In the wake of the murder by a police officer of the unfortunate Sarah Everard, and the ensuing justified anger, many media people were calling for “good” men to act more visibly in opposing violence against women. While I back 100% the calls made for “good” men to speak up, I am also concerned that the more general ideas of social equality are fast becoming reduced to a gender-specific proposition, having the potential knock-on effect of splitting the Left.
This is not to diminish the seriousness of violence against women, but only to attempt to bring to light how the focus on gender equality may be impacting our perception of more general inequality, and how this apparent narrowing of focus risks being manipulated by those whose interests are not necessarily best served by social equality.
While many women are exploited by many men, in the wider culture there are those still looking to keep wages low; rents and the cost of living high, while reneging on any social housing provision, who will look to spin the fact of female exploitation in order to capture the female vote to the service of their own particular brand of social exploitation.
Spin
In a recent tweet, Una Mullally, responding to Josepha Madigan’s dig at the Kerryman newspaper, suggesting the paper be renamed the Kerryperson, called this out for the cynical political ploy it was. Referencing her own Irish Times article of March 8th which predicted this type of play, Mullally described Madigan’s move as an awkward Fine Gael grab for the female vote, which, as things stand, may decide the next government, as it decided the referendum in 2015.
But the main talking point in the past week has not been Fine Gael attempts to capture the female vote, but the more immediate mystery as to why “good” men don’t speak out against violence against women.
Fintan O’Toole, writing in the Irish Times on March 16th said that in order for men to make a more overt stand against violence against women they must first learn to be shocked by that violence. At the moment, he argues, such violence all seems routine to most men. I wonder about that, since it seems to suggest that silence equals complacency equals broad approval.
When you remove the particular instance O’Toole is referring to, that is, the emotive and highly charged question of violence against women, and replace it with say, general social inequality; you immediately already have an answer as to why “good” men appear to do nothing in the face of violence against women. The truth is, the majority of good men, and good women too, tend to remain strategically schtum on a wide range of problematical social issues until they see which way the political winds are blowing.
Good Men
Edmund Burke is reputed to have said that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.‘
Burke wrote the line in a letter in 1770, which is more than a little while ago. The point being, the good men idea is far from being new. In fact, Burke’s quote needs updating, since at the time of his writing the realization of women’s suffrage was a long way in the future. An updated version would read: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and good women to do nothing.‘’
So instead of posing the question, Why do good men do nothing, in such a way as to refer to a specific issue – in this case male violence against women – it is perhaps clearer to ask why do good people, regardless of gender, not raise their voices in say, situations where right-wing policy creates homelessness and subsequent deaths from exposure; or privatisation results in poor services and deaths due to cut corners and profit-conscious oversights? Why do good people not raise their voices en masse on these issues too?
By the strict criteria of the “good” men concept as framed by Edmund Burke and others, we are all responsible, good men and good women alike, for homeless deaths, for direct provision deaths, for deaths caused as a result of medical privatisation, for domestic violence in all its guises and so on. Since this is a democracy, we all, strictly speaking, bear equal responsibility for the failings of democracy to deliver equal treatment to all. But these are difficult questions when applied to the real world.
For instance, if you were an arts practitioner cosying up to Josepha Madigan when she was Minister for Arts, with a view to gaining favour and financial support for some project you had planned, are you complicit in Madigan’s rallying support to oppose Traveller accommodation? Or are the two issues compartmentalised? One being her political position and the other being her apparent social and class intolerance. Do you sacrifice your project to make a point, or do you compromise?
Herds
Along with such moral quandaries you also have the problem of the behaviour of crowds, which tend to behave like herds. Even politicians don’t really lead, they too follow the herd in the form of the public mood glimpsed in polls. Most people are spectators, going with the flow of the herd. We stand and watch the game until some critical mass is reached and then we raise our voices in support of whatever new majority appears to be on the rise. This works for every growing gang, from commies to fascists. A critical mass is reached and the herd follows. History shows that the herd will follow any old idea once this critical mass is achieved.
Søren Kierkegaard, writing on this phenomenon, noted that an individual is worth more than a crowd of individuals, because an individual has personal agency, whereas a crowd tends to go with the flow of the herd. As a result, Kierkegaard comes to the conclusion that truth always belongs to the minority, since the majority tend towards unthinking obedience to the movement of the herd.
