THE COVID State, apart from its destruction of lives, societies and economies, has caused a rethink of our explanations of political life.
What we assumed to be the basis of liberal democratic polities, the social contract, if you will, has been rendered obsolete.
- Australia faces a crisis of governance of epic proportions.
- Politicians no longer respect the rights of free citizens.
- A radical response may be to refuse to pay taxes.
Forty odd years ago, longer than I care to remember, I wrote a political science thesis on Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek and the State.
Hayek and Nozick were classical liberals, and concerned to promote and defend the liberal, minimal State.
FREEDOM
Nozick was a Harvard philosophy professor. Hayek was the doyen of Austrian economists.
They had little in common except for their love of individual freedom. Today we would call them libertarians. What would they make of the State in 2022?
My remaining faith in them would suggest they would be appalled.
Nozick wrote his most famous book (in 1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia, as a rejoinder to his Lefty Harvard colleague (and friend), the even more famous philosopher, John Rawls.
Rawls had penned a Left-liberal classic, ostentatiously titled A Theory of Justice.
Nozick’s rejoinder was, pretty much, a book length hit piece. Arguably, Nozick was more a philosophical dilettante than a committed libertarian, as some of his later writings confirmed.
He just wanted to “prove” that Rawls’ defence of social democracy was baseless. It was an intellectual exercise. A challenge.
Hayek was an economist and a philosophical liberal appalled by the coming of the overweening State.
Perhaps his most famous work was The Road to Serfdom, published during the Nazi atrocities and wars but seeing an equal danger to freedom in the coming of the interventionist Western State.
There are lessons for us today.
Nozick envisioned a minimalist State, in which individuals, families (of all stripes) and communities would be free to pursue their own visions and preferences free from autocratic State power. He called this “utopia”.
CRUSHING
Hayek focused on the way in which State power can grow surreptitiously, without anyone noticing, even in liberal democracies, and potentially crushing the lives of individuals.
Today we face a crisis of epic proportions.
The COVID State, under the cover of liberal democracy and representative government, has suddenly, in two short years, assumed totalitarian control of our lives.
From the curfews, to the police brutality, to the vaccine passports, to the enforced unemployment, to the lockdowns, to the bans on travel, to the public health rules, to the border closures.
An Orwellian outcome to which we have supinely submitted, like rabbits in the headlights.
The image of the slowly boiling frog is appropriate, neatly conforming to Hayek’s underlying theme in The Road to Serfdom.
Nozick’s theory of “utopian” self-governing communities living under the benign direction of a minimalist State has resonance today.
Increasingly, individuals and groups now harassed by a far-from-liberal State are seeking an escape route.
Several solutions have emerged. One, pre-COVID, was the notion of the “Benedict Option” proposed by the American conservative Rod Dreher.
Dreher was concerned with the fate of Christians in a post-Christian world. He suggested, along the lines of St Benedict, that people bullied by the secular State, retreat to the cave, as it were, and start again.
GHASTLY
To live lives distant from the (to them) ghastly woke, anti-Christian, leftist State.
COVID and its Big State fascist response has given fresh impetus to Dreher’s ideas.
These ideas also appear in the notion of “parallel societies” proposed by the Australian Brendan Moloney and the Canadian James Corbett, among others.
The idea is to remove oneself in all areas possible from the tentacles of the COVID autocracy.
Remove yourself from the legacy media and its relentless COVID propaganda, choose social media platforms that respect freedom and diverse opinions, buy local to thwart the corporates, cling to freedom-loving small businesses which will actually service non-vaccinated customers, indulge in the informal economy, and so on. Ditch Facebook. Embrace Telegram. Forget Google. Use duckduckgo. Refuse to use masks. Refuse to sign in to shops with QR codes. Find work, if you can, with freedom loving employers.
A more radical approach would be – don’t pay your taxes.
It is the State that has abandoned its core principles of the social contract, in which the citizens consent to governance by rule-following governments who respect, above all else, the rights of free citizens.
Can anyone with half a brain recognise these attributes in our current governing class? No, I didn’t think so.
Corbett’s and Moloney’s parallel societies conform to Nozick’s utopian communities, to a tee.
The great liberal philosopher has turned out to have plotted a solution to our COVID fascist dilemma.
OVERREACHING
And Hayek has described, in graphic detail, the mechanics and the art of the overreaching State con.
They both bear close re-reading in the 2020s.
It is a sad fact that aspiring so-called “liberal” politicians, the third-tier careerists, frequently quote the liberal greats in support of their candidacy.
Yet they have all, with very, very few exceptions (like Antic, Rennick and Christensen) ditched the core philosophies of those whom they are pleased to have quoted.
