Making sense of the pandemic situation
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’
When a society depletes its moral capital, we witness a Tower of Babel type situation; a cacophony of voices without any rhythm or common tune. ‘Treachery’ is on everyone’s lips; the enemy is seen as residing within. Religions factionalise, civil wars erupt.
The only thing keeping our post-religious Western sphere together is the animus of a cold civil war. The promises of the Enlightenment and liberalism are shattering before our eyes. To distract from this reality, the elites are forced to blame the masses of unconscious biases, invisible dog whistles and mysterious, unknowable sins of the past lurking in the shadows of the collective unconscious. The ‘systemic’ problems denounced by the emerging elites of the managerial class are formulated in such a way as to require eternal torture and penance. Matters of injustice and inequality, climate change, race and class baiting are always enounced as zero sum games between groups in which there can only be winners and losers. The winners of this ‘divide et impera’ strategy are always the managerial elites, while the losers are all the groups still left unshattered by modernity. Commoners blocking, banning, denouncing their family members for not seeing eye to eye; small businesses smashed to smithereens; the independent middle class impoverished and dumbed down overnight.
The only thing elites are following in this game is absolute political and administrative power. Until that is fully achieved, the selective factors of Bio-Leninism will not cease to act on society. In this sadistic game of punishing your own society for the crimes of its elites (real or imagined), systematic mendacity and poor governance become omnipresent. Under the selective filters of anarchy, the government is forced to pursue imaginary foes, while leaving practical issues unsolved, or even worse – weaponising them in the service of the revolution. The pandemic of 2020 is a good example of such an occurrence. It appears the situation was caused by irresponsible scientific experiments meant to limit hypothetical scenarios. Over the last two years we have witnessed endless pivots from the legacy media and sense-making apparatus, trying to keep the illusion that the situation is under control, while endlessly contradicting its own prior statements.
While normies deceive themselves thinking that no imaginable institution would benefit from a state of chaos like the one we were forced to witness, we can easily see the incentives for perpetuating or even worsening the malfunctions of the sense-making apparatus.
The press thrives on views and rating; sensationalism, panic, rage and tribal headhunting are excellent boosters of views. And since we cannot agree on any ethos or metaphysical common good, why wouldn’t they attempt to maintain the panic by all means necessary? Weren’t we taught that the selfish pursuit of private interests would magically create order out of chaos?
Add to that the fact that the pandemic crisis boosted sales for large corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, Deliveroo, Microsoft. Many large architecture companies smashed their competition, put their employees on furlough; while the small businesses were put out of existence, the large ones kept petitioning for government funds, or blatant virtue signalling about their pandemic-friendly work environments or the luxuries of allowing their employees to work from home.
Most importantly, the desire to punish conservatives and every other stripe of non-progressivism has become the real, unstated goal of the establishment. One must realise that THIS is the core incentive of the emergent deep state; not only because it creates consensus and the sense of embattled comradeship among the managerial elites, but more importantly because demonising and torturing their own citizens is the most effective strategy for grabbing power. This can be seen is something as trivial as the reaction of the press to the EURO final. The rage of the most powerless of deplorables – Norf FC football fans – has been instantly turned into a pretext for further internet control and regulation. In the hands of such elites, the pandemic is primarily a weapon to be used for their unstated core purpose; the goal to actually end the pandemic or minimise its effects always comes second and can be easily ignored or overridden in situations like the last Summer’s protests in Minneapolis. Thus, suspecting said elites of nefarious motives or deliberate plotting is not necessary. The more sincere elites are about this supposed danger coming from commoners, the more effective the power grabbing strategy becomes. Being able to lie to yourself about your practical purpose is key here; if you can project your own faults onto your stated enemies, it becomes even easier.
This conflictual situation makes it almost impossible to make sense of what’s going on. Things that should have been mere technical problems to solve, are mixed up with strange religious fetishes; in the absence of a sound metaphysical system uniting the centre, the elites latch onto superstitions and badly understood atavisms of past cultures. The fetishisation of the NHS, environmentalism, the many mantras chanted by young and prosperous millennials, are characterised by this unsatiated religious hunger. The various C0v1d groups cannot even talk among themselves, because each has turned its work hypothesis into a religious idol; the cult of mRNA vaccines, the cult of ivermectin, the cult of homeopathy – they never debate each other in a charitable way; there is no Bell curve to unite these factions, because the political centre and the Overton window are things of the past.
The other side of the coin is equally worrying – when the legacy media and sense-making apparatus goes bonkers, so do the commoners. They become anti-establishment and will actively oppose every single notion advanced by it. If the BBC claims ‘x’ is true, the dissidents will claim ‘-x’ is the actual truth. Thus, both sides weaponise information for the purpose of their cold civil war, and the process of sense-making truly becomes an impossibility. Elites cope with this situation through a blind adhesion to their always shifting emergent consensus, because they can derive endless advantages, funds and sinecures by sticking to the narrative, even when it is truly mendacious and rotten to the core. The commoner dissidents, on the other hand, have only to lose from being anti-establishment. With every new outrage, they are further decimated on the internet; their accounts further closed by Patreon and PayPal; their identities doxed, their beliefs ridiculed; their attention drained by the loss of even the little sovereignty they had.
We need to discuss ways of surfing this chaotic situation; a friend was telling me he is in a process of ‘hillbillifying’ himself, of returning to basics; learning about foraging, reading classical authors, interacting with the tangible world. That, despite being a brilliant scholar and having recently been awarded a PhD in philosophy. I think this is the way forward; we also need to recover a more wholesome religious outlook that will prevent us from worshipping contingencies and forming these strange fetishes we see both on the left and the right.
