germany was the land of Beethoven and Goethe - it was civilised - and it was their home and they lived amongst friends.....
Yes, that sounds similar to AA conceptualising the 20th Century as the 'Boomer Truth Regime'. I suspect us humans are quite bad at recognising tyranny at home and good at post-hoc rationalising it away. I've read a few books of Stalin's Russia and people had a huge capacity to normalise and adapt to things we'd consider extreme.
I know its not your style, but the only thing missing is who is behind the overall drive through supra national organisations , like the UN 2030 Agenda which Starmer seems to be trying to force on the UK by 2029, because its not just the UK that is subject to these trends. It seems to prevalent through all western nations, albeit Trump may be 'the Mule', outside the plan.
The problem with planning an escape route is finding anywhere suitable that is not going down exactly the same path.
The problem here is the question of which is the dog and which is the tail. Are the supra-national organisations driving the agenda, or are governments driving their agenda through the super-national organisations they have created?
I know exactly what you mean about escape routes, but my sense is that things will collapse before we get to the point at which a genuine one world government is conceivable. There are too many different crises brewing, and they won't be solvable through globalised responses.
This is an important question, David, but in defence of James' take it is not obviously governments per se that are involved in establishing the key supranational agendas. I agree we have to question dog vs tail here, but the discourse that underpins the agendas that appear seems to be centred around the wealthy and powerful, which politicians only become by sucking up to the wealthy and powerful.
The conventional take from the dissident web, for instance, is that the WEF is a shadowy retreat for Bond villains, controlling global evil like SPECTRE sans secrecy. I rather suspect that what we have in the WEF is simply a conveniently arranged club for the rich and powerful that gives us an invaluable way of observing the banality of the ultrarich philosophy that is being inflicted upon us. The ever-salient Eugyppius' intermittent critique of WEF publications strongly suggests to me the WEF is doing us a favour by giving us a window onto power mediocrity.
This, as far as I can tell, is the reason that citizen democracy has been callously dismantled: it has become inconvenient to the 'untaxables', who anyway generally have no reason to be loyal to one state or another, and for whom a 'global governance' has been the state of affairs for quite some time. I am open to alternate readings here, but in the echelons of influence in what I sometimes mockingly call 'feudal capitalism', successful politicians must swear fealty, and it is not to their nation that they do so.
Great sidebar discussion, thanks for writing it both of you!
But while this is true "...this phenomenological presentation does allow us to identify a way forward for a political movement which wants to save us from our current predicament" there are so many people and organisations trying to exploit our existing predicament for their own purposes that the direction of the way forward is resisted and blunted.
A good non tyrannical government (ha!) would try to manage resistance to change to achieve a soft landing. As it stands the 'tyranny' will have to get a lot worse and more obvious before an effective way forward is recognised by enough people to make a difference. Unfortunately the ratchet of risk aversion, government largess, patronage and regulation is naturally contrived toward tyranny, eventually.
In as much as democracy makes a difference, vote for representatives who still embrace core liberal values – free speech, open inquiry, rational debate, private property and ideally smaller government. And hope that they are not too quickly corrupted by the tyranny ratchet.
I have been reading your letters for some time now and so moved by them I felt obligated to your support. Strange is it not, that sense that one should support someone whose well crafted words leave me feeling so completely homeless in modern Britain. The swelling sense of dread has been growing for a long time, like some fractal pattern that has been steadily doubling and it is now surely so large that the next doubling will be the last and with luck it result in some sort nationwide calamity those still here can start to rebuild. Hopefully.
It seems to me that there are two forces underpinning all of this. One is the simplistic conception of 'fairness' and 'kindness' which elevates those who contribute least as the most virtuous and deserving (a curious warping of Christian ideals). The other is fear of appearing déclassé for noticing how this works.
Why the “oppressive majority”? Don’t they have the right to say what they think? and who are you to decide what is rational? The point is Swiss citizens can tell their politicians to f—-k off - most of us cannot.
Sadly, no. Both the govt of Switzerland and the majority of the Swiss have caved in. There have been referenda with dreadul outcomes. If you want an alternative democracy, without political parties, where every vote counts and no vote is wasted, go to www.fuzzydemocracy.eu
Without media free of financial coercion, even electoral democracy fails.