It could be that now is the time where the issue of violence against women is to be embraced by the herd as an issue whose time has come. An issue for which good men are expected to speak up. But the point is, that apart from the particular issue, the question as to why do good people do nothing might be more properly considered in relation to a wider sense of social equality, encompassing all issues of social inequality.
This applies equally to the politician allowing the market to decide the fates of those seeking housing, as it does to the person turning a blind eye to white collar corruption, or a man turning a blind eye to violence against women.
Good Men and Good Women
In this regard, for Fintan O’Toole to suggest that the evil of violence against women is exacerbated by good men doing nothing, is disingenuous at best, or is simply more political gamesmanship.
Because the Irish Times also plays politics with notions of equality, quietly supporting right-wing Fine Gael policy through the manner in which it shapes and pitches stories, while always being first up with the property supplements when the market shifts, eager supporters of the housing Ponzi scheme, where the wealthy business class figuratively eat our young by selling them over-priced houses, while their political cronies refuse to enter into any believable form of social housing policy.
Which begs the question, that when Fintan O’Toole is calling on “good” men to be more vociferous in condemning violence against women, is he referring to the same “good” men who remain silent in the face of social inequality on a more general level, keeping strategically schtum on a range of social equality issues, in order to ensure the perpetuation of a neoliberal status quo that is giving rise to social inequality in the first place?
All of this is not to suggest that the call for “good” men to raise their voices on the subject of violence against women is a wasted exercise; but only to point out that such a call to “good” men is not new; and furthermore, that by repackaging that call as an issue-specific moral imperative, while ignoring the same demand across a more general range of social equality issues, is to have the effect, whether knowingly or not, of splitting the Left by narrowing the imperative of social equality to a divisive gender issue, in such a way as to assist the project of the establishment parties and the elite they appear to represent.
This will doubtless remain the situation until such time as good men and good women of all classes speak out against social inequality in all its guises.
Since the 1970s, the consistent presence of neoliberalism in politics alongside short, sharp bursts of neoconservatism have shaped our planet to a greater extent than any other ideologies. This has been to the detriment of all but a shrinking cast of billionaires that profit in periods of crisis, even during the pandemic. The prognosis is not good, even if the pandemic provides a porthole for the possibility of a realignment.
Distinct Ideologies
At one level, neoliberalism is extreme libertarianism, purged of its earlier socialist or anarchist underpinnings that were ultimately communitarian. Neoliberalism has had a tremendous influence on conservative thinking in recent times. Yet it is not conservatism in a traditional Burkean sense of conserving and preserving that which is good. Neoliberals do not advocate moderation, restraint, anti-extremism, perspective, nuance or that ill-defined word ‘balance,’ save in terms of conventional political rights such as liberty, privacy and freedom of movement.
Contemporary neoliberals are not supporters of little people, and in effect operate against the interests of the ordinary working person in the name of economies of scale or other workplace rationalisations. It is unbridled free market extremism, engendering a tragedy of the commons.
It did not begin this way. In its first iteration, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek warned against the excesses of socialism in The Road to Serfdom (1944). This was witnessed in Britain of the 1970’s with the three day working week, refuse on the streets, and the stranglehold of government by the unions. Many of Hayek’s points were valid, and I suspect he would be horrified at the political trajectory his ideas have taken. Similarly, Karly Marx was not responsible for and would have been horrified by Stalin.
The initial idea behind libertarianism was for a combination of unregulated laissez faire economics, and the legitimation of a hedonistic lifestyle through laws and social policies. I see nothing wrong with hedonism per se – or for tolerance of human frailties more generally – and indeed have spent much of my professional career as a barrister upholding the rights of an accused to due process.
Neoconservatism, on the other hand, is hardly even capitalist in outlook. It is really an offshoot of a more authoritarian leftism combined with a fundamentalist, morally self-righteous neocolonialism informed by ‘Christian’ values. It is associated in particular with the administrations of George W. Bush, with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle its most prominent ideologues.
Left to right: Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush.
