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In my post of 12/27/24, I reviewed the work of the great Friedrich Hayek. Now I would like to use that discussion as a springboard to further examine the ongoing collapse of the Western economic and financial system.
Hayek helps us to see economic life for what is is: the “extended order of human cooperation,” as he calls it. This is society’s vast network of ideas, contacts, and exchange; an endless web of human interaction. This order is infinitely complex, and in a constant state of flux; as such, it lies beyond the ability of any single authority to direct it. The extended order has evolved into its current form. Hayek points to the pioneering vision of Adam Smith, who realized that a type of evolution is the driving force behind the genesis and development of economic and other institutions. (Hayek remarked that Smith and similar thinkers were Darwinian before Darwin, and may have influenced the latter.) Think of law, language, and money: none were the result of a unified, conscious plan. Rather, they evolved in a spontaneous, self-ordering process, in a series of adaptations, producing a workable framework in which people could function. The upshot is that economic structures cannot be planned. Interference with the extended order is doomed to failure, and if pushed far enough, will lead to death and destruction. The case of the Soviet Union is obvious enough. But the same principle applies to our current predicament. Consider the extent of the disease: the colossal edifice of central planning in the West, guided by Keynesian economic theory, is sufficient all by itself to guarantee disaster. It has resulted in an activist Federal Reserve, unbacked fiat currency, rampaging inflation, out-of-control debt, asset bubbles galore, and a rapacious government that now accounts for fully half of what passes for an economy. Add to this the other poisons administered to the extended order, such as DEI and the Green-Industrial Complex, to name two of the worst offenders. None of these monstrosities would exist without coercive government interference. Needless to say, they demonstrate a complete disregard, and even contempt, of economic reality. We can point to additional distortions that result from economic illiteracy. One of them is the absurd notion of a “consumer-based economy.” Consumption is a result of wealth creation, not its cause. The people parroting this inversion of reality confuse the fruit of the tree with the tree itself. And our tree is dying, and will continue to wither as long as we concentrate our efforts on simply eating the fruit. Related to the consumer-based nonsense is the notion that China is dependent on the American consumer, and therefore we can punish them by restricting access to our enormous market. This could make sense only if we were exchanging something of value for the imported consumables. If we were paying in gold, or oil, or even manufactured goods of our own, the dependency story might be plausible. However, we “pay” for the goods with depreciating dollars that are conjured up on the keyboards of the government, the Fed, and the banks. And this means expansion of debt, which, ironically, was until recently being funded by the likes of China. They stopped buying Treasuries, but we can always compensate by creating more dollars, inflation be damned. So let me get this straight. We will punish China (and other BRICS countries) by threatening to stop consuming their goods while giving them nothing of value in return. How on earth will they survive? Real-world, Hayekian economics teaches us that wealth is created by production of tangible goods (instead of financial products), savings (instead of consumption), and the use of sound money (instead of unbacked fiat currency). All of which is coordinated by means of true price discovery and other market mechanisms—not by the declarations and schemes of bureaucrats and clueless academics. What is the proper role of government? Mainly to get out of the way. Stop interfering in the extended order. Instead, grease the wheels; facilitate commerce rather than hindering it. Safeguard property rights. Enforce contracts. Prevent crime and fraud. Build and maintain infrastructure. Humanity is not a proper subject for rational central planning. The aggregate of all human action, beliefs, and behavioral patterns is unknowable. These facts, as Hayek laments, run against the grain of mainstream economic thinking. It is time for a new paradigm. The improvement-of-mankind fanatics consider man to be an input to their calculations, in the same way as one might treat a chicken, a plant, or a steel beam. In other words, in their view, man is a part of the natural world: understandable, predictable, malleable. With the correct laws in place, and the correct government subsidies, he can be forced to live in perfect harmony with nature. This is a false and dangerous assertion. Man can never be integrated into the remainder of nature. He is condemned to stand outside it, to be an observer and an actor with his own unique agenda. This means that answers to the riddles of our existence will not be found in interventionism and central planning, which pretend that society can be harmonized, as if man really were a chicken or a plant.
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Pondering the disaster unfolding in Los Angeles, I am reminded of the 1966 movie Fahrenheit 451, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. The film is a masterpiece of the dystopian/futuristic genre. It portrays a society in which the job of the fire department is to light fires, specifically for the purpose of burning forbidden books.