Over the years Transition News from Switzerland (in German) has brought many examples of the oppressive majority there outvoting reason and individual freedoms in respect of the Plandemic and its measures.
every day life in Switzerland is full of control, thank you Big Banking. also (very broad sweep, but still) with all the high mountains surrounding it, the natural Swiss ecosystem makes for a fairly myopic outlook, it's not easy to look beyond the mountainous borders.
Great essay and much I concur with. Shared with friends who once voted for the current party tyrannising us, and are now trying to dream up the type of future state they would now prefer.
Yet another well argued polemic on the vicissitudes of governance and, as a fellow polemicist, my sense - and one that I share - is that it is founded upon an opinion that the imposition of authoritarian control mechanisms are unnecessary.
Humanity consists of a myriad of individuals whose perception of the world around them is formed by an indisputable individuality. No individual has ever reached this point in time and space by sharing exactly the same experience of existence as another individual.
That is the basis of human nature ie we may arrive at the same conclusion, in the form of agreement/disagreement, but such conclusion will never have been arrived at via exactly the same route. It provides a sense of having converged, but it is an illusion. It cannot be any other way.
So, humanity, being said myriad of individuals, must also continually struggle to come to terms with the knowledge that it must share existence with all those others it perceives as part and parcel of existence. In order to do so, each individual is forced to acknowledge the need to compromise on what we perceive as our optimum existence. However, compromise necessitates implicit trust that the compromise will be reciprocated and it is the increasing pace of that lack of trust which has always been utilised by those who seek to impose authoritarian control mechanisms. The following cut and paste from your article is highly pertinent :-
“A population in which people trust one another is one in which they permit one another to express themselves freely, safe in the knowledge that nobody will take undue offence. “
Accordingly, all forms of authoritarian governance cannot be anything other than a form of tyranny. Is that the result of the manner in which human nature will always be experienced ie the seeming inability to come to terms with the indisputable individuality? I find that to be a thoroughly pessimistic notion and one which is, most certainly, at the forefront of those who revel in the controlling influence of societal governance. For it to be otherwise, humanity must strive to become the best possible version of itself. That is the journey on which we are no longer being educated to embark. Instead, we are showered with the comforts and convenience of technological advance with its ability to engender narcissism and the sheer nothingness of the ‘bread and circuses’ which pass as mass entertainment.
I’m also extremely interested in establishing the actual source of that controlling influence and, like James Whelan, I don’t see national governments as being anything more than puppets who have attached themselves, willingly and naively, to the strings of the global ‘financial masters of the planet’. Those pulling the strings are the central bankers who control the flow of debt on which the global banking system now functions via decisions taken by totally unelected organisations such as the Bank of International Settlements and the developing BRICS nations.
Debt conveniently labelled as credit which is, of course, anything but credit. Credit is something which is provided on the basis that it can and will be repaid. Governments function on the basis of being provided with credit which everyone is increasingly aware never can/never will be repaid, but that, in the meantime, must be serviced by the payment of interest which now takes the form of taxation of those in receipt of the supposed beneficence of the actions of governments seeking to invoke acceptance of the citizenry of the tyrannical nature of governance!!!
One quibble: I'm not sure I agree that control flows from central bankers to politicians rather than the other way round. I think we will find this out again when the next big fiscal crisis hits. At that point, we may well find governments taking control of central banks in order to print money so as to meet liabilities. It will then be laid bare that ultimately power and authority are still invested in the political branches of the state and it is still able to exert them when in its interests to do so.
I continue to struggle to put flesh on the bones of my theory concerning the global controlling influence of what is still labelled as money and those who wield that power. I accept that national government can give the impression of being able to turn on the taps and hose down an economy with unlimited debt.
However, the power is surely with those holding the hose, not with those seeking to persuade the citizenry that the hosing is in their best interests?!! The only cost to the hosing, so far as the government is concerned, is the possible loss of influence come the next election. Those doing the hosing bear no cost. Indeed, increase in the receipt of interest - paid by the citizenry - is a spectacular bonus enjoyed by the tap turning hosing cabal.
