Have you noticed the curious stage of history we’ve reached where freedom has become a dirty word? The preferred spirit of the age is a contrived, top-down collective hug that feels increasingly like a chokehold.
From the ivory towers to the local coffee shop, a new generation of thinkers is dusting off the failed scripts of the 20th century, adding a fresh coat of anti-human paint, and wondering why the engine is smoking. Whether it’s the cult of the State or the new-age prophets who view human life as a planetary glitch, the target is always the same: The Individual.
What’s up, really, with the grand, tragic human tradition of trading our birthright of liberty for a bowl of government-subsidized thin gruel?
It’s as if we’ve collectively forgotten that every utopian shortcut in history eventually leads to a dead end, usually guarded by men in uniforms. So goes the ongoing collision between high-minded idealism and the cold, hard pavement of reality, where common sense is treated like a contraband luxury.
Today, for insights and perspective on these matters, we return with another guest article from our old friend Joel Bowman and his Notes From the End of the World. Inside Bowman navigates the “isms,” the idiocies, and the slow-motion swan dive of the West.
Here’s Mr. Bowman, on the case, from Buenos Aires, Argentina…
Enjoy!
MN Gordon
P.S. After giving Mr. Bowman’s article a read, please head over to his website and subscribe to his newsletter for all his latest musings on freedom, liberty, ruin in a nation, and the future of the west. We have no financial arrangement with Bowman and do not profit from publishing his work. We simply find his observations and writing to be valuable and believe you will too.
—
Barbarians Inside the Gate
Collectivist claptrap, blue-haired baristas and the road to serfdom…
“The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
~ Friedrich Hayek from The Road to Serfdom (1944)
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina…
Welfare at home and warfare abroad… fiscal insanity and monetary madness… collectivist “thinking” and the “warm glow of socialism”…
Many and varied are the means by which a civilization tears itself asunder, dear reader, embarking on what Friedrich Hayek called, in his work of the same name, published during the depths of WWII, “the road to serfdom.”
And always at the centerpiece of man’s self-destructive impulses is the negation of the individual in favor of an “all-knowing” state. The only problem is that, far from the picture of omniscient benevolence, the naked State is merely ignorance multiplied. Wrote Hayek:
“The case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us.”
And yet, down the road Homo credulus goose-steps headlong, convinced by his intellectuals and browbeaten by his elites, made to believe that top-down organization is the way to go… that if he only places more trust in his political overlords, surrenders more of his liberties to the State, and votes harder in the next election, his safe passage will be guaranteed.
Anything, anything but the freedom of individuals to choose their own paths for themselves! Naturally, such radical self-determination presupposes cooperation and collaboration… only – critically – without the compulsion of the State… and the State is nothing if not a monopoly on force. Hayek, again:
“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization… but against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization—the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”
See rent controls… price caps… labor laws… forced, or “closed shop,” unionization… income, corporate, wealth, sales etc. taxes… sanctions, duties and trade tariffs… permits and licensing, in which the State forbids you a right, then charges you for the very same privilege… to say nothing of central banking, interest rate manipulation, capital controls and the entire Mamdanization of the free market.
Hollowed Institutions
In these and many ways besides, like a dipsomaniac at an open bar, it seems man cannot resist helping himself to death. And so the road to serfdom remains the path most traveled.
Of course, not all roads diverging in the woods are of equal length and terrain. Sometimes the way is long and winding. Other times, the path is short… and the cliff steep.
Consider, for example, the abrupt rise and fall of the formidable Third Reich. A centralized command system built to reign for a thousand years, Hitler’s deranged experiment in National Socialism survived barely a dozen.
Though scarcely acknowledged in the hallowed halls of our long-since hollowed academic institutions, Hitler himself was neither a partisan of the so-called right nor the so-called left, those mistakenly depicted opposites, but instead drew from the “pure” (that is, totalitarian) elements of both quarters. In his own words:
“From the camp of bourgeois tradition, [nazism] takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism.”
The Führer distrusted capitalism as being susceptible to flourishes of self-expression, preferring instead a socialist-style, state-directed economy designed to subordinate any and all individualistic inclinations to the collective will of the Volk.
All told, his ambitious militaristic expansion probably peaked in the fall of 1942, when most of continental Europe was either under Nazi occupation… or complicit in its crimes.