Many neoconservatives made an ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist left to the camp of American conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s, with its intellectual roots in the magazine Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz. But anti-Stalinist does not imply a respect for human rights or the rule of law; its followers’ ambitions were simply global rather than limited to a particular country, as was the case with Stalin’s approach.
Neoconservatism adopts the unregulated free market, but not libertarian permissiveness or due process or a respect for international law: the ends would justify any means. That is what makes it distinctly evil. It attracted money from Christian fundamentalist and the rapture movement and cohabited with authoritarian academics.
Thus, there is a world of difference between former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, a defender of human rights and free markets, and Tony Blair, the UK’s foremost neoconservatives. Blair is a fundamentalist Christian, a self-deluding mediocrity, who exported a destabilising jihadist war based on an absurd world view and sold it as a humanitarian intervention. He cannot really be described as a socialist – although state bureaucracies expanded massively under his New Labour – but nor is he a genuine conservative. He is simply a telegenic opportunist who became drunk on power.
His neocon influencers were Bush and Irish-American pseudo intellectuals like Daniel Moynihan, who fused Christian jihadism with racist fundamentalism and veneration of a deregulated market. The worst of all possible worlds.
Neoliberal Permissiveness
While neoliberals cock a snoop at Christian fundamentalism, some perhaps even going so far as to oppose the war in Iraq, an inbuilt resistance to state intervention means neoliberals such as even Barack Obama, did nothing to heal the wounds, or address the causes of discontent in the developing world.
I suspect the neoliberal endorsement of liberties and indulgence has in one sense been counterproductive. It may have not started with bad intentions. All were in favour of lifestyle ‘choices’: gay and transgender rights, sexual freedoms and shifting the agenda of equality towards formal equality rather than substantive equality. This involved superficial gestures such as including sufficient mixed race women in boardrooms but keeping the cleaners in the poverty trap.
The gender equity and transgender lobby now often act in a sinister way, and represent a branch of neoconservative in all its puritanical absurdity. ‘No platforming’ esteemed academics like Germaine Greer steers young people into sexual confusion and away from political engagement. It is a disaster emanating from a preening devotion to political correctness.
The sponsorship of the gender equity agenda by corporate America negates the real human rights agenda. These companies do not tend to fund advocates of social and economic justice, including rights to housing, healthcare and a clean, safe and aesthetically pleasing environment.
The privatisation of healthcare and even the Bismarckean welfare state began largely under Nixon in the U.S., where neoliberalism first evolved. It was replaced by an insistence that people exercise personal and professional responsibility, which masked a dismantling of social supports.
‘Even Richard Nixon’s Got Soul’ (but not William F. Buckley)
Nixon, a more sympathetic figure in hindsight – at least by comparison with latter day Republicans – was forced into healthcare privatisation by lobby groups from the medical profession, bringing into being the anti-health care system of America, where in 2018 over 17% of the country’s resources devoted to healthcare, yet it has one of the lowest life expectancies in the OECD. Moreover, industry sponsors regularly renege on private health care entitlements, through the machinations of unscrupulous lawyers. The fact of having a health care plan in the U.S. is no guarantee it will pay out.
Nixon had his doubts and did not buy into the ideology wholesale, but by the time of Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 the neoliberals were firmly in the ascendancy, with disastrous consequences for Americans, as Reagan’s advisor David Stockman describes in The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed(1986).
A crucial neoliberal mastermind was William F. Buckley, the satanic ideologue of modern U.S. conservatism, who ostensibly venerated Edmund Burke, but subverted Burkean conservatism. Buckley helped establish the new philosophy of neoliberalism through texts such as God and Man in Yale (1953), and through his editorial of the Republican Party intellectual rag The National Review.
Buckley moved conservatism away from the spirit of Burke’s community of souls, towards naked self-interest. This has led to the undermining, and now the actual buying of the state apparatus by the corporatocracy. Thus, under Buckley’s stewardship conservatism mutated into a form of individualism tat undermined states.
Buckley’s brilliant rhetoric was only matched by his repulsive qualities as a human being. This is all-too-evident in the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies made about his media punditry alongside the almost equally contemptible Gore Vidal during the 1968 American election. Buckley had an enormous, understated, influence in moving the Republican Party, via Reagan, towards libertarianism, and the disaster capitalism now in vogue. Buckley in fact co-opted Russell Kirk, the Burkean conservative author of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953) onto The National Review, seemingly in order to get him ‘on message.’
