David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 3

I ended my previous column by arguing that the people in charge of Western societies are displaying many symptoms of insanity. To be slightly more charitable, we could say that they merely display the classic symptoms of any culture in its late degenerate age. There may not be much difference. Civilisations rise and they decline. ‘Hard times create strong men; strong men create good times; good times create weak men; weak men create hard times’. Every civilisation becomes a victim of its own success. It loses confidence in itself and its own achievements. While still believing itself invincible it despises the very means by which it came to greatness. It defames its great men and demolishes their monuments. It worships that which it is not ~ the barbarian, the bruiser, the angry refugee and the weird sexual outlaw, the gladiator and the brainless muscular sporting ‘hero’, the clueless adolescent and the thuggish spokesman for the oppressed. It actually wants to be hurt. It fantasises about being....dominated. ‘Insanity’ becomes just a cultural judgment. It eschews being ‘judgmental’. It tolerates everything. Why should our opinions be thought better than anyone else’s? Post-modernism and ‘multiculturalism’ are its philosophies. History is revised into a catalogue of our own sins.

Who are the people in charge? They are the ones not merely in charge of our laws and government, but of how we behave and how we think, of what we consider acceptable and unacceptable. They are our ruling caste. Some people call them the PMC, the Professional/Managerial Class. Others speak of the ‘lenocracy’ ~ all those people, whose numbers grow daily, who themselves do nothing useful or productive, but just clip the ticket as other people do the hard yards. They are not necessarily the politicians, certainly not of the more conservative parties. After all, what power do politicians have? They are the bureaucrats in national and regional and local government, the journalists and columnists and ‘influencers’, the schoolteachers who cannot even teach children to read but who know all about the Treaty, the academics devoted to indoctrination, the managers and consultants and directors, the beltway society, the ‘chattering classes’ ~ our very own ‘Establishment’.

Over the last few years there has been a remarkable transformation of the Establishment Once it was conservative. Now, the ‘left’, the alleged ‘liberals’, are the new Establishment; and they are certainly more smug and stupid than the old one.

Recall a few basic axioms that, until recently, any self-respecting leftish person would have considered obvious. (They are, in fact, mostly pretty sensible axioms that I think most of us might well agree to, especially these days...)

1. One should distrust the mainstream news media. (They were all tools of the capitalist system, owned by big capitalists or controlled by oppressive governments.)

2. One should distrust and dislike spy agencies, for the same reasons.

3. Along with oil companies and other big multinational corporations, we should also distrust Big Pharma, the dubious greedy pharmaceutical companies and medical industry which falsify results, make scandalous profits and push dubious remedies on to the public.

4. We should distrust governments, always the tool of oppressive and exploitative vested interests.

5. We should resist censorship and the repression of alternative opinions.

6. We should of course oppose apartheid and insist on the equality of all human beings.

7. We are in favour of peace ~ as a general principle anyway. Make love, not bombs!

8. And it goes without saying that democracy ~ universal adult suffrage ~ is a good thing.

These rules were surely basic and sensible rules of thumb. They fit my worldview reasonably well. At the very least, the trust which we place in institutions should be earned. But now, the left, by and large, holds precisely the opposite opinions.

1. We should believe everything the ‘mainstream media’ ~ the legacy media ~ tells us. Otherwise we are going down a rabbit hole and becoming conspiracy theorists, as we believe mis- or dis- or even mal-information. (Mal-information, evidently, is information which is actually true, but is still ‘harmful’!)

2. I am not absolutely sure when the left stopped distrusting spy agencies, but it may have been about the time that Mr Trump was first elected president. The FBI and the CIA clearly did not like him, and so they were obviously now on the right side. Have you heard any criticism of spy agencies recently? The United States ‘intelligence community’ made blatant political attempts to destroy an elected president by the total fabrication of the ‘Russiagate’ affair, and many further lies. But Mr Trump is evil, so that is OK. Observe the horror with which the Left greets the news that a former director of the FBI should be prosecuted for criminality.

3. Big Pharma. What a remarkable turn around there has been there! A brand new virus appears ~ Covid ~ and five minutes later, all these dreadful companies, which we have long had very good reason to distrust, come up with their own amazing ‘vaccines’ ~ and if you do not at once accept their wonderful effectiveness, there is something wrong with YOU!

4. Governments? Trust them. They are on our side. The sole source of truth, in fact. And kind!

5. Censorship? Totally OK. People who disagree? White supremacists, trad wives, conspiracy theorists, nutbars, climate change deniers. Silence them all. The Hunter Biden laptop? Say nothing at all about it. Besides, 51 senior spies said in writing that it was a fabrication. Trust the spies! And trust he newspapers who fed us their stories.....

6. Apartheid? Yesterdays’s issue. We are now in favour of apartheid, as long as people of other races are on top, and we ~ or the vulgar ignorant lower classes of our society, anyway ~ are on the bottom. Serves them right!

7. War? Well, we don’t like what is happening in Gaza, but we certainly don’t have any problem with war in the Ukraine. Indeed, Mr Trump, who would like to stop it, is a bad man. The Left, once the deadly enemy of the American military-industrial complex ~ to use President Eisenhower’s phrase ~ is now horrified that Mr Trump may, however ineptly, be attempting to give it a good shake-up!

8. And the idea of one person one vote? ’Simplistic’, according to our last Prime Minister. Democracy has moved on.

The left is now the Establishment. The left preferred Kamala Harris to Donald Trump, even though Ms Harris was so obviously a complete obedient creature of the Deep State, ready to continue any profitable wars if so desired. And are not all wars profitable to the military industrial complex which rules the United States? How did the left come to support these people? Yes, Mr Trump is guilty of constitutional over reach; I do not applaud him wholeheartedly; but would Ms Harris have been any better? I doubt it.

In fact, much of the ‘left’ is a mirror image ~ is in fact a part ~ of the global capitalism it once professed to oppose. Post-modernism agrees with Mrs Thatcher that ‘there is no such thing as society’, there are only individuals, and the group identities of identity politics. The left who support illegal immigrants and open borders are just like global capital, desiring the free and unimpeded movement of peoples.

To be continued…

David Round, a sixth generation South Islander and committed conservationist, is an author, a constitutional and Treaty expert, and a former law lecturer at the University of Canterbury.