Professor Thomas Harrington’s primary field of study is Hispanic culture and history, with a focus on Catalonian language, history and nationalism. One might suppose that such a person might not necessarily possess the perspicacity to see the treason of an entire class of experts from government, technology, business, medicine, and media. And yet he did: and from the very beginning of the Covid crisis. This book collects only part of his tremendously insightful observations from the beginning until recently.
Because I’ve come to know Tom as a friend, I have my own theory about what gave him such insight. With a deep knowledge of the life of a particular region and language group, he cultivated a keen insight into the difference between what is authentic and organic to a social order and what is exogenous and imposed by a ruling-class structure. He has a particular curiosity about the latter. His profound awareness of this power in operation in world events allowed him to see what so many others missed: namely he knew something was very off from the beginning.
He and I come from very different traditions of thought and yet we both came to the same conclusions at the same time though from different angles. My formation in economics trained me to marvel in the spontaneous orders of unplanned human interaction. His outlook trained him to sniff out and see the opposite: that which we take for granted which does not result from unplanned order but which is instead imposed and shaped by complex and interactively powerful forces that gain advantage from their invisibility. The combination of these two perspectives has made for a strong intellectual and personal bond, though I have to admit that his outlook has proven more fruitful for understanding the Covid crisis.
It’s to the eternal disgrace of so many elites in the political, economic, cultural, and academic world that so many participated in the “great reset” and, further, that so many who did not participate remained silent even as essential social, market, and cultural functioning was systematically dismantled by force with the full participation of the commanding heights of society.
It mortifies me as a libertarian that big business was such a willing executioner. Tom, as a decidedly left-leaning intellectual, was equally mortified to see the participation by academia and government in such destructive actions that were clearly designed to transfer wealth and power away from the social firmament to ruling-class overlords. It was a war of the ruling class against the people, and in nearly every country in the world, all in the guise of pathogenic control.
Being on the editorial end of Brownstone Institute’s operations, I can report my excitement when an essay by Tom arrives in my inbox. I know for certain that I will learn something new, be encouraged to turn the prism in a different direction and observe events and trends from a new perspective, and feel infused by the power of his mind and erudition that emanates from his spectacular writing talent. In so many ways, each essay is a gift. A full book of them is a windfall, and just what we need to understand what has happened to us and where to go from here.
I’m very proud to call Tom a colleague and thrilled that he chose Brownstone as his publisher. Prepare yourself for a real adventure, one that seems often more like fiction than reality. It is inconceivable that a book like this could have appeared only a few years ago. No one would have believed it if it had. But these are extraordinary times and they require extraordinary and brave minds to operate as tour guides, as with Dante and Virgil. The treason of experts has indeed landed us in very dark places but we can see our way out with the truths elucidated herein.
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