And here we are. The job of the state and local government in California, apparently, is to ensure that fires break out, and when they do, that the people and equipment for extinguishing them have been degraded as much as possible. The accomplishments of the leadership thus far: malfunctioning reservoirs; precious water channeled into the ocean; empty hydrants; routine brush-clearing protocols ignored; criminals, drug addicts, and lunatics (“homeless”) running amok and starting fires; essential equipment sent to Ukraine; funding diverted to woke insanity; a mayor who has the intellectual prowess of a gerbil; and last but not least, fat lesbians making sure that ability is the least important qualification required for the post of “firefighter.” The dystopia has arrived. We are in it. As an author of dystopian fiction, I am concerned that my vocation will be mooted by reality. If things continue on their current trajectory, it will soon be impossible to write a novel like Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World. It is already problematic. How can one depict horrors that await us in a future society when those horrors are happening right now? The synopsis on Amazon for Huxley’s Brave New World declares that the book is “a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order.” Well, we’re about, what, eighty percent of the way there? We often hear that such-and-such government policy, or new piece of woke terminology, is “Orwellian.” What adjective do we use when everything is Orwellian? At that point, the term is useless; the outbreaks of depravity that plague us are no longer outbreaks, but rather the norm. Walking in the rain, you can say “I’m getting wet,” but if you jump in the pool, the phrase loses its meaning. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a mentally retarded black lesbian struggling to lift a fire hose—forever. Recent headlines have informed a wider audience that Muslim rape gangs are running amok in Britain. This has been known for some time, but it took the power and reach of Elon Musk and others to catapult the issue to prominence.
This sickening chapter in the destruction of old Blighty is not strictly about pedophilia, although the rape and torture victims are very young. Nor is the core issue Muslim degeneracy, although clearly we are witnessing an open display of such. Rather, the crux of the matter is the purposeful importation of primitive Third World tribes as bioweapons to degrade and destroy the native population. The importation of human bioweapons into Europe sprang from the same psychopathic brains that gave us lockdowns, transgender madness, death jabs, and totalitarian measures to “save democracy.” All of these are cut from the same ideological cloth. All are weapons of war. Chaos has been the intent from the outset. Multiculti benetton kumbaya diversity blah blah blah—Fuhgeddaboudit. The results of planting these savages in the middle of England (or France, Germany, Sweden, etc.) are predictable with 100% accuracy. The 1400 years of Islamic history make it crystal clear as to what we could expect. Throw the "South Asian" rapists in prison and throw away the key. But don't blame them for this mess. They're pawns in the game. Muslims are gonna Muslim; a leopard can’t change its spots. Disruptions, often violent, will occur whenever you transplant a distinct and unified group into a culture with significantly different values, beliefs, and behavioral patterns. If your clean and safe Arizona town suddenly receives a huge influx of woke Leftist wealthy white Californians, you will soon be experiencing crime, social disarray, and urban blight. Conversely, if Pakistan suddenly became twenty percent Norwegian, there would be outbreaks of nonviolence, rule of law, personal responsibility, and orderly commerce. There is no mystery in any of this. I lived part of my childhood in London; that was back in the early 1970s. It might as well have been on a different planet. The city was safe and pleasant. I could travel alone or with a friend to any neighborhood, at any time of day, without the slightest fear. I don’t think that young people today could imagine that such a thing were possible. I grieve for the old London, and the rest of Europe, which is teetering on the edge of the precipice. We in America are heading for a similar fate, though possibly not quite as rapidly. But on both sides of the pond, unless there are drastic changes, all roads lead to extinction of European man. If Europe, our homeland, goes under, it will be a catastrophe, and will make it even more difficult for North America to keep its head above water. For decades, the U.S. Deep State has been advancing the woke agenda around the world, including the subversion of efforts to stop “refugees” and “migrants” (i.e., the bioweapons) from pouring into European countries. Presumably, with the incoming Trump Administration, this shameful chapter in American history will come to an end. The American foreign policy and espionage establishment is in love with “color revolution” and regime change. What we need is a new kind of regime change, one that liberates the people from treasonous Leftist leaders who are bent on the annihilation of their own nations. In order for Western civilization to extract itself from the bog of crises into which it is currently sinking, it must eventually come to terms with the intellectual rot that has permeated its foundations. One manifestation of that rot, less obvious than, say, Keynesian economics, is the pseudoscience of “psychology,” embodied in the Therapeutic-Industrial Complex (TIC).
