David Craig, on January 1st, 2023‘Happy’ New Year blog
(Sunday/ Monday/Tuesday blog)
Have we been living in an historical anomaly?
We tend to think of the times in which we live as being ‘normal’. But if we look at say the last 2,000 years of human civilisation, it’s only in the last 50 to 100 years that we’ve had anything resembling democracies in which there was the chance of a reasonable life for the majority of the population. So that’s just 5% of the last 2,000 years. Moreover, if you look across the world’s 7.8 billion population, I estimate (Fingerspitzengefühl as the Germans so elegantly call it) that only about one billion of these 7.8 billion live in countries with any pretence of being democratic and only about two billion of the world’s population have a chance of a reasonable life. Almost three quarters of people living today probably still have lives that Thomas Hobbes described over 500 years ago as “nasty, brutish and short”.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index more than a third of the world’s population live under authoritarian rule while just 6.4% (about 500 million) enjoy a full democracy. According to Freedom House: “A total of 60 countries suffered declines in democratic freedoms over the past year, while only 25 improved. Now about 38% of the global population live in Not Free countries, the highest proportion since 1997. Only about 20% now live in Free countries.”
In summary, throughout most of human history and in most of the world’s countries today, a tiny elite have managed to acquire a massive part of each country’s resources and they have used and continue to use corruption, force, fear, propaganda and religion to keep the majority of the population close to poverty and under authoritarian control.
Do most people accept totalitarianism?
I haven’t read Mattias Desmet’s 2022 book “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM”. After all, the hardcover version costs £17.49 on Amazon and the book is only 256 pages. Even the Kindle version costs £15.99, which is (IMHO) a total rip-off. My wonderful book “THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS” is 354 pages and the paperback only costs £7.99 while the ebook is only £3.99.
Though I guess Monsieur Desmet is much more intelligent than me so that’s why you have to pay so much for each of his words of wisdom.
I believe that in Mattias Desmet’s book which I refuse to buy due to its pricing, the author suggests that the way people reacted to the Sino/American lab-leaked Wuhan plague totalitarian lockdowns can be split into three groups:
- The mesmerised – who unquestioningly believed everything their rulers told them amount to about 30% of the population
- The compliers – A larger middle, perhaps half of citizenry, complies but is not mesmerised. They believed that the virus is hazardous and are persuaded that restrictions and vaccines are necessary.
- The dissidents – about 20% of the population questioned what they were being told and resisted the bombardment of pro-lockdown propaganda from prostituted supposed ‘scientists’, the politicians and mainstream media
Back to Orwell?
Godwin’s law, short for Godwin’s law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches. Similarly we can make a new law, we’ll call it Craig’s Law, which states that any discussion of democracy inevitably leads to mentioning Orwell’s book “1984”.
In “1984” Orwell warned:
I saw this adapted for the Sino/American lab-leaked plague totalitarian lockdowns:
and I have now adapted this for the coming Climate Change totalitarian lockdowns:
The new eco-totalitarianism
We’re already seeing our totalitarian future being imposed on us in the name of saving the planet. Efficient cheap gas boilers will soon be banned; efficient cheap petrol-fuelled cars will soon be banned; there are increasing environmental taxes on our energy; Oxford Council will soon be restricting how many times people can drive out of their designated living areas influenced by the “15-minute city” theory being pushed by the WEF; many other cities will soon be implementing similar WEF-inspired restrictions on their citizens; farmers in the Netherlands and New Zealand are being deliberately forced out of farming; the Dutch government plans to cut the country’s livestock by 30% forcing up the price of meant; fertilizer use is being restricted resulting in lower crop yields and thus rising food prices and so on.