Just look at the so-called “Modern Liberals”, as one example. They are either charlatans or liars.PC
About 45 years ago I wrote a letter to Grassroots Magazine to the effect that to remove onself from society politically or go bush and become isolated would not allow one to escape from its tentacles, or words to that effect. The hippies, as the were then called, the grassrooters, the new agers, etc., escapists almost all, have de-enfranchised themselves and cannot now complain that their children and children’s children are stuck with the result of several generations which, since the Sixties at least, have chosen to leave the political field wide open to the new robber barons. No, I’m not talking about Twiggy Forrest and Gina Rinehart, they are mere opportunists and members of the new robber barons fanclub. There are many others who are absent from society in a political sense. A few use their time well, for humanity’s sake. They are quiet thinkers and philosophers-some even write something worthwhile. However, quantum philosophically speaking, well-balanced and directed deep thought in itself is bound to make a contribution which most of us can now only guess at. It is simply impossible to prove what action,and to what degree, human thought has upon society at large through the quantum or spiritual realm. However, the hippies and other escapists were mostly, as evidence would have it, into turning away from society at large and leave that society to its own devices.
We now know that there is no escape from tyranny. Go to the south of South America and you’ll find the new robber barons in situ. The Amazone forest is a place to lose oneself, oké.
Now, for the rest who are not escaping from society physically, there are a great many options available, and, indeed, are being made available. These escapist options have been made available since the beginnings of human society, when politics was in its birthing rites. This was the beginning of religion, the priesthood and religious institutions. In other words, spiritual-psychological manipulation of other individuals, groups, tribes and eventually larger ideologically inducted groupings.
Now we are here; almost everybody who has a vote, and that includes being able to choose how to spend one’s time, money and mental-emotional abilities and work at the potentials for same, has chosen to escape the exercise of one’s being as a member of society at large and the exercise of one’s position as a potentially free and independent-thinking citizen. These escapes are innumerable. They are consumerism, religion, academia, politics, business, hobbies, drugs, mind drugs, repetitive behaviour and so on. The facts are, few people are switched on to what influence in the bigger scheme of things they have, willy-nilly. Let’s face it, the majority by far doesn’t know, or care to know. There is a power pyramid of influence which the majority unconsciously fit into. This pyramid is not an accident of history, but a conscious construct. Constructed with intent, consciously and purposefully, by people who cooperate in this kind of endeavour. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s simply common sense for people who want power over others. Some want to be at or near the top, but the majority are content to be somewhere at their personal level of achievement in this pyramid. In Europe, the struggle for civil rights has been long and bloody. Tribal democracy on the North-West Sea littoral flourished in tribal settings until overtaken by larger and, increasingly, autocratic systems of governance. Eventually, after the Treaty of Westfalen and the development of nation-states, democracy found another foothold in a more sophisticated sytem of self-government. The rest is history. People have left politics to political operatives. These were always to a degree beholden to International elites, or, to be exact, an international elite which, in due course, became globalised and somewhat fractious and inefficient. That was remedied in due course, of course. Now the elites are better organised than ever, forming a cabal of proto-uber rulers, who will be in charge until they fall out. “If you’re not (allowed to be) one of us, you’re against us”, is their motto.
There is no escape. Before long we’ll be forced to pay for the air we breathe. Yes, go and sit in a cave somewhere and live on stale air, until the pyramid scam finds a use for you, even if it was only for organ harvesting. I think, to escape one’s responsibility as a human being is to leave the field wide open for tyrants to organise themselves and build a pyramid of big tyrants, not so big tyrants and heaps of little tyrants willing to fit in, or unwilling, at least, to bear the consequences of refusing to fit in and be told what to do, say, think, or not do, say, think, as the case may be, and put up with whatever is put upon them from higher up and dutifully pass it on further down the pyramid scam. Society is now fully a mass of locked-in scammers. But we don’t have a choice, they say, if confronted-if they will allow it at all. Hmm, think about it.
C O V I D V A X X I N E S Update on Criminal Case from Mark Sexton – 16th January, 2022
ON the 16th of January 2022, retired Police Constable Mark Sexton recorded an update regarding the criminal case which is now a live criminal investigation.
Retired Police Constable Mark Sexton made a criminal complaint to Hammersmith police station on the 20th December 2021. The complaint of Gross Negligent Manslaughter and Serious Misconduct in public office were accepted and a crime number was issued accordingly.
Here is Mark Sexton’s update which he recorded on the morning of Sunday the 16th of January 2022.
Watch Video in full story….
Mark Sexton has said that he had made this case public in order to assist and encourage all of the victims who want to make criminal complaints to come forward and do so.
This information, he said, can be provided to the Police as supporting proof of a live criminal investigation taking place by The Metropolitan Police. He has therefore kept the public in the loop with regular updates since first making the complaint.
To enable the readers of the Expose to be informed of the proceedings, you can read those updates in Mark Sextons’s own words below.
Diary of Updates Regarding the criminal Complaint
On Monday the 20th of December 2021 at Hammersmith Police Station in London a criminal complaint was made.
Continue for full story and watch Video >
https://notaakhirzaman.com/9199/
Hang on, I thought everything was NOT BROKEN? That’s what monarchists claim anyway.
Surely the buck stops at the top, with the most senior auhtority.
What is Ms Windsor doing to fix things?
“I thought everything was NOT BROKEN?”
It’s ironic that you should say that, given how broken you yourself are.
Why don’t you go and find a forum that welcomes pompous fools who are full of their own importance, incapable of critical reasoning, and devoid of intellect? (Who knows, you might finally discover an audience that appreciates the ad nauseam regurgitation of mindless ill-informed twaddle.)