I therefore remain unconvinced that politicians are in ultimate control. The hosing cabal are only too happy for the citizenry to turn their wrath upon the dancing puppets whilst raking in the interest on the proliferation of debt.
I always enjoy your engagement with classical political commentary David, and I'm disappointed that rather than a substantive response I have just nitpickery here - namely, homonym typos (something I am prone too myself). You have in the third paragraph "sewing discord" and later "sew discord", but as per Psalms 6:19 where we get this imagery, it is conventionally 'sowing discord'. It's dimly possible you are making some kind of point by intentionally choosing 'sewing' over 'sowing'... but I suspect homonym typos.
I believe your leadership idea needs a bracket saying (In a culture of Male dominance.). Raine Eisler in her book the Chalice and the Blade suggests-Dominator culture refers to a model of society where fear and force maintain rigid understandings of power and superiority within a hierarchical structure.
There is a weird complacency in the comfortable middle class in this country that I believe is rooted in this country's experience of the 20th century. They don't see the slide into tyranny because they have been steeped in the belief that that is what happens in other countries and that we are somehow different. So fascism and communism swept continental Europe and we stood apart and fought against it - and won. We defeated the Nazis, the Berlin Wall eventually came down etc etc. Many people do not understand that we fall under the spell of tyrants just as easily as our continental cousins - we just haven't been tested yet. Except the covid madness did show that British people were quite capable of believing nonsense and turning in their neighbours to the authorities. Now our current regime is showing dangerous tendencies. The mask of reasonableness keeps slipping, showing a scary monster beneath. People are not sure....wait, what? Did you see? Can you believe? Hold on, is that....? We are on the brink. The next GE is the test. I for one am planning an escape route because I do not believe that my fellow countrymen are easily roused from their complacency - their smug belief that, we are not like that, that it couldn't happen here. The Reds are most definitely under the bed and pulling the covers off.
I think only a fool would not be planning an escape route, quite frankly.
I'm so glad you agree. My 'comfortable middle class' friends think I've lost the plot, so I'm beginning to wonder if I'm overreacting, but I always think of the Jews in 1930's Germany convincing themselves that nothing could get too bad because Germany was the land of Beethoven and Goethe - it was civilised - and it was their home and they lived amongst friends.....
Yes, there's a feeling I have that things will fairly rapidly take a turn for the worse. We're in a bit of a boiling frog situation at the moment.
I consider people escaping to be cowards and traitors - no different from the people being imported over here.
In a battle, if you are outnumbered and outgunned, you can retreat or be slaughtered.
Yes, that sounds similar to AA conceptualising the 20th Century as the 'Boomer Truth Regime'. I suspect us humans are quite bad at recognising tyranny at home and good at post-hoc rationalising it away. I've read a few books of Stalin's Russia and people had a huge capacity to normalise and adapt to things we'd consider extreme.
Excellent article.
I know its not your style, but the only thing missing is who is behind the overall drive through supra national organisations , like the UN 2030 Agenda which Starmer seems to be trying to force on the UK by 2029, because its not just the UK that is subject to these trends. It seems to prevalent through all western nations, albeit Trump may be 'the Mule', outside the plan.
The problem with planning an escape route is finding anywhere suitable that is not going down exactly the same path.
The problem here is the question of which is the dog and which is the tail. Are the supra-national organisations driving the agenda, or are governments driving their agenda through the super-national organisations they have created?
I know exactly what you mean about escape routes, but my sense is that things will collapse before we get to the point at which a genuine one world government is conceivable. There are too many different crises brewing, and they won't be solvable through globalised responses.
This is an important question, David, but in defence of James' take it is not obviously governments per se that are involved in establishing the key supranational agendas. I agree we have to question dog vs tail here, but the discourse that underpins the agendas that appear seems to be centred around the wealthy and powerful, which politicians only become by sucking up to the wealthy and powerful.