But there are many more restrictions to come. We don’t know exactly how the new eco-totalitarianism will turn out. Obviously many more modern conveniences will (like gas boilers and petrol-fuelled cars) be banned for supposedly being harmful to the Earth’s climate. Other things considered to be contributing to non-existent Global Warming – meat and imported food for example – will be rationed probably by being taxed so much that most people can’t afford to buy them as often as they did in the past if at all. Perhaps we will all have ‘smart’ meters in our homes allowing our rulers to cut our electricity if they believe we are using too much or if their useless, bird- and bat-massacring wind turbines and equally unreliable solar panels can’t provide sufficient power to keep our lights on.
Our freedom to travel will be drastically curtailed, especially trips abroad. And already we’re seeing mainstream media articles blaming baby-boomers for the housing crisis and suggesting that the greedy baby-boomers should be pressured to downsize their homes after their children have grown up. Nobody in the mainstream media ever suggests that uncontrolled immigration may be the real cause for the accommodation shortage. So perhaps there will be new taxes on people who the authorities consider to be living in homes which the authorities decide are too large for them? Maybe there will even be a government-recommended number of square metres each person needs and anyone having more square metres per person than the official figure will be considered to be wasteful and harming the environment and thus will be landed with new taxes?
Whether the new eco-totalitarianism will reach as far as each person having a ‘carbon budget’ and being prevented from exceeding their carbon budget as described in Ross Clark’s satirical novel “THE DENIAL” is as yet unclear. However, if our new eco-totalitarianism does end with some form of carbon rationing for the masses, you can be sure that certain groups – politicians, media personalities, environmental scientists – will be exempt from any restrictions on their lives. Meanwhile the banks will all be running some kind of (very lucrative for them) carbon trading scheme enabling the richest to buy carbon credits freeing them from the regulations imposed on the 99% of us who will see limits put on how much we can buy, how large our homes can be, how much we can heat our homes and how much we can travel.
Totalitarianism is the norm – freedom was the exception
As with the Covid lockdowns, all these restrictions will supposedly be for our own good. And as we saw with the Covid lockdowns, most people will accept the new totalitarianism and only 20% or fewer will dare question our rulers’ motives and policies.
But we shouldn’t be surprised at how our rulers are using the imaginary Climate Crisis to take back any power and freedoms they conceded to us over the last 50 to 100 years under the guise of improving democracy. After all, totalitarianism has been the norm for most countries for most of human civilisation.
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It certainly looks like this is unfolding. I personally have just had a water smart meter imposed against all protests because Thames Water are classified as being in a particular bad drought zone. So i have no say and they are now in complete control of my water consumption.
I will be complaining all the way but it seems i must comply to save the planet. What a complete clown show this country is but this water melon strategy is a religion and a water meter has been deemed and i have as much chance of reversing it as i have by appealing to God.
All despite the inconvenient fact that its been pissing down for months and thames water are a corporate subjected to extreme financial engineering loaded with debt. Thames water has never seen a water issue that doesn’t require higher than inflation water bill rises. There whole debt laden model is based around lobbying government endlessly for higher bills so they can load up with more debt and pay huge payouts to their investors.
Aluminium foil makes a (poor but effective) Faraday cage if wrapped around the bloody thing.
You were thinking of packing in but this article is why you need to continue. I’m finding that GB News and TCW, as two examples, were different initially but they seem to be going over the same issues and not coming up with anything new, or ways to deal with the problems they are discussing. I think it is because, as you say, the last 50 years are the anomaly in human civilisation and also it does seem that a majority prefer an element of totalitarianism. The freedom people think they have is nothing more than Roman bread and circuses – state dependence and meaningless entertainment.
GB News fails repeatedly to get the people responsible for the problems to turn up to discuss them. Isn’t this an indication that we do not live in a democracy? It is just an illusion brought about by elections and universal suffrage. The London firework display even included political propaganda.
One anthropologist suggested that our period as hunter gatherers was the best of our existence, because all we had to do was collect enough food for the day and then we could just sit around the fire gossiping. It’s not an existence we would like to go back to, but we have exchanged it for mostly meaningless work and low pay for many people. But the other aspect of that period is that they had to live with huge risks and that is what we have lost with increasing knowledge. We think we can control everything and are extremely risk adverse. This makes us easier to control and to desire a more totalitarian existence.