Yet the Republican Party and indeed much of the present Conservative party in the UK are not conservatives in the Burkean sense as aforementioned. They have become neoliberal fanatics, which is far from the origins of the paternalistic conservatism that emerged in Britain the late eighteenth century.
Why Edmund Burke Provides a Counterweight
Edmund Burke was a moderate conservative in the Benjamin Disraeli mould, who sought to preserve traditions he believed worth maintaining. His career was an idiosyncratic mixture of radicalism and abiding by conventions, and he believed in the desirability of change but not change for its own sake. Change should come about incrementally he believed, and with due regard to tradition; his antennae were attuned to unintended consequences.
Edmund Burke.
Contemporary neoliberalism has engendered a form of corporate fascism that mandates extreme conformity in working days that stretch into long evening. I doubt Burke would endorse its excesses. He believed in a form of market capitalism favouring small enterprise, as do I too. Burke was also anti-monopolist and would see dominant multinational firms, and perhaps the European Union, as anathema to the capitalism he favoured.
Neoliberalism should not therefore be equated with traditional conservatism. Indeed if Edmund Burke was around today he might pen a text entitled: Reflections on Imminent Social and Economic Breakdown!
Burke of course, unlike adherents of neoliberalism believed in the concept of a community, involving associative obligations and reciprocal interactions. A moral and networked community in other words. The neoliberal mentality, on the other hand, leads towards social atomisation and fragmentation, or as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: “There is no such thing as society only individuals.”
Thatcherism is contrary to the Burkean ethos. I suspect that in modern times Burke would be regarded as a Keynesian capitalist, which is precisely what Buckley was attacking in God and Man in Yale. Burke ideas also align with environmentalists as he had a sense of community as inter-generational:
Society becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
He held a defined sense of the public good that was not just where the dice landed in the casino capitalism of the market. Further, though a passionate advocate of rights and liberties he was also a passionate advocate of restraint and moderation. He believed that the extension of rights should not extend to untrammelled liberties and licentious anarchy.
Although a conservative in terms of his invocation of habit, tradition and social order, and also with his belief in institutional contribution and preservation – as well as measures of fiscal rectitude – he was, conversely, also its opponent of in other respects.
One drawback to Burke as an intellectual, in my view, was his devotion to religion. Born in Ireland to a Protestant father and Catholic mother, noxious Irish Catholicism shaped him, diminishing his contribution; although one cannot say that he had the religious zealotry of a neoconservative.
The Beginning of the End of History
The Bushman-Blairite wars were an exercise in duplicity in shocking breach of international law. There were no smoking guns or development of nuclear weaponry in Iraq. It was Christian jihadism led by a latter-day Crusaders, including telegenic Tony that most lightweight of British gentlemen.
Neoconservatism is a nefarious dysfunctional ideology that suits the interests of the powerful, which tragically became the consensus. A Dictionary of Received Ideas. There would be no comeuppance for Tony or George Dubya, who now blithely paints portraits of migrants, with all irony seemingly lost on him.
In Britain, Brexit may lead to the gradual dismantling of the Blairite welfare state, even after the Johnson health care crisis, with the chronic under-resourcing and deregulation of the NHS now laid bare by the pandemic. This applies to all other countries, Italy most obviously, which diverted resources from essential services under neoliberal austerity measures. Meanwhile we see America on the brink of anarchy and civil insurrection due to the triumph of these ideas with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, who is the symptom of a very deep malaise.
The combination of neoconservatism and neoliberalism is a far more deadly virus than Covid-19, which has simply exposed the soft underbelly of societies afflicted by its ravages. From a neoliberal point of view healthcare or a clean environment are not rights but entitlements and part of a libertarian agenda.
The lack of regulation of spiraling accommodation and rental costs in the US and elsewhere brings a situation where, for the vast majority, outright ownership of property is a myth. Ostensibly, high salaries are hoovered up in hyper-inflated rents and mortgages subject to repossessions by vulture funds.