The conventional take from the dissident web, for instance, is that the WEF is a shadowy retreat for Bond villains, controlling global evil like SPECTRE sans secrecy. I rather suspect that what we have in the WEF is simply a conveniently arranged club for the rich and powerful that gives us an invaluable way of observing the banality of the ultrarich philosophy that is being inflicted upon us. The ever-salient Eugyppius' intermittent critique of WEF publications strongly suggests to me the WEF is doing us a favour by giving us a window onto power mediocrity.
This, as far as I can tell, is the reason that citizen democracy has been callously dismantled: it has become inconvenient to the 'untaxables', who anyway generally have no reason to be loyal to one state or another, and for whom a 'global governance' has been the state of affairs for quite some time. I am open to alternate readings here, but in the echelons of influence in what I sometimes mockingly call 'feudal capitalism', successful politicians must swear fealty, and it is not to their nation that they do so.
Great sidebar discussion, thanks for writing it both of you!
Chris.
Yeah, I would broadly agree with the Eugyppius angle. Thanks for this comment.
A good thought provoking essay.
But while this is true "...this phenomenological presentation does allow us to identify a way forward for a political movement which wants to save us from our current predicament" there are so many people and organisations trying to exploit our existing predicament for their own purposes that the direction of the way forward is resisted and blunted.
A good non tyrannical government (ha!) would try to manage resistance to change to achieve a soft landing. As it stands the 'tyranny' will have to get a lot worse and more obvious before an effective way forward is recognised by enough people to make a difference. Unfortunately the ratchet of risk aversion, government largess, patronage and regulation is naturally contrived toward tyranny, eventually.
In as much as democracy makes a difference, vote for representatives who still embrace core liberal values – free speech, open inquiry, rational debate, private property and ideally smaller government. And hope that they are not too quickly corrupted by the tyranny ratchet.
I have been reading your letters for some time now and so moved by them I felt obligated to your support. Strange is it not, that sense that one should support someone whose well crafted words leave me feeling so completely homeless in modern Britain. The swelling sense of dread has been growing for a long time, like some fractal pattern that has been steadily doubling and it is now surely so large that the next doubling will be the last and with luck it result in some sort nationwide calamity those still here can start to rebuild. Hopefully.
Thanks, Adam. Sadly I can't disagree with your prognosis.
It seems to me that there are two forces underpinning all of this. One is the simplistic conception of 'fairness' and 'kindness' which elevates those who contribute least as the most virtuous and deserving (a curious warping of Christian ideals). The other is fear of appearing déclassé for noticing how this works.
Good points. A 'toxic' mix, to use a very overused word.
“Liberty is power, chopped in pieces.”
I think the answer is Switzerland, without the nosy neighbours 😂
Why the “oppressive majority”? Don’t they have the right to say what they think? and who are you to decide what is rational? The point is Swiss citizens can tell their politicians to f—-k off - most of us cannot.
Sadly, no. Both the govt of Switzerland and the majority of the Swiss have caved in. There have been referenda with dreadul outcomes. If you want an alternative democracy, without political parties, where every vote counts and no vote is wasted, go to www.fuzzydemocracy.eu
Without media free of financial coercion, even electoral democracy fails.
But the citizens still get the right to veto whatever the politicians decide. Not sure what you mean by “caved in”, or the “dreadful outcomes”.
Over the years Transition News from Switzerland (in German) has brought many examples of the oppressive majority there outvoting reason and individual freedoms in respect of the Plandemic and its measures.
every day life in Switzerland is full of control, thank you Big Banking. also (very broad sweep, but still) with all the high mountains surrounding it, the natural Swiss ecosystem makes for a fairly myopic outlook, it's not easy to look beyond the mountainous borders.
or strictly necessary 😂
hah, yeah, granted!
Great essay and much I concur with. Shared with friends who once voted for the current party tyrannising us, and are now trying to dream up the type of future state they would now prefer.
Peter Hitchens was right.
Yet another well argued polemic on the vicissitudes of governance and, as a fellow polemicist, my sense - and one that I share - is that it is founded upon an opinion that the imposition of authoritarian control mechanisms are unnecessary.
Humanity consists of a myriad of individuals whose perception of the world around them is formed by an indisputable individuality. No individual has ever reached this point in time and space by sharing exactly the same experience of existence as another individual.