But for all its far-reaching designs, it was not even three years later when, enjoying the view from his Berlin bunker in the spring of 1945, the Führer sat down to savor his final meal… generally believed to be a cyanide entrée followed by a main course of copper-jacketed lead, delivered by his trusty Walther PPK.
The Political Pyre
Yet another collectivist ideology tossed on the flaming heap of history’s failed experiments, though by no means the last.
Marxism-Leninism in the USSR… Maoism in China… Castroism in Cuba… Peronism in Argentina… Chavismo for the poor and blighted Venezuela…
The names of the Dear Leaders change, just as their personality cults come and go, but the central conceit remains the same:
The State knows best what individuals need… and stands at the ready to give it to ‘em, good and hard.
That such command-driven programs always and everywhere end in misery, privation, and bloodshed is hardly worth mentioning (mostly because those who advocate for them are, to borrow David Bowie’s phrase, “immune to your consultations”).
Thumbing through the dusty pages of history, one might think man already had ample means by which to impoverish his people, ruin his nation and generally make an ass of himself. And yet, like a wide-eyed gambler discovering a fail-proof system, there is always a new ‘ism to tempt the do-gooder class into action, quick, sharp…and stupid.
Not content with simply relying on “old school” instruments of civilizational self-immolation, a cocksure generation of “thinkers” has lately risen to the challenges of the 21st Century, armed with a gruel-like hodgepodge of reheated, reconfigured ideologies to derail progress, stymie development and generally retard the pursuit of human flourishing.
Many of these ideas do away with the nettlesome rationale proffered by such passé ‘isms as the aforementioned lot which, as calamitous as they were, at least pretended to some utopian, human-centric aim – the New Soviet Man of Russia, for example, or the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) of Nazi Germany, free of social conflict and internal class struggle.
Today’s Great Causes are, meanwhile, of another ilk entirely in that they are overtly anti-human in nature.
Gaia Complex
There’s climate alarmism, for example, a dreary Neo-Malthusianism which posits human life as the gravest threat to a benignant Mother Earth, anthropomorphized as the pure and gentle Gaia, that autochthonous Greek goddess who arose from Chaos at the dawn of time.
Glimpsed through this cracked lens, humans are nothing more than a cancer from which the planet must be cured, the very carbon that ought to be destroyed in order that the earth may finally heal. Naturally, the treatment requires starving billions of parasitic humans by denying them access to cheap, reliable, abundant energy, such that nature – pink in tooth and rainbow in claw – can “rewild.”
Consider green queen and famed chimp whisperer, Jane Goodall, pining ever so glibly for the good ol’ days, before ~7.5 billion living, breathing human beings fouled everything up with their… existence:
“All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”
Then there’s beloved BBC blowhard, the double-knighted Sir David Attenborough who, despite his solutions to what ails us, nevertheless remains stubbornly among the living… at age 99:
“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder—and ultimately impossible to solve—with ever more people.”
And who can forget eco-mentalist and doom peddler, Paul R. Ehrlich, to whom the greatest threat to the abstract idea of “humanity” is… actual human beings.
“The population explosion is the most serious crisis facing humanity.”
Blue-Haired Barista Brigade (BBB)
Closely associated with this masochistic death wish is the cult of antinatalism, which holds that bringing children into this world—rife as it is with anthropogenic disasters—is so immoral an act that it must be averted at all costs, up to and including the future of the species.
We speak here of the septum-led, intersectionalized martyrs/baristas who look upon the struggles of their ancestors – generation after generation scratching in the mud, desperately eking out a meagre existence, only to be ravaged by plague and famine or slaughtered in trenches, their kin perishing for want of medicine or basic hygiene, braving superstition and natural disaster alike for millennia upon miserable millennia, yet driven by the fire of life to survive, to raise and nurture their offspring, standing guard against the dying of the light, yearning to pass along the genetic torch, flickering in the harsh winds of history – all so the ze/zer cipher serving your morning coffee can rage quit the future of life on earth in a righteous eye roll of imagined indignation because, “Uh, I can’t even…”
And somehow, even this selfie-stick brand of existential narcissism blanches beside other dark forces welling up across the west, where the craven lust for total cultural annihilation has risen to the status of supreme and suicidal virtue.
For more about the future of the west… and what’s really at stake…
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World…
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
founder of Notes from the End of the World
P.S. For all of Bowman’s latest musings head over to his website. While you’re there, subscribe to his newsletter for all his latest analysis and insights as they’re reported in real time.