The cost of living is prohibitive, and cramped accommodation makes the possibility of a decent family life almost impossible for most, engendering a dysfunctional humanity. Inequalities, short term contracts, and punishingly long working hours destroy mental health, decrease productivity and render family life – save for a privileged few – a thing of the past. The long-term effects on children are potentially catastrophic.
This leads to short-termism and prevents even a modicum of forward planning for most people, who must live from one pay cheque to the next.
Lacking objectivity and perspective, as we struggle for survival in subhuman working conditions that undermine the quality of life, decline arrives in increments. This leads to petty corruption and greed, in a dog-eat-dog universe where the elderly are replaced once they have outlived their usefulness. Their fate is increasingly to be place in decidedly uncaring privatized nursing homes, or spend their last moments on a trolley in an underfunded hospital.
Nozick the Great Ideologue of Neo-Liberalism
Anarchy, State, Utopia (1974) by Robert Nozick was a subversive reaction to John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice who had promoted a theory of economic justice. It became a neoliberal bible. Nozick suggested that government intervention, meaning taxation, beyond the enforcement of contracts and the control of crime is akin to slavery or theft. I own my body, he argues, so I therefore own everything my body produces, and if the state takes that which I produce away from me it enslaves me or – more elegantly – ‘socialism forbids consenting acts between capitalist adults.’
The egregious fault with his argument is that it does not follow that because you own your body you own everything you produce. Inequalities are inbuilt into capitalism as David Ricardo’s Labour Theory of Value demonstrated. It also does not allow for any understanding of the human condition, other than one informed by radically disaggregated and individualistic behaviour, devoid of co-operation and community.
At the time many thought that him daft, and that his ideas could not be implemented as they would lead to a socially dislocated society. It was even suggested that Anarchy, State; Utopia was an elebatorate joke, or part of an intellectual game. Indeed, Nozick was fond of scholarly conceits and subsequently wrote a book with a radically different thesis. So perhaps he did not take what he said seriously. Others did unfortunately.
The consequences have been economic collapse and surging inequality, the gradual destruction of the middle class, and the privatisation and diminution in healthcare as a right, as well as homelessness and mass evictions
The University of Chicago with its two highly placed judges in Easterbrook (dangling for a Supreme Court judgeship) and the truly nefarious ‘most cited’ legal scholar in the world Richard Posner, have also been responsible for much of the damage.
Here we have the perfect reductio ad absurdum: all of human activity is reduced to the wealth maximisation thesis. Thus rape arises out of scarcity of resources: it is expensive for men to purchase sex so we should have a de-regulated prostitution market according to Posner; or adoption should be de-regulated to deal with a competitive baby market where the product can be purchased by the consumer. Such nonsense is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) in which he satirizes an earlier version of neoliberalism, with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it would serve the polity to kill excess babies for economic gain.
The Middle Way
Keynes fell out of fashion because of the stranglehold of unionism and the imposition of socialist dogma in the 1970s. This created ‘a market’ for the work of the Chicago School and trickledown economics characterised by fetishist privatisation, deregulation and the elimination of state subsidies. In the late 1970s a retreat by the state made some sense, but the correction turned into an ongoing campaign. The market may have seemed like a score counter that could be tamed for human purposes. No longer. It is the recipe for inequality
Naomi Klein in her bestseller The Shock Doctrine (2007) analyses the growth and development of neoliberalism across the world. She dubs the economic paradigm ‘disaster capitalism’, homing in on how these crises and others are used to justify further disaster prescriptions. She quotes Hayek’s disciple Milton Friedman:
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
Naomi Klein.
That is precisely where neoconservatism and neoliberalism coincide. Proto-neoconservatives remove the democratically elected Allende regime and replace him with Pinochet, before neo-liberal reforms open up the country for exploitation, washing their hands of any blood.
Yet all the best evidence indicates that stable growth occurs in Nordic and Middle European social democratic countries. There is a tangible link between Keynesian economics and sustainable redistributed growth. Neoliberalism does not generate sustainable growth, as opposed to wealth for the few, and does not provide for redistribution. In effect it is a recipe for diminished human welfare, less good for the greatest number.