The preaching and practise of psychology in the West, lo these last hundred years or so, is a natural outgrowth of Progressive ideology, which exalts the degenerate while attacking the productive and well-constituted. The TIC brings this maneuver down to the micro level, destabilizing and paralyzing the individual from within his own mind. Not satisfied merely with destabilization of the political and economic realms, the Progressives have infiltrated the most intimate chambers of our private existence. This is accomplished with the aid of two primary tools, guilt and inversion. Guilt is as essential to the TIC as debt is to the fiat-based monetary system. Wait a minute, you say; doesn’t psychotherapy release us from our burden of puritannical guilt, all that sexual and potty stuff? Perhaps, but that’s small potatoes compared to the guilt loaded onto us by the selfsame soul robbers. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The skilled pracitioners of the TIC construct an archeological dig within your memory banks, to find shards of ancient guilt that had been buried forever. And even if that shard cannot initially be reimagined in its original form, your friendly neighborhood ego-crusher will weave a wondrous tale, so that the image of the original full-sized mental pot or jug becomes crystal clear to the victim. If this sounds like witchcraft, that’s because it is. The more normal and sane you are, the worse the guilt weighs upon you. This is partially a function of conscience; better-quality people tend to be more self-critical. But it is also due to inversion, another major tool of the brain leeches. The natural order of society is inverted: normal is considered sick whereas mentally ill—the real kind—is considered perfectly normal. Ask your TIC representative how the American Psychological Association views transvestites, compared to, say, 1965. Now contrast this with the “treatment” of energetic and mischievous (i.e., normal) little boys. You’re sick, I’m sick, we’re all sick; the world is just one giant hospital (and they run it). You are guilty of all sorts of transgressions that you “suppressed” since birth. Don’t fret, says the TIC, there are ways to confront and process that guilt. Overwhelmed? That’s okay, we’re here to help! What are we to do with this parasitical class, this latter-day Carthaginian priesthood? Mao had the solution: send them to the fields! [Related: see my post of 12/13/24, Homeless Nation.] In my previous post, I wrote that Elon Musk should establish a movie studio that would produce alternative cinema, to challenge the longstanding dominance of the medium by the Left. The studio’s first film could be a sequel to the Jason Bourne series, this time with the CIA plotting a coup d’état against a conservative U.S. president.
Following are some further suggestions for movies that speak truth to power. Please feel free to add your own ideas in the comments. “The Butcher of Boulder” Liam Neeson once more plays his familiar role as the estranged father (or grandfather?) who must save his children from harm. In this incarnation of the role, he is a blue-collar guy living in Providence, Rhode Island. Life is fairly normal, until his wife becomes a lesbian, obtains a divorce, cleans him out financially, and is awarded custody of their only child, an eight year-old boy. She moves with the boy to Boulder, Colorado, and before long shacks up with another woman. After being denied visiting privileges, the father sells his last possessions to fund a move to a nearby town. After doing some undercover investigation, he discovers that the ex-wife and her girlfriend are about to bring the boy in for a sex-change operation. Liam must outwit the two women, the police, social workers, and the medical butchers, in order to save his son. The ensuing chase, involving multiple modes of transportation, ends in Uruguay, where Liam and the boy attain asylum. “The Broken Broker” Denzel Washington plays a stockbroker in Cleveland who is having a mid-life crisis. He decides to move to Portland, Oregon, to start a new life. Nearly every job interview in the new city results in a job offer, even when it is obvious that he is underqualified. In every case, the phony gushing over a black candidate is all too transparent. This makes Denzel feel humiliated and depressed. He buys a house, and sets up a home office for his own independent brokerage. When potential clients (both white and black) see him, most of them take their business elsewhere, assuming that he’s not really qualified. Denzel manages to eke out a living, and finds a supportive girlfriend. He becomes involved in the local Republican Party, concentrating his efforts on fighting DEI. After a number of spicy battles with political adversaries, Antifa burns down his house. He moves back to Cleveland with the girlfriend, and soon becomes the host of a right-wing radio program. “Jab Me Once, Jab Me Twice” In the darkest days of the scamdemic, a humble airline steward (played by Jared Leto) refuses to take the jab. He defies the airline, the FAA, and almost all of his friends and family. Everyone is amazed that such a mild-mannered man could confront the world in this manner. One day, just before boarding a plane, Jared is informed that he has been fired from his job. This will be his last flight. At thirty thousand feet, somewhere over Middle America, the pilot and co-pilot are gossiping about the steward, mocking him for being a “vaccine denier.” They share a good laugh. All of a sudden, the pilot has a heart attack and keels over. The co-pilot takes control of the aircraft, declares Mayday, and requests permission to land at the nearest suitable airport. But then he also has a heart attack, with terrible convulsions before his death. The stewardess screams; Jared rushes to the cockpit. He asks, over the PA system, whether there are any pilots on board. Silence from the cabin. Despite having no experience as a pilot, Jared rips off his Covid mask and begins to fly the plane. With guidance from air traffic control, the plane descends, in a nail-biting scene, to a bumpy but successful landing in a Nebraska wheat field. Jared becomes a national hero; his testimony before a Congressional committee leads to the cancellation of the killer jabs. “Seven Days in February” High officials in the Pentagon and State Department are attempting to start a nuclear war with Russia. They manage to pull off several minor but audacious attacks while planning the “big one,” a provocation so outrageous that the Russians will have no choice but to retaliate with everything they’ve got. The secret plans are discovered by a patriotic colonel, played by Matthew McConaughey. Being severely disabled from wounds suffered in Iraq, Matthew moves slowly, and is limited in what he can accomplish. On the verge of despair, he meets a young, intrepid female reporter, and together they blow the whistle on the whole affair. Nuclear war is averted. The Secretary of Defense and several other conspirators are imprisoned, and the President is impeached. There is great anticipation in the land, that the incoming Trump administration will set aright the capsizing ship of state. I examined this topic in my post of 12/9/24; now I would like to expand the discussion beyond the boundaries of the merely governmental.