I also read that the period when we effectively separated into controlling elites and the masses was about 12,000 years ago when agriculture started. As we became more efficient and produced more food, it enabled cities to be established and some people realised it was an easier life to control the excess food production than to do the hard labour of farming.
When you look at the earliest civilisations they were all based on slavery, including the ancient Greeks, regarded strangely as the cradle of democracy. The feudal period in Europe was very little different to slavery resulting in the Peasant Revolt. It is only when the masses cause problems for the elites that we get mentioned in history. Historians don’t write about the miserable lives of the masses because we really have never mattered. Overall wealth and major developments increased during the industrial revolution but it was still a hard and dangerous life of poverty for most people. Living in crowded cities brought health problems because of poor sanitation. Then we had the misery of two absolutely pointless world wars, but not for the elites who profited from them. The wars still go on because they generate wealth and increase the size of the state.
I tend to agree about Desmet. He seems to be cashing in on ideas that have been around for hundreds of years about crowd behaviour, but doesn’t provide answers to deal with it. There are free copies of older books on the topic available on the internet. I don’t understand why, at a time when education in the west is better than at any other time, many people don’t seem to have a clue about anything and don’t seem to have developed any analytical skills through education. They seem to be easily brainwashed into believing climate nonsense, frightened into lockdown and untested vaccines and now even the unbelievable idea of changing sex. I thought a belief in witchcraft was bad enough but we really have created our own hell on earth with the nonsense believed today.
The modern electronic world developed after the last war, because wars always result in new technology. But in my view the supposed wealth and improved living standards are all the result of debt from money printing. This started over a hundred years ago with the creation of central banks outside the control of governments, the development of international corporations influencing governments and the many NGOs. The politicians think they can control and grow the economy by allowing money printing but the result is accumulation of assets by the elites and accumulation of debt by taxpayers together with boom and bust cycles. The politicians think they are a part of natural business cycles, but they create them. We are effectively not wealthy at all because we don’t have enough wealth to pay off the debt. The elites now realise that money printing has come to an end and this is really what the WEF is telling us. They messed up and we, not the elites, have to pay the price, as always. We still have to find out what that is. Unlike the Peasant Revolt when nobody had much to lose, we now have a lot to lose, with or without a revolt.
I think through history this is the result of socialism in a wider sense of state control and our failure to accept responsibility. This effectively caused the failure of the Roman Empire although the idea of socialism was not known then. There was an interesting article on Mises Wire yesterday about authoritarianism which concluded: “We must resist the temptation to believe that a strong man can save us. We can only save ourselves. The modern West is characterized by laziness, frivolous spending, and living beyond one’s means. We must do the opposite. Working hard, living frugally, and saving money are solutions all people can adopt to protect themselves from the encroachments of authoritarianism.” The elites are clever. They have encouraged the idea of collective responsibility with the sate in control enough entertainment to take our minds off what they are doing and now they are in a position to take control of us.
Very good article. Even in the West I believe democracy has only been an illusion. We are brainwashed from birth, with bribes and threats, to accept that others know better. Our whole lives are about obeying rules. Of course some rules are essential to prevent chaos but many are utterly unnecessary. In addition to home, school and work there are many people who choose to belong to authoritarian religions, cults and the armed forces where their lives are mapped out for them. We adhere to social norms, in order to be accepted in the community, and join organisations, for pleasure, where there are a whole new bunch of rules. And, when something happens that people don’t like, the cry ‘Why doesn’t the Government dooo something?’ can be heard everywhere. The vast majority of the 20% of free thinkers are also kept in check by the knowledge of what happens to folk like Julian Assange and Tommy Robinson. Not only is Democracy an illusion so are Truth and Freedom. Sad.
Has anyone considered the concept of the 15 minute council, or indeed 15 minute councillor perhaps? You know, the council / councillor that doesn’t do what the electorate want them to do? They either comply or are evicted along with their ‘plans’ inside 15 mins?