That is the basis of human nature ie we may arrive at the same conclusion, in the form of agreement/disagreement, but such conclusion will never have been arrived at via exactly the same route. It provides a sense of having converged, but it is an illusion. It cannot be any other way.
So, humanity, being said myriad of individuals, must also continually struggle to come to terms with the knowledge that it must share existence with all those others it perceives as part and parcel of existence. In order to do so, each individual is forced to acknowledge the need to compromise on what we perceive as our optimum existence. However, compromise necessitates implicit trust that the compromise will be reciprocated and it is the increasing pace of that lack of trust which has always been utilised by those who seek to impose authoritarian control mechanisms. The following cut and paste from your article is highly pertinent :-
“A population in which people trust one another is one in which they permit one another to express themselves freely, safe in the knowledge that nobody will take undue offence. “
Accordingly, all forms of authoritarian governance cannot be anything other than a form of tyranny. Is that the result of the manner in which human nature will always be experienced ie the seeming inability to come to terms with the indisputable individuality? I find that to be a thoroughly pessimistic notion and one which is, most certainly, at the forefront of those who revel in the controlling influence of societal governance. For it to be otherwise, humanity must strive to become the best possible version of itself. That is the journey on which we are no longer being educated to embark. Instead, we are showered with the comforts and convenience of technological advance with its ability to engender narcissism and the sheer nothingness of the ‘bread and circuses’ which pass as mass entertainment.
I’m also extremely interested in establishing the actual source of that controlling influence and, like James Whelan, I don’t see national governments as being anything more than puppets who have attached themselves, willingly and naively, to the strings of the global ‘financial masters of the planet’. Those pulling the strings are the central bankers who control the flow of debt on which the global banking system now functions via decisions taken by totally unelected organisations such as the Bank of International Settlements and the developing BRICS nations.
Debt conveniently labelled as credit which is, of course, anything but credit. Credit is something which is provided on the basis that it can and will be repaid. Governments function on the basis of being provided with credit which everyone is increasingly aware never can/never will be repaid, but that, in the meantime, must be serviced by the payment of interest which now takes the form of taxation of those in receipt of the supposed beneficence of the actions of governments seeking to invoke acceptance of the citizenry of the tyrannical nature of governance!!!
One quibble: I'm not sure I agree that control flows from central bankers to politicians rather than the other way round. I think we will find this out again when the next big fiscal crisis hits. At that point, we may well find governments taking control of central banks in order to print money so as to meet liabilities. It will then be laid bare that ultimately power and authority are still invested in the political branches of the state and it is still able to exert them when in its interests to do so.
David, you may well be correct.
I continue to struggle to put flesh on the bones of my theory concerning the global controlling influence of what is still labelled as money and those who wield that power. I accept that national government can give the impression of being able to turn on the taps and hose down an economy with unlimited debt.
However, the power is surely with those holding the hose, not with those seeking to persuade the citizenry that the hosing is in their best interests?!! The only cost to the hosing, so far as the government is concerned, is the possible loss of influence come the next election. Those doing the hosing bear no cost. Indeed, increase in the receipt of interest - paid by the citizenry - is a spectacular bonus enjoyed by the tap turning hosing cabal.
I therefore remain unconvinced that politicians are in ultimate control. The hosing cabal are only too happy for the citizenry to turn their wrath upon the dancing puppets whilst raking in the interest on the proliferation of debt.
I always enjoy your engagement with classical political commentary David, and I'm disappointed that rather than a substantive response I have just nitpickery here - namely, homonym typos (something I am prone too myself). You have in the third paragraph "sewing discord" and later "sew discord", but as per Psalms 6:19 where we get this imagery, it is conventionally 'sowing discord'. It's dimly possible you are making some kind of point by intentionally choosing 'sewing' over 'sowing'... but I suspect homonym typos.
Stay wonderful,
Chris.
Gah! I obviously knew this, but somehow didn't manage to show it.
I believe your leadership idea needs a bracket saying (In a culture of Male dominance.). Raine Eisler in her book the Chalice and the Blade suggests-Dominator culture refers to a model of society where fear and force maintain rigid understandings of power and superiority within a hierarchical structure.