Note: Trying new font.
In the 1990s, I bought Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. And while I've learned snippets of the book and its characters over the years, I never got around to reading the book. I plan to finally do so very soon. I have piles of books and articles and figured I'd sneak this one in because there might be some lessons to draw from it.
For now, suffice it to state that the gist of the book is about the retrenchment of man as the world shrugs.
This got me thinking about 15-minute cities, the rise of the medical technocrat, and how they're conspiring to achieve the abolition of man.
There are all sorts of moral and ethical implications to what's being considered in the so-called 'new world order'. This includes the WHO's revised pandemic treaty, which appears to give it more broad powers that could conceivably usurp or at least sideline national sovereignty. This falls in line with the notion that there must be a global response for every emergency declared. This sounds like a nice gig for the corporate-medical complex. Everything will have a top-down, one-size-fits-all solution ordered from the WHO, even if a local community is not affected by a declared emergency. Everyone must comply. I don't know how realistic this plan is, but it's a plan they have. I consider leaders who sign onto this to be fools, if not traitors, to their populations. Naturally, the United States and Canada support the revised treaty given the sorry excuse for leadership currently in place in both countries. Flushing it out in order to form a plausible, logical, and lucid idea around these complex concepts demands much sober thinking.
A good place to start is with C.S. Lewis, who wrote about how we teach critical thinking and how moral philosophy fits into it in The Abolition of Man.
He was not sanguine, shall we say?
He explores how we've constructed our moral framework around the idea of, for example, 'man conquering nature''. However, on the way to triumph, his soul was compromised. All that's achieved is the abolition of man.
The only way to avoid this fate, Lewis argued, was for men to be men. And for this, he needs to be taught how to become one. Children must learn what is good and bad (i.e., differentiating between right and wrong). It doesn't come naturally to humans. This position is ancient in its beliefs. A person who doesn't get this formal training, therefore, cannot be a man. This allows him to proceed and take up actions that in fact injure what it is to be a man; human. Think robots. Robots threaten to make men secondary in the scheme of life. They allow robots to exist because man lacks a strong moral and ethical foundation. He doesn't grasp what it means to be human.
I would add a free human.
During the zeitgeist, we see this with the outright and brutal assault on freedom as a concept and value. Read the comments of most (left-leaning) mainstream news outlets. There are a disconcerting amount of people who lash out at the concept of freedom, reducing it to a politically partisan issue. This fundamental breakdown of one of our most cherished and timeless values—a value humans have been fighting to attain for centuries—is The natural state of man is liberty. The natural state of governments that rule nations is tyranny, which points to the miseducation of generations of students. We're teaching them to distrust with hostility and liberty. To them, being free means being selfish. And it's, in part, the selfishness brought upon by freedom that puts us all in danger. For example, people declining to take a vaccine, exercising their medical autonomy, threaten public health. The Freedom Convoy, therefore, was naturally going to be seen as a threat to the miseducated. As one person—a paediatrician—once said to me, 'Your freedom of speech ends at my offence.
I submit that an ostensibly free society that takes freedom for granted, at such levels, cannot move forward. If we can't agree on the one value that makes life bearable, then we've opened the floodgates to tyranny. The miseducated believe freedom can be controlled through a series of laws and regulations that keep it in check. Thus, they believe in such false notions as 'balanced speech' and 'hate speech'. There is no such thing. This is nonsense. There's only speech. Stating that speech can be regulated is propaganda. Note that making rules against, say, vulgar language is not the same as regulating speech that derives from an opinion and therefore freedom of expression.
Speech comes in a myriad of functions and expressions. Are we not humans with free will and minds? Are we not free to express our opinions, no matter how vulgar they may be, to those with whom we disagree? We're bound to step on each other's toes. Yes, the miseducated will say it's the degree to which the speech is expressed that determines if it will be regulated! And who measures the degree? Where and how can such arbitrary rules possibly be drawn and applied equally before the law? It's impossible.
Speech becomes subverted to whatever trend in folly grips society, and compelled speech must follow.
Too much freedom of speech leads to racism, climate change denialism, anti-mandates, and so on.
To the miseducated mind and the political opportunists who seek to capitalise on its potential for increased power, the solution is restricted speech, if not outright censorship.
We've been through this before, with the example of the Soviet Union and communism. A period well described by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. But now we're witnessing the ripping apart of freedom within a pluralistic democratic framework.
This has been going on for decades. Slowly, the concept of what it means to be free was dragged under the auspices of 'safetyism' and 'safe spaces'.
