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Is Civilization Unraveling? |
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By Jeffrey Tucker |
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Commentary
This weekend, some climate activists entered the Louvre Museum in Paris and splashed carrot soup on the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. To be sure, if such a thing happened at the Whitney Museum in New York City, no one would have noticed the difference. But the Mona Lisa is the most revered painting in all Christendom (that’s a word you don’t hear anymore!). The painting wasn’t damaged because it is behind bullet-proof glass. Still, there is something spooky about this event. Sure, you can chalk it up to brain-damaged climate activists who were likely doped up on something, as most are. Part of the drugs they take is ideology as currently preached by the World Economic Forum, Harvard, and the University of Paris. These stupid kids are merely putting into practice what they are being taught. And what are they being taught? Put aside all the convoluted language and intricate theorizing in giant treatises, it comes down to one message. Civilization is corrupt. Beauty is a lie. Freedom is exploitation. Rights are myths. All institutions that people regard as serving their needs are actually wrecking mother nature and poisoning all things. Therefore none of it has value. It all needs to go. They are so convinced of this worldview that they think they are engaged in principled and effective activism by attempting to wreck the world’s most beloved painting. You could call it insanity but then you would have to say the same about large amounts of the consensus among the globe’s top elites in media, government, nonprofit foundations, and academia. This rot is dominant among them all. How in the world did we get to this place? Years ago, I did a deep dive into the conservative doom literature of the times, which warned of the coming of fundamental attacks on the values of the West. I took them all seriously, but only intellectually seriously. I never truly believed that the threat would leak from academia into the real world, and finally affect our public and private lives. And yet here we are. I had wildly underestimated the power of truly bad ideas. They don’t stay in the classroom. If the kids in these chairs, cheating their way through school and popping pills to do all-nighters, end up being hired by prestigious institutions in government and finance, they come to inhabit the commanding heights of the world’s most powerful institutions. In my most naive period of thought during the rise of digital technology, I had convinced myself that all these threats were just noise. We would overcome them all through wild innovation and the unleashing of the creative energy of entrepreneurship in the digital space. In this case, old-time institutions like universities hardly matter. That’s the old world whereas we were building the new one. This outlook blinded me to the rot underneath our feet. The new digital companies grew and were eventually captured by the enemy. The media played along. The administrative state which no one elected sunk its claws into everything and everybody. This is how a wicked worldview was eventually foisted on the world. It all seemed to happen while we slept. There were warning signs that all of this was coming after 2016. The people elected Donald Trump. He was never my favorite, as you probably know, but he was the president who the people elected. We are supposed to live in a system in which the people control the government, not the reverse. Almost immediately it became obvious that the entire establishment would treat his presidency as if it were fake. They said the Russians magically elected him. They said he was a bad man and therefore could not be in charge. The press was constantly hostile, day in and day out. The whole of the administrative bureaucracy set out to defy his every edict. |
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It wasn’t just opposition to his policies. It was opposition to a whole ethos and philosophy of life, which is rooted in something authentically American. It was at this point that the whole of the establishment decided to pretend Donald Trump didn’t exist, or perhaps just work toward his non-existence. Something similar was happening in the UK at the same time. The voters supported getting away from governance by the European Commission and going back to being the same old self-governing group of states called England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. They would manage just fine. Boris Johnson was elected Prime Minister with one mandate: implement Brexit. The deep state was determined to resist. For Trump’s part, he arrived woefully unprepared and naive. He believed that the system still worked. Now that he was president, he would be in charge. He gradually learned otherwise. It took him a long time to come to terms with the depth of conspiracy that surrounded him. Late in his first term, exhausted of the endless fights, the deep bureaucracy figured out the path to rolling him and wrecking his presidency. They tricked him into issuing lockdown orders. The same thing happened in the UK. The lockdowns did more than that. They introduced to the whole world the notion that not even the most outrageous violations of traditional rights and liberties were off the table. The world can change on a dime. We can try completely bonkers experiments on the whole of the human population. We can even cause all corporate media, tech, academia, and medicine to go along with it, while punishing and silencing all dissent. The point was not to achieve anything really. There never was an end game. The whole point was to illustrate what was possible. It was the global imposition of shock and awe. And it went on and on until the perceived vandals like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were driven from office once and for all, so that the administrative state and its wicked agenda for the rest of us would then have a free hand. Since those days, the world has been on fire with wars, mass migrations, huge political divisions, and a frantic effort on the part of people the world over to claw back the peace and serenity that we all once knew. We are having some success but it is very limited. The reason is that the people in charge have come to think of the people they rule as insurrectionists, an unruly mob that must be contained lest their revolution fail and all their efforts are in vain. They underscored the point in the absurd kangaroo court over the supposed January 6, 2021 “insurrection.” And there have been efforts now to keep Donald Trump off the ballot by citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, written to keep Confederate officers from holding office, later overridden by Congress. The same section of the amendment bars from political participation anyone who “aids and abets” an insurrection. This is likely another path to how the real vandals will smear anyone who wants to stop them. The revolution against civilization takes many forms, some calm and seemingly scientific and others preposterous and directly destructive. They speak of the need to stop climate change but the real target is your standard of living, even your ability to stay warm in your home or travel distances. They speak of the need for “sustainable” agriculture but they are really going after traditional farming and ranching, even your ability to afford beef and pork. They talk of diversity, equity, and inclusion but it is really about targeting for exclusion an entire group of people who are resisting the great reset. Elites sniff at this sort of talk, as if it is all too extreme and alarmist. They say we should just calm down and relax because everything is going to be fine. But what if they are wrong? What if there is no turning back from where the elites are taking us? I ask because there really is no turning back. One core pillar of civilized living—even the basics like freedom and human rights—are gone, there is no getting them back, not for generations long after we have passed from this earth. Those are some big thoughts but these are emergency times. The attempted defacing of the Mona Lisa might seem like a cheap prank by some crazy kids but I fear it is symbolic of much more. How much more of this do we need to see before we realize that these are the times that could change the whole course of history? We either do something or watch it all unravel. |
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