Where Are We Now
The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stieglitz famously described our present state of affairs as ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor’. And the new era of state and corporate feudal control and terror we have entered into will accentuate these trends. Thus during this pandemic some of the wealthiest individuals in the world have actually increased their wealth.
A return to the methodology of neoconservatism can be seen in the emergency legislation that has passed through the parliaments of U.K. and Ireland. In theory these are designed to confront an immediate emergency, but will become embedded, and spiral out of control just as we have with counter terrorism legislation. Enforcing self-isolation and ‘track and trace’ become new norms inflicted by neoconservatives and consented to by neoliberals, many of whom with notable exceptions such as Lord Sumption, forget their libertarian origins as long as the dosh keeps rolling in. Notably Tony Blair is awake to new opportunities.
Tony Blair: If you're not able to test significantly when trying to get large numbers of people back into a normal routine, you're going to be enormously inhibited in how you handle the disease.
— Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (@InstituteGC) August 17, 2020
The very phrase ‘social isolation’ is problematic and euphemistic – like ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘military intelligence,’ a contradiction in terms. In fact self-isolation suits a silo bubble of social atomisation and dealing with people or problems one by one by state authorities. We risk a descent into a new barbarism not least due to the pernicious effects of decades of privatization.
The Indian activist Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neoliberalism and environmental damage have gone hand-in-glove in her book Capitalism: a Ghost Story (Verso 2014). There are the mass evictions in India of ‘surplus population’ (a truly evil capitalism coining). The street vendors, rickshaw riders, the small shops and business people, and not least the suicide of 250,000 farmers.
This forced displacement, often from rural areas to cities, augments the channelling of wealth towards the one percent plutocracy controlling India.
It has been suggested by John Gray and Roy herself that the pandemic may lead to a rethink. I fear not. In fact, rather than becoming, as Roy puts it, a porthole to a sustainable and fair existence for all, I fear increased atomization, semi-permanent social distancing, diminishing social supports and the insidious undermining of civil liberties, supported by a scared and soma-induced population.
We are now entering an age of corporate feudalism and of mercantile state control with sub Malthusian ideas gaining traction. It is an age of extremism nourished by religious fundamentalism. It is a time for the convergence of Burkean conservatism with Habermasean moderate socialism to implement ideas informed by traditions of decency and the green agenda. It is a time for sustainable personal and societal living to be realised.
I didn’t particularly want to write this article. I didn’t want to get involved in the whole online social media circus of opinion and rebuttal, triggering and offense. But I feel like I have something to say, and what I have to say is important. So I’ll speak my truth.
About a month ago, I completely removed my attention from the hysterical world of 24-hour news cycles, social media, the conspiracy theories, the craziness, the arguments and rebuttals, the fear, projection and lashing out. So I stopped watching the news and left Facebook, and very liberating it was too.
The collective process the world was going through as a result of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) was taking its toll on me. I had never experienced such fear and anger online before. People were literally lashing out, blurting their unprocessed emotions, fear and anger, all over social media, mirroring perhaps, conversations that were occurring in family homes all around the world.
Instead, I put my energy into the world around me: learning new skills, fishing, growing food, renovating a cottage. Putting my energy and vision into creating a new reality. But something is making me speak out at this time.
I would like to preface what I am saying by acknowledging that Covid-19 is a real threat that has caused great loss and suffering to many families all around the world.
The collective hysteria resulting from it, however, is every bit as damaging as the virus itself.
On the nature of fear
My background is as an outdoor guide. I spent two decades guiding in remote and sometimes dangerous rivers and mountains on four continents. During that time I became very familiar with the nature of fear. A large part of the psychological aspect of guiding in adventurous environments involves managing people’s fears.
One lesson I learnt beyond any doubt is that fear is contagious. Just like a virus. If one person in a group becomes fearful, it spreads like wildfire throughout the entire group, a legacy of our evolutionary heritage, and the fight or flight mechanism.
What we have witnessed, in the past few months, is the entire human species in fight, flight or freeze mode. It is collective anxiety on a global scale, amplified by social media and hysterical media coverage.
Our political leaders, for the most part doing their best and responding to an unprecedented situation, were pressured by a fearful media and hysterical public to do something, anything, and naturally they reacted from a place of fear.