And as we've seen during the COVID hysteria,
In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan expressed that even science must be questioned, and the only way this can be conducted and achieved is through freedom.
"Now it's no good to have such rights if they're not used: a right of free speech when no one contradicts the government; freedom of the press when no one is willing to ask tough questions; a right of assembly when there are no protests; universal suffrage when less than half the electorate votes; and separation of church and state when the wall of separation is not regularly repaired. Through disused they can become no more votive objects, patriotic lip-service. Rights and freedoms. Use 'em or lose 'em."
Man has begun his retrenchment. In Charles Murray's 'Human Accomplishment, we detect a decline in achievement, having reached its apex by 1950 in the West. You can't flourish in such a world. Where all thoughts are kept private, you have the recipe for a dark age.
By denying our moral (and even ethical, which is a more opaque notion) obligations that underpin a healthy civilization, we deny our humanity. Hence, the abolition of man.
The rise of the scientific-technocrat, which President Eisenhower warned against, has led us to see through science, for its own sake, the abolition of man. The triumph of The Science has meant the removal of morals and ethics from human affairs.
We saw a perfect example of this in the last three years. It was captured in the following simple calculus: If you do not take this solution to protect and save us, you will not be permitted to work and earn a living; you will not have a right to life. This coerced action is then called having a choice, and choices come with consequences. You were free to not take the vaccine, but the price was to lose your job and your right to life. To be ostracised by friends and family." This may sound logical to the miseducated mind, but it's forcing an action under duress. It's an accepted concept in the law that police, for example, cannot force a confession from a suspect under duress. The same principle applies here. People were forced to undergo medical procedures under duress. It's an example of how shockingly easily ethics crumbled.
It can only happen with the abolition of man.
Moreover, we saw the triumph of pure magic as "men of science" pushed unscientific measures from masks to social distancing, lockdowns, and passports.
Lewis states (bold mine):
"I have described as a 'magician's bargain' that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to nature in exchange for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medical survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magic endeavor and the serious scientific endeaovr are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak.
There is something that unites magic and applied sciences while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem was how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution was knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike, the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a technique; and both, in the practise of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious, such as digging up and mutilating the dead."
We can argue technocrats like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Theresa Tam, here in Canada, are the prime manifestation of how science dissolves human agency. They clearly do not consider personal agency or free will in their decisions and orders. By denying that man is free and independent, it's much easier to see civilization as nothing but a collective organism made up of different people from different perspectives and backgrounds. Or genetics, for that matter. They're the very people C.S. Lewis (and Eisenhower) warned against.
Medical tyranny forces us into a world where the white coats will dictate. Public health has never been a more nebulous term. Merely expressing an opinion that challenges the orthodoxy or dogma of the zeitgeist now increasingly and dangerously being monitored by 'public health' and the medical and pharmaceutical cartels that rule it.
You will have to explain yourself. And we've already seen this happening in the profession as well as in academia, which has long since ceased playing its part in spurring the intellectual curiosity and growth necessary to advance our civilization. Today, they're nothing but the exclusive property of the corporate and state apparatus. Too cowardly to challenge, they succumb to government orders and funding.
For their part, people have offloaded their civic responsibilities to the government and bureaucrats. In doing so, they've abandoned the critical thinking skills necessary to question authority. During COVID, some realized they were too intellectually ill-equipped to mount any kind of pushback against the COVID response. Hence, they simply surrendered to the authorities. With it came the infamous jargon soundbites. Among them, as they were often repeated, were 'fifteen days to flatten the curve', 'save granny," and 'we're in this together'. These were all obvious propaganda slogans. Slogans we learned later by the silent hand of behavioural scientists manipulating the population in the service of politics. The details are in the jargon.
This deference finally settled on, 'What are your credentials?" and 'Are you a doctor?" from people who wouldn't or couldn't challenge the narrative. So they accepted the appeal to authority and refused to understand why anyone else wouldn't do so as well. Obedience by the population paved the way for censorship.
Thomas Jefferson had something to say about this issue:
"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness will insensibly open, cultivate and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved."
And.
"Part of the duty of citizenship is not to be intimidated into conformity. I wish that the oath of citizenship taken by recent immigrants, and the pledge that students routinely recite included something like, "I promise to question everything my leaders tell me.....I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgements."
None of this is possible without freedom of thought and expression, concepts and values, which censorship denies.
If citizens decline to exercise their own free will through the power of their own critical abilities, you get a civilization ready for retrenchment.
Jefferson put it this way:
"If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
John Stuart Mill stated in On Liberty:
'If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up as mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame."
