I was quite busy last week and wasn’t aware of the
move for suggestions for a “If I Wanted New
Zealand to Fail” video - see HERE.
Prior to discovering it, coincidentally I had
put down a few thoughts along similar lines.
Here are some that came to mind.
Firstly, bring in mind-altering thought-suppressing
drugs and dope as much of the population as you can up to the eyeballs. A significant
percentage would be rendered docile by the sweet-smelling weed and
non-compos-mentis by meth. Much easier to control people who can’t think
clearly!
Next, give high regard to criminals and gangs—the
lumpenproletariat who with a bit of training can be turned into a useful revolutionary
force. By high regard I mean put them on TV, give them a profile and a voice.
Let them promulgate their views and air their grievances.
If a madman or a bunch of crims go berko with firearms,
exploit it to the max; don’t miss the opportunity to guilt-trip the country.
“We’re all guilty” works quite well.
Then work on promoting liberal laws on every issue to
get people freer in their thinking and less likely to consider the consequences
of a do-whatever-you-like-and-to-heck-with-everyone-else worldview.
Trash the economy, bankrupt it and flatten it all out
so that it could be rebuilt in a new and “fairer” way. Pose as “experts” in the
matter.
Farmers are not revolutionary enough. Replace them with
co-ops or communes of some type.
Arrange for good books to be thrown out of libraries
and fill them instead with pulp fiction, semi-pornography, left-wing
propaganda, and books in other languages. Remind people that it’s all on the
internet anyway and your kids can access it all at their fingertips so why
worry about real books?
Arrange for schools to become places where young immature
adolescents, after being repeatedly alarmed by lessons on catastrophism, can be
groomed to become little warriors to save the world, carrying placards, lying
down in the street, lambasting previous generations for their perceived
negligence and failure, touring the world as hyped up missionaries of green
religion and imbued with a sense of their own importance as the only hope for
the planet. Naysayers could be labelled conspiracy buffs or deniers.
Socialise hospitals, making medical care primarily
available to the lower socio-economic groups before anyone else. Make others wait
and pay exorbitant amounts for necessary drugs. This would help to drive
general morale further down. A discouraged population is more easily
manipulated.
As I said, it’s only a few. But to attempt to turn
things in a better direction, turn these into their opposites and then use the
advice of real experts who are thinking straight; then perhaps we’ll be on the
road to a better future than what presently appears to be looming.
And we might still hope that greater sense will eventually
prevail.
Guy Steward is a teacher, musician, and writer.
3 comments:
I would add to your list the following:
If I wanted the country to fail, we should all fall into line with the prevailing orthodoxies of today's proper-thinking experts in 'learning' and their progressive antecedents, who have convinced us of the real purpose of education: 'self-actualization' (or some such variant of the personal fulfillment credo). Such progressive ideals have almost completely robbed us of our cultural inheritance, the Western canon or, as Matthew Arnold so eloquently put it, the 'best of what has been thought and said'. Who will fight for what little there is to save?
I would add that what passes for knowledge in today's schools is increasingly anything but. The humanities have been stripped of their essential character and replaced with dogma and narrative. Also, the blinkered thinking that all boats must rise has effectively stymied selection by merit in schooling (try advocating the latter today and you will be met with outcry and derision. You will be called an 'elitist', as if that settles the argument). It goes without saying that these developments not only fail pupils but more importantly knowledge itself.
...and set up more government-initiated commissions and committees on the public dime. Operating in the shadows, they are accountable no one one but themselves it seems. Set up in an hoc, knee-jerk fashion, they give the appearance of a government willing to act on whatever happens to be the defining issue of the time, but they become instead an excuse for inaction. Should we be at all surprised when change does not come and the problems continue to fester?
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