As anyone with a background in adventure sports will know, good decisions are never, ever made from a place of great fear or hysteria.
The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti wrote: ‘Fear of any kind breeds illusion … where there is fear there is obviously no freedom … It makes one tell lies, it corrupts one in various ways, it makes the mind empty, shallow.’
I am not suggesting that our government in Ireland is consciously part of some nefarious plot to undermine democracy. Not intentionally anyway. But democracy has nevertheless been undermined as a result of the hysterical response to Covid-19.
In the UK, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption said: ‘This is what a police state is like, it is a state in which a government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes’. He has called the lockdown ‘the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history’. When great legal minds are telling us that the rule of law is being undermined, we should listen.
Our civil liberties and civil rights are not something that we be taken for granted. We forget now that Irish independence and the fight for freedom came at a high cost. ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’, is a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
It does not matter whether you consider yourself to be politically on the left, centre, or the right, the erosion of civil liberties that has occurred in most Western democracies over the last few months is something that should concern you. if the there is one thing the history of the last century has taught us, it is that tyranny can take many forms.
Over two thousand years ago, Plato warned of the dangers of tyranny arising from a fearful and chaotic democracy. The people, when afraid, beg for a strong leader to come to save them. Tyranny can arise, not from a despot seizing power, but through a fearful public demanding protection from an external threat. This threat is real, but is overblown: ‘This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.’
Many other great political thinkers have expounded on the idea of the tyranny of the masses. The great Irish political theorist Edmund Burke, wrote in a 1790 letter that ‘The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny’.
John Stuart Mill in his famous essay ‘On Liberty’ (1859) spoke of the need to protect against, ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling … as the majority opinion may not be the correct opinion.’
We confront a dystopian nightmare of an Orwellian society of constant surveillance, with the government and/or corporations controlling what we can think, what we say, and how we act.
Militaristic language has become all too commonplace, thereby justifying extreme wartime measures. We talk of ‘front line’ workers. Much as these amazing doctors and nurses are doing a wonderful job and should be commended, there is no ‘front line’.
This is not a war. You cannot fight a war against a part of Nature. That is like fighting a war against yourself, a mass collective schizophrenia. This is part of the problem with our current rational-materialistic society: in our arrogance we believe ourselves to be somehow separate from Nature. This crisis is showing us clearly that we are not.
The following liberties have been undermined since the start of the Covid-19 hysteria:
The right to personal liberty and to protest.
Article 40.4 of the Irish constitution guarantees a right to liberty, while Article 40.6.1 says you have a right to assemble and to associate freely.
The right to assemble and to protest is an essential part of any functioning democracy. Remember the mass civil unrest that was occurring in Hong Kong and France before Christmas? This has disappeared without a trace. Are we no longer allowed to march on the streets should the need to protest arise? What is now stopping future governments using the ‘health and safety’ of the public as an excuse to crack down on civil disobedience?
One of the most important of our human rights, established as early as 1789 in Article XI of the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ – ‘The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely’. Article 40.6.1 of the Irish Constitution guarantees a right to express freely your convictions and opinions .
However, this right has come under attack in recent months, with censorship becoming very prevalent. Any questioning of the mainstream narrative quickly gets labelled ‘false news’ or a ‘conspiracy’ theory, thereby stifling debate and discussion. Who has the power to decide what is false news? Do you, or do I? Or does some unelected Youtube or Google content executive?
The mainstream media and social media companies have unprecedented power to manipulate the narrative. Social media and search engine algorithms can effectively control what we read and see, and therefore control the reality we live in. Who decides what we should think, and who holds this absolute and terrifying power?
I may not agree with what you are saying, but I absolutely respect your right to say it. Otherwise, one day, we may find that right has been taken from us.
The seemingly benign concept of using a ‘contact tracing’ app could easily be misused by governments to normalise mass surveillance of citizens at all times, in the interests of public safety. Keeping track at all times of where you go and who you are with, a smartphone becomes like a voluntary ankle tag. With smartphones becoming almost essential to function in society, this mass surveillance is constant.
One of the very worst tendencies this crisis has brought out in people is of of neighbours spying on one another, settling old grievances by informing. Have people forgotten already how secret police, such as the Stasi in East Germany, controlled populations by encouraging this behaviour?
