This is the year of elections, with 50 (World Economic Forum), 64 (Time), or 80 (Guardian) countries and the EU going to the polls, accounting for almost half the world’s total population. The list includes the US and India, the world’s most powerful and populous democracies, respectively. The US presidential election is the most internationally consequential of all while, by sheer weight of numbers, India’s is the most awe-inspiring.
Is it time to disassemble sides and camps, to intermingle tribes, so we may think more critically and independently, build alliances to grapple with real and substantial challenges we share, challenges that get ignored while governments harm our health, waste our resources, order violence, and overreach their power and authority? Rulers and cartels, who have gotten paid all along, want us down in the street fighting each other. That way, they retain their power and keep getting paid…while nothing changes all that much.
What could we count on after lockdowns descended? Mainstream churches shuttered doors while the local AA meeting near my house met at a park in the winter. Another 12-step meeting met under a tree in the yard of the church in warm months and under a porch awning when it rained. Church bureaucracies ordered doors closed. What had happened to us? Yet, Amazon never stopped.
The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured. Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome. The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore.
Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched Read Journal Article
We recoil because we know that the appeal to self is corrosive to unit cohesion. We also know that promoting individual identity and self-actualization—focusing on what is different among us—fosters division. And yet we are repeatedly told that it’s precisely such “diversity”—not of thought, but of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation—that makes our nation prosperous and our military strong.
We’ve become, through a series of coercions and inducements forced on us by the government since 2001, and made banal through cult-like invocations and rituals, a nation of first-class “skimmers” there for the taking by anyone who feels like tossing us out into the encroaching waves of the deep blue sea.
For many years now, Ireland has been subject to a particularly intense cultural offensive. Why this should be so is an open question. It may be that Ireland is – or was, at least – more than usually culturally robust, an opportunity for the technocrats to really cut their teeth.
It will be jarring for many to hear a scientist speak with such certainty. It should be jarring. We are trained to present ideas with caution, as hypotheses in need of a test. But in this case I have tested the idea and I am as certain of this as I am of anything. We are being systematically blinded. It is the only explanation I have encountered that not only describes the present, but also, in my experience, predicts the future with all but perfect accuracy.
Looking back, Daniel Bell’s “end of ideology” seems more like an attempt to draw closed a green velvet curtain that was hiding something terrible, namely that we were gradually giving up citizen control of our societies to an elite that pretended to possess wisdom, judgment, and prudence to the point that the rest of us could do no better than to outsource our penchant for exercising freedom and democracy to them. Pull back that curtain and we find ignorance, institutional interest, fraud, graft, and a shocking lack of empathy.
In mid-November 2023, Australians for Science and Freedom held its inaugural conference under the banner ‘Progress through Science and Freedom’ on the campus of the University of New South Wales. ASF is a think tank launched in mid-2023 by myself and nearly a dozen like-minded professionals from different disciplines, all aghast at the travesties we witnessed during the Covid era.
This book, which is a collection of some articles I wrote for Brownstone Institute, is designed to help us talk about this issue. Lockdowns were the turning point in our lives, our societies, our culture, and affected everything from academia to education, to science, to media, to tech, and all the way down to demographics and our relationship to our professional and personal lives. It touched everything, turning what worked into something fundamentally broken and dysfunctional.
The old distinction between civilization and barbarism has taken on a new form in the 21st century. It is from within our own “civilized” culture that emerges an inversion of the concepts of civility and savagery. It is our professionals, our academics, our political leaders, and our journalists who most ignore the standards of rational discourse, who institutionalize hatred and incite division. Today, it is the elites who are the true barbarians among us.
