Step Over The Sleeping

Once committed, we are invincible

CJ Hopkins is right, in his article The Road to Totalitarianism, to demand we cast aside quibbles over mutants or the experimental nature of shots. We should stop critiquing the externalizing of personal responsibility into deified abstracts like “The Science." It is time to pick a side in the face of totalitarianism.

His timely appeal confronts the sad reality of the grey sponge that passes for a lot of people's brains. Can they see the dilemma? Can they understand the question that Hopkins is asking? Sadly: no.

It comes down to perception or what we see when you and I look at the same thing.

When I look at vaccine passports I see Soviet residence permits. I see police stopping people randomly in the street, scanning their papers for irregularities and then inventing offences in order to gouge a fine.

I see people unable to leave their city of birth or, if they can, paying a babushka to register them in her apartment so they can get fake documents. A registration in the big city is like winning the lottery, a ticket to deep chocolate, people would say.

I hear lovers cry as the state gives them jobs at other ends of the country. Like my niece wept over Brexit when she feared Britain leaving the European Union would stop her marrying her German Max. She is right to cry but she's blind to the threat. Residence permits lead directly to work permits and that leads to the state assigning you a job. It would take Soviet couples years to finally land a job in the same place.

I see corruption and inefficiency and unproductive bureaucracy all in the name of central planning. I have spent days queuing in rank corridors, pleading with stone-faced officials, being ignored, waiting in a corner until I handed over a chunk of my earnings to the policeman or the tax man. While down the street, militsiya and buildings inspectors searched for infractions, hounding hairdressers and shoe repairers from basement to dingy basement.

Why do I see this and you, perhaps, did not until now? Because I lived that — and the fact that you’re reading this probably means your lived experience would enlighten me.

Our level of knowledge, our life experience, determines what we are able to comprehend.

***
Joe Blow shuffles into view. He thinks lockdown's a pain but he wears a mask and he collects his stimulus payment. He suspects the pandemic's exaggerated and he doesn't think the Covid vaccines were tested properly. He holds his tongue and he doesn't protest. He is part of the majority.

Every lie and every death could be documented in an affidavit and tied with a scarlet bow dipped in his own grandmother’s blood. That would not sway Joe Blow. You could put a gun to a minister’s head and videotape him admitting to killing entire wards of old people with midazolam. It would be water off a duck's back.

Joe's idea of what's reasonable is conditioned by the terms of his contract with the status quo. It doesn’t change, whatever he reads in the press, because he has calculated his prospects of starving. He thinks he is more likely to starve if he doesn't listen to what the government tells him. As former Pfizer scientist Dr Michael Yeadon put it, a person will never join a rebellion if he thinks the government can turn off the food. This is why Aldous Huxley said a scientific dictatorship has no natural end.

The biggest reason for Joe's stubbornness is that Joe doesn’t believe anything that has not happened to him personally.

As a playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin of all places the Mr Hopkins can describe better than I the willing suspension of disbelief. Accordingly, the audience has its own knowledge of how life happens but lays preconceptions aside.

Does Joe? The executive, the professor, the doctor, the policeman feeling your collar — he's Joe and he knows nothing. He's the smiling face in the World Economic Forum video forecasting a life of blissful ignorance in 2030, nine years away. No need to wait.

We talk of people’s worldview but Joe has no weltanschauung, a conceptual representation, a theoretical exposition of the world and his place in it. He hasn’t got a fucking clue.

Excuse me. I think metropolitan types overuse this bijou of emphasis but on this occasion I think even Fowler’s Modern English Usage would defer to me.

We have to face the fact that in our society, larded with paper qualifications, souped in information, most people are spoon-fed instructions on what and how to think. By relieving people of responsibility the western social democracies have opened their heads, Monty Python-style, and removed the brain.

This is our problem, not Joe's, because ultimately he doesn't give a shit. He is going to defer to big papa government or whatever Rockefeller operative is presented as the face in charge.

You can rehash cause and effect until you lose your voice or the ability to write. It makes no difference. It isn’t a matter of what people think. Most don’t.

***
What do we do? We face the fact there are rather few of us.
With few people that limits the number of options.
Confronted with the state, it leaves us vulnerable.
Vulnerability puts a gun to our head and tells us to make a choice.
Making that choice empowers us.
Once committed, we are invincible.
For in making your peace, you have already discounted the cost of losing.
Every positive result is a step towards victory.