Substack Notes 16.1 - Schism
Some Selected Notes After a Long Hiatius
Great Britain and France and Australia have all passed laws which limit social media use for teens, a move which I suspect is driven my a growing discomfort with the rightward drift of young men fueled by information they’re finding online. Great Britain has a mandatory digital ID scheme. Australia’s is voluntary - but for how much longer? Canada has perfected its tools of narrative control by controlling speech (fining violators), punishing credentialed professionals who dissent, and pumping institutional propaganda through the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Great Britain has the BBC, which serves an identical function, and it maintains organizations like the Research, Information, and Communications Unit (RICU), which seeks to control public perception of immigration, crime, and newsworthy events. Many countries have used intelligence agencies to monitor and intervene upon citizens. Debanking is now an established tactic. All of this is merely the hard and coercive edge of the thought control apparatus. It is a separate and minor constituent of a huge complex which includes credentialing bodies, professional organizations, college administrations, political parties, media companies, and the upper class as a whole - all enforce progressive opinions and forbid any dissent or fracture In Great Britain.
Plus it jails hundreds of its citizens for nonviolent, personal opinions each month.
The only reason that this isn’t happening across the Western world is because of various resistance groups, legal protections, and control strategies. The people trying to implement the globalist, progressive agenda would like that power. Eventually, they will have it - or, worse, they will no longer need it.
The superstructure of digital control is already perceptible across much of the Western world. When you include digital currency and Flock cameras and AI, and consider that all of these tools are being controlled by the same class of people (with the same incentives and the same general worldviews) that instigated COVID lockdowns and masking and mandatory vaccines, an uncomfortable conclusion is unavoidable: all that remains for the state to abandon its pretense of libertarian concerns is for some crisis or some manufactured emergency. Even if the pretense was thin, most people would go along with newly-instituted oppressive policies. Pensioners and university professors and public employees would go along to protect their careers. Women would go along to signal the proper politico-cultural allegiances (this would quickly become a partisan issue, as everything does these days - further possible influence of manipulations by the powerful). The rich would go along to protect their privilege and their wealth. Who would resist? Precisely the groups that have been progressively and heavily disempowered under our current social arrangement. I’m not sure that this is merely a coincidence.
The lines of schism are still faint and unclear, but they are resolving a bit more every day. There are people who are willing to look at matters clearly and there are those who are willing to fight for liberty and for local agency. And there are many more people who are not.
Governments can easily play-act and manufacture resistance and conflict:
Or they can use flagrant and colorful outrages in order to (possibly) incite anger and rebellion against the most impetuous, justifying a totalitarian response.
I have only occasionally ventured into Notes during the past 6 months. I am a schoolteacher and I am writing a book, and I mostly use Substack as a platform for processing my own thoughts about life and the society that I see (remaining aware that my vision is clouded by hyperreality and algorithms, like everyone else’s). This is therefore a highly fragmented and incomplete collection of Substack Notes from the beginning of that time period.
More will follow.
Notes
"Today, I think America has lost its way because its people have lost faith. Not simply in God, but also in its institutions."
-Joseph Hamrick
”Consider the case of Richard Bilkszto, a teacher in Toronto who pushed back during an anti-racism workshop. Instead of engaging with him respectfully, with dignity, the facilitator shunned him and used his statement as an example of what not to do. His statement was reasonable.
The tragic result was that he lost his job and ultimately took his own life. The facilitator shared what occurred in articles as a neutral condolence–muted compassion, but took no responsibility. Perhaps she refrained from doing so out of concern about liability, yet she never even acknowledged the possibility that the way she responded to his dissent could have caused harm.”
The fruits of multiculturalism:
…I think the estimate is up to 10% at this point.
The enfeebling of communities is the negative feedback loop which is now weakening our culture. Even basic norms - against gluttony, promiscuity, waste, fraud, aggressive violence - are now fading. We don’t even have an active concept of virtue any more! We only have incentives (career, wealth, status) and a system of vague and poorly (and unevenly) enforced dictates from the state. We’re like people sleepwalking off of a cliff. We still have the mental inheritance of decades ago (it’s wrong to cheat on your partner, it’s wrong to steal, it’s wrong to punch strangers in the face) but if those actions don’t interfere with gaining incentives and if they don’t risk the punishment of the state, they are essentially available for modern people to explore, without social penalty or loss of status.
This is a very dangerous situation, and I can’t see a corrective, other than to insert yourself within a vibrant community and to work for its protection. But for those who live in global cities or faceless suburbs or the fallout-zones of modern urban decay? You’re standing on a net that is disintegrating before your eyes. Your money and status won’t save you in the end.
The Progressive Agenda as Pure Class Interest
Could it be that the keystone issues of the modern progressive political program are really just instruments wielded to gain resources and status for the ruling class, and little else? The more time that passes the more I suspect that this is the case.
The institutional campaign to silence, persecute, and marginalize dissenting voices goes on. It’s discouraging how few people are willing to risk their careers or reputations for the true or the good.
Peter Boghossian:
Auron MacIntyre:
You've spent an incredible amount of time on this article. Thanks for sharing it.
As someone with an interest about the liberal side of anti-humanism, racism and society destruction, i'd like to see those informations more widespread. I appreciate how detail oriented you are, cheers.
What's the source for that women's suffrage graph? Decline in piracy causing global warming logic notwithstanding, the representation of birth rates falling in the 20s intrigues me, because to hear modern feminists tell the story, it's only thanks to the birth control pill that women were freed from mandatory childbearing. I've never found this explanation satisfying, as hormonal birth control even today, let alone in its cruder form sixty years ago, is only marginally more effective than other forms of pregnancy prevention. This is especially true if you're tracking how these techniques are used in practice, where people in general aren't very good about taking their meds.