The French philosopher Michel Foucault believed that: ‘the power of a goverment is co-extensive with its ability to surveil’, and wrote about the symbolic prison of the Panopticon, in which prisoners never knew when they were being observed, so were obliged to be on their best behaviour at all times. We are living in a digital panopticon, and giving governments unprecedented powers of surveillence.
Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.
Moreover, with cash becoming redundant through this crisis, governments and corporations have acquired an even greater capacity to surveil, and therefore control, our lives. In the U.K., Derbyshire police used drones to film hillwalkers in a remote mountain area, while in California police fined surfers a $1000 for catching waves.
Is this the kind of society you want to live in?
Despite posts yesterday highlighting issues of people still visiting the #PeakDistrict despite government guidance, the message is still not getting through. @DerPolDroneUnit have been out at beauty spots across the county, and this footage was captured at #CurbarEdge last night. pic.twitter.com/soxWvMl0ls
The right to bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty.
Are we going to give away our right to bodily autonomy to pharmaceutical companies, and the possibility of a mandatory vaccination programme?
I am neither pro- nor anti- vaccination, but I believe that people should enjoy an absolute right to decide what is put into their bodies, freedom over their own body. A right to bodily integrity has been recognised by the courts as an unenumerated right, protected by the general guarantee of ‘personal rights’ contained under Article 40 of the Irish constitution.
There is some disagreement in the scientific community around the safety of vaccines, with billions of dollars having been paid out in compensation by the Vaccine Injury Courts over the past thirty years, but any dissent of the mainstream Big Pharma narrative is brutally suppressed and attacked. In the Middle Ages, heretics were burnt at the stake for daring to question the mainstream version of reality. While they are not burnt at the stake today, anyone who questions the mainstream narrative is attacked, vilified, and discredited
If anyone thinks these concerns over civil liberties far-fetched, I suggest you look at the situation in China at the moment, where the government has used the crisis to strengthen its grip on power, and to crack down on dissent.
Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo
What sort of world do we want to live in post-Covid-19?
I would easily sacrifice an element of safety for my freedom. I want to live in a world where personal liberty and civil duties are both honoured and respected; where personal sovereignty is not given away to unelected global corporations; where political power remains vested in individuals and communities, and a central State does not have unchecked power to interfere in citizens’ lives. Where policing is by consent, and not by coercion and control. I want young children to be able to run freely in the outdoors without fear, or masks.
Image: Daniele Idini (c)
I do not want to die anytime soon, but if I do, so be it. I have long accepted that one day I will die. I would much rather die a free man from Covid-19 than live in a dystopian surveillance society. What we are seeing is a global collective psychological process, the unconscious and unprocessed fear of death. By facing and accepting our own mortality, this fear dissipates.
I do not want to live in a sanitised, risk-free, nanny-state surveillance world, where the government knows where I am at all times and controls what I think, what I can say, what I put in my body. I do not consent to this version of reality. I will not be part of it.
The real front line is about personal power and self-sovereignty. Reclaiming our power from the unelected Silicon Valley AI/tech, media and pharmaceutical executives, who have acquired greater power over every aspect of our lives, with hardly any oversight.
We need to come terms with the immense power that is accumulating in Google and Facebook to influence, manipulate and control what people think. Even that most Machiavellian of realpolitik bureaucrats Henry Kissinger recently wrote: ‘The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order. But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even more sweeping technological revolution whose consequences we have failed to fully reckon with, and whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms’. He who controls the algorithms controls the world.
This is not a world I want to create. I do not consent. For sure this crisis has brought out the very best in humanity, with neighbours helping one another, communities coming together, increasing food security and developing a great sense of solidarity. But we cannot, Pollyanna-like, ignore the potential for the slide into a dystopian surveillance society.
What sort of society do we want our children and grandchildren to inhabit? This is the real front line. We have had a great opportunity for reflection and collective dreaming, for visioning and birthing a new society and new reality. The birthing process of the new world will be messy and painful, as births always are, but the baby will be born.
We are not powerless. We have the power to rewrite the story and create a beautiful world for future generations. Let us make our collective vision a beautiful one.