Is this not what is happening in Canada and Jefferson's place of birth, the United States?
We've become infantilized, self-entitled complainers who are too lazy to think and too cowardly to question, choosing instead to meekly hand personal agency to Leviathan.
It is no wonder, then, that the 15-minute city would be 'revived' under such conditions. I say revived because an architect friend of mine explained to me that this is not a new concept. It's been around since the early 20th century and derives from urbanists and urban planning circles, not politics. In fact, it's really a cheap knockoff of the mediaeval town.
The idea behind the 15-minute city is to provide every possible kind of service within a 15-minute walking distance. Its aim is to provide a self-sustaining unit. It's more of a 15-minute pocket, as he described it. And it's a little more restrictive than people think. If your town, for example, produces onions, you shall eat them, as trade will become highly restricted.
He's not entirely sure how practical or feasible it is, but they're going to try it. For now, it seems more like a trend as cities look to rebrand themselves as more 'compact' cities.
As loathe as I am to link to them, Wiki explains it in this way:
"Compact cities are designed to keep residents in close proximity to everything they need for daily living, including shopping, education, housing, and work. The rationale of this urban development model is to reduce the amount of time people spend commuting, reduce fossil fuel usage and to increase the sustainability of developments. While compact cities promise short commutes and sustainable designs, these benefits are not guaranteed. "
Sounds good?
As mentioned, this is reminiscent of medieval towns. And people who know the history of the Middle Ages know that the citizens of such towns never left their towns or traveled. Trade between cities was almost nonexistent. It was only when commercial (mostly Italian) merchants, first on the Volga River, began trading with local economies along the river Later trade blossomed with the Italian city-states during the Renaissance and the Venetian republic, which monopolised trade routes in the east of Asia. Banking centres and major trade expanded from Italy into other places, including Antwerp and Amsterdam.
This is what we today call capitalism, and the rest is history.
With the dubious and tenuous assertions made by climate change advocates and the mythical consensus, there are calls to become more 'local'. In many ways, we were already becoming more local. The 'eat local' and 'buy local' movements have been thriving for at least 30 years now. If we want culture and society to be 'local," then does it not follow that politics should be too? In other words, more decentralisation is needed not just from a national federal entity (i.e., Washington and Ottawa) but from state and provincial ones as well. In other words, we become city-states again, or mediaeval towns. Or, if the architects of the 'new normal' or 'global reset' have their way, a new feudal system.
It's one thing for such concepts to be in the hands of urbanists and local municipalities, but it's quite another when they become politicized. Which is the great danger here. Politics combined with the abolition of man makes for dystopia. This is where all the potentially nefarious dystopian scenarios begin to play out. To the person who only naively sees the "good' in such plans, they cannot see the 'bad'. We swing back to Lewis here.
Recall that we're no longer human. We're to be controlled in the service of bringing nature to heel and kneeling before godless men. They are not, remember, men, but people with no morals or ethics.
In other words, the problem with the 15-minute city comes when man is at his weakest point as a sovereign, critical-thinking individual.
This is why digital ID can pose a major threat to freedom. A 15-minute city has been characterized, with good reason, as a ghetto. First, they force you in, and then you need to show papers to get out. This could be the plan, as there's already talk of limiting people's mobility. Of course, the authorities that will impose it will exempt themselves from this little trap. Remember, humans are the problem, and therefore they're the solution. That solution is to reduce your 'carbon footprint," and you do this by restricting mobility.
But first, you must indoctrinate people against the 'dangers' of freedom. You must disengage them from this notion. Just like propagandists dehumanise their opponents in order to divide and conquer (see unvaccinated people),
You have to condition people into believing they're not individual humans but cogs in the 'greater good'. For this, just observe how behavioural scientists used the 'nudge theory' to scare people into wearing masks, social distancing, and getting vaccines. Fear and isolation Not courage and contact.
In a 15-minute city, we see a paradise for parasitical authoritarians to abuse power.
In order to truly evolve into a better civilization, we must be free. What good is it to become serfs again? We fought for 1000 years to emancipate ourselves from such conditions. Now we find ourselves slowly reverting back as the neo-Lords and Dukes rise again.
This can only be rebuffed with a rebirth of man that seeks to avoid the abolition of man.
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The state of Canada
I do not doubt that the post I just wrote would run afoul of the 'white coats' of various colleges of physicians and psychological associations.
I'd be marked for a struggle session through psychotherapy.
The abolition of man abandons morals and ethics while denying freedom. In this case, medical autonomy.
If there's to be a rebirth, Canada will not be Florence.
It will follow, but it will always be a step behind.
