Conspiracy or Coalescence?
Several Substackers conspire to reveal the hidden processes of usurpation of our freedom.
Focusing on more learned experts to train myself in the mysteries of the Covid pandemic led to the dismaying eradication of my career-long trust in my own medical establishment. Facts matter and have completely displaced the “Truths", now outed as lies through FOIA, spouted by our governmental and scientific mavens. They now deny any complicity, in what
labels Hysterical Institutional Amnesia. Viewing the lockstep agreements and actions of almost all national governments and international bodies including the WHO, one could easily believe in a conspiracy of the elites. However at least four of those who revolted against this idiocy have gone deeply beyond the “what” into the “how” and “why”. , , and have all clarified the scientific, political, and ethical errors committed by the Pandemicists. Dr. Malone has gone further and recently has sharply dissected the polemical propaganda used to enforce compliance of the body politic in surrendering its freedoms. While Eric Hoffer wrote how individuals mislead themselves in The True Believer, Mattias Desmet has written what may be the defining treatise-The Psychology of Totalitarianism- on the underlying weakness of that body politic in so willingly following the pandemic’s Pied Pipers. All of Dr. Malone’s Substack columns on the evil processes practiced by our leadership may hopefully be collected into a like volume of revelation and warning. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, in addition to thoroughly exposing the falsity of the intentions and actions taken for the sake of public health, has been the keystone in providing rational alternatives to that public health hysteria through his many interviews with other equally authoritative scientists and practitioners who share his ethics of truth derived from data in The Illusion of Consensus. The latest episode is a textual interview with Germany’s light of rationality and freedom, , whose Plague Chronicle has travelled beyond the pandemic to the equally addled processes of German politics in general (see my Germanizing America for how he may be predicting our near-term plight in the U.S.A.).That text, on The Illusion of Consensus, distills much of what Malone and Desmet have revealed in broader detail. Eugyppius’ current assessment is not of broad international conspiracy, but of a self-empowering coincidence of special interests. He has simplified that process into a stark warning of what may be inescapable for those of us who value our freedom and our self-directed personal responsibility. Salient quotes follow:
The pandemic illustrated above all how we are governed by complex bureaucratic systems that are very hard to understand from the outside [and poorly seen by those within them], that aren't really under any kind of firm political control, and that increasingly behave in radical and unpredictable ways…The primary culprit seems to be a decay in the nature of state power, over many generations. While the actors inside these nodes [see below] have formally defined agendas with respect to the outside world, their real purposes are necessarily careerist – they want more funding, more jobs, and more prospects for themselves, and so they prefer interventionist approaches to everything. This power has been bled outward and downwards, from the political arm into a wide array of lobbying operations, academic bodies [e.g. NIH, FDA, CDC], contractors and corporations [universities], and even state-adjacent [not truly independent] journalistic enterprises like public media. This has had the effect of insulating the state [in our case, Congress and the President] from criticism…Hysteria and panic, promoted by the press [if it bleeds it leads], have thus become a key feature of state power in the West, important not only for propagandizing citizenries but also for coordinating state actors internally [note how often government and media use the exact same language and phrases]…everything it [the administrative state or technocracy] does is subject to incredible inertia. It will persist in obviously ill-advised policies for years, blind to their destruction and expense.
Who are the “accidental conspirators” who further the actions of that institutional stone rolling downhill? Eugyppius labels them as “influence nodes”. They are both outside and inside every level of our government, with individuals dedicated to the nodes’ needs rotating in and out of government and these extracurricular organizations which the British refer to as “quangos”, quasi-nongovernmental organizations. Eugyppius explains them:
‘influence nodes.' These are informally organized interest groups both within the state and in private institutions, responsible for formulating specific policies and promoting them to the political establishment.
Granted, many of these are similar to the interlocking directorates that coordinated the actions of the Robber Barons in our late 19th and early 20th centuries (and still do in Japan and now China). But most of their actions are informally parallel in interest rather than formally coordinated. They are incrementalists, instrumental in playing their individual part in the larger orchestra of tyranny whose music indirectly cuddles all of us, “for the greater good”, into submission. Creature comforts provided at the expense of others, or our future, are the pillows that silence our nascent protests. True, only the most local subsidiary levels of these nodes are available to us in our towns, cities, and counties. But that is where we each individually can most effectively raise our voices, before our ability to speak is finally silenced. Shouting and snarling in frustration slides off these influence nodes. Reasoned, repetitive, forceful, sincere speech, along with disenfranchising those populating the nodes at every voting opportunity and exposing their conflicts of interest when they hide in extracurricular organizations, can be incrementally powerful in resisting and reversing the decay of state power derived only from the people. Thurgood Marshall had written that the right of free speech had a second part, the right to be heard. Only when we each personally take action at the local level will that second part of the First Amendment activate the final leg of its triad, the requirement of the creeping administrative cabal to listen.