Who are they? They are Left and Right liberals – the UniParty.

What are they up to? They are serving their own ideological and financial interests and their politician sock puppets (to coin a phrase) are doing likewise – lining their pockets on the way through. All the while enforcing their liberal, globalist, progressive ideology on the rest of us.

BIDDING

What they are not doing is governing in our interests and doing our bidding. We are doing theirs.

Why are they doing this? Well, as Lord Acton suggested, power corrupts and all that. The rest can be explained neatly by public choice theory.

The elite theorists of democracy – Mosca, Pareto and Michels, mainly – explain the broad “how”.

The modern, detailed “how” becomes pretty clear, too, with a little thought.

The following tools of the trade are routinely deployed by the political class to ensure that the light never shines through the almost non-existent cracks in the cave walls.

These include: Gaslighting; memory holing; word salads and propaganda that doesn’t even need to be that clever anymore; claiming “hindsight” to explain errors; instilling collective guilt on those subjugated; outsourcing responsibility; stonewalling; fomenting division and doubling down.

Not to mention: Covering up; de-tooling dissidents, opponents and the coming generation; look over there and revisionism.

Quite the suite of strategies and tactics. Quite the toolkit.

Instilling collective guilt is an interesting one.

Eugyppius and James Brown have been talking about this recently.

Here is James Brown: “The doctrine of collective guilt, which functions much like original sin, is corrosive precisely because it assigns a debt no one can discharge.”

For the German Eugyppius, the collective guilt question relates (naturally) to the Nazi elephant in the modern German room.

The guilt is passed down, cross-generationally, and with heavy top-down insistence by Left-liberal globalists like Merkel and Merz that all subsequent generations of Germans not only share guilt over crimes they did not commit, but (conveniently) are forced to banish the emerging populists of the “far Right”, like AfD.

For others, collective guilt means endless, purposeless guilt over global whitey crimes. In every case, it is collective guilt strategically deployed for updated ideological ends. Enforced through soft and hard power.

It is the gift that keeps on giving for the political class.

If ever there was a defining characteristic of the age, it is the coming of collective guilt in roughly the proportion that individual responsibility has declined.

In these identitarian times, we have not just group rights, but also group victimhood, group enemies (white men, colonisers) and group guilt.

Despite the fact that none of us did the bad stuff, or ever voted for the punishment. Eugyppius calls it a “guilt cult”.

This is all very well. But one big question remains.

In the age of humanism, rationalism and the Enlightenment, how does it work that the ruling class needs tyranny (and the tactics outlined above) to impose its model of modern society on its people?

Particularly in light that most people, most of the time, think that their rulers are evil shits?

PAID-UP

Don’t their woke, globalist, green world views and policies not simply sell themselves? Clearly not, as the current polling across the West clearly shows.

The ruling Parties retain office only with the not inconsiderable aid of a biased and paid-up media, a compliant education sector and electoral systems no longer fit for purpose.

A related question is how on earth do the ruling progressives sleep at night – and sell their crazy views and evil policies to themselves.

The answer, I think, lies in learned cognitive dissonance. By a whole ruling class. And by its many fellow travellers.

They are all in on it. It is intellectually disreputable, of course, but it serves higher ideological purposes.

Two recent examples serve to illustrate the power of this progressive technique.

The first is the ongoing debate in Western Australia over the deaths of three little Aboriginal children in 2022.

The mother did it, in a meth fuelled rage. The police, the grandmother and associated legal eagles, continue to fight for an inquiry into the compliance of the government machine in achieving the deaths of three innocents.

The problem for the State? It is a challenge to the myth of the stolen generations.

The dissonance? We cannot care for the children, but this is justified because to take the children from the black parent would be racist. Even to give the custody of the children to a black grandparent.

It’s okay to remove at-risk children from abusive parents when they are white. But not if they’re black.

How do the woke bureaucrats defend their inaction?

The second example was the recent, sad death of the old ABC newsreader, Richard Morecroft.

One story let the truth slip. Richard died at a time “of his choosing”. It was almost a casual, posthumous endorsement of the right to die legislation. Whatever.

Two isolated examples of an underlying reality.