There is a tendency among the forces of the Right to be fixated on the political realm, particularly the Executive branch of the Federal government, as the source of salvation. I have no doubt that this domain is quite important, but it does not have primacy. The Left understands this full well. They know that fundamental change, including in the political sphere, is the end result of cultural shifts. Remember the “long march through the institutions”? That was the Left’s gradual, patient, decades-long subversion of the culture. And it worked. Let us recall the domains in which the Left overthrew the existing structures, and ousted the last vestiges of sanity: criminal justice; primary/secondary education; art; movies; academia; medical; economy/finance; race relations; to name just a few. The Obama/Biden regime is the logical outcome of this process. It could hardly be otherwise. Can it now be overturned and expunged by a change of president and other high-level government personnel? I submit that it cannot. To be sure, many emergency fixes can be made. I do not wish to downplay their importance. I will be the first to applaud if, for example, all illegal aliens are deported from the country. This is essential to national survival. It is unrealistic, however, to expect that Trump and his associates are the people who can accomplish the required deep cleaning. They are liberals (in the classic sense) who have been “mugged by reality”; who are horrified at the excesses of the Left. They can apply the emergency fixes, but they are not equipped philosophically to lead us into the promised land. That work will remain to be accomplished by others. As a case study, consider Elon Musk. His support for Donald Trump, and his purchase and decensoring of Twitter, were laudable actions. But if he were a true cultural leader and visionary, he would go much further. He would confess that Tesla is a monstrous grift based on one of the biggest lies in the Left’s pantheon of big lies: the Global Warming/Green Energy myth. Musk would then convert the Tesla operation to the production of simple, $10K internal-combustion cars, sell the company, and use the funds to set up a movie studio that is bigger than all of Hollywood combined. The first film to be produced would be a Jason Bourne sequel, this time with the CIA plotting a coup d’état against a conservative U.S. president. Next step for Musk: Become the leading benefactor at the top five art museums in the country. Use that position of power to clean out the “contemporary” filth, replace curators and executives as necessary, and restore American art to its former elevated status. MAGA: Make Art Great Again. Now back to reality: Let us not live under the illusion that this monumental task can be delegated to one individual, namely Mr. Trump, and that’s that. The responsibility for cleaning out the rot has devolved upon each of us, every man in his respective domain. We must overcome, however, the propensity of our side to non-involvement in such affairs. Folks on the Right tend to be engaged in productive economic pursuits, as well as family, religion, and other “normal” activities. They are not, by nature, political animals. The Left has a huge advantage in this area, having armies of people whose religion is Wokeism, and who are willing to devote their lives to the cause. The Right builds, the Left tears down. An ancient template. When institutions are conquered by the Left, they become platforms to pillage and ruin what came before. Educational institutions become a tool to destroy education. Artistic institutions destroy art. And so on. Now it is time for us to do some destruction of our own—creative destruction, to return those institutions to their true roles. We need smart and preferably young people to attain key positions in education, the arts, and other areas in which opinions are formed and culture is determined. Ideally, the big guns like Musk could jump-start this process. When this is in place, we can speak truth to power, and solve the dilemmas plaguing our society. Please indulge me for a moment; I need to get this off my chest. There are a few things about our everyday life that just annoy the hell out of me. Here is a list, in no particular order:
1. Sloppy/inappropriate dress. People, circulating in public, who look as if they just rolled out of bed. Colors and patterns in the most abhorrent taste. A grown man, in an upscale restaurant, wearing a football jersey and those ridiculous three-quarter-length shorts that make him look like a toddler. Women wearing tights that show every nook and cranny of their (usually) disgusting physique. Fat women with clothing that emphasizes their most unattractive characteristics. 2. Bodily mutilation. Tattoos, piercings, and Lord knows what else. I’ll be writing a separate post about this in the near future. 3. Dull faces. You know, that catatonic expression. Many years in the making; now exacerbated by (a) the scamdemic, with its extended isolation, and vax-induced brain fog; and (b) social interaction taking place increasingly on line. 4. Uptalk. Enunciating a statement as if it were a question; constant rising intonation. Especially annoying on men. Makes them sound like little girls. 5. Substitutions for “you’re welcome.” These include “of course” and “no problem.” The other day, in a shop, a young lady (with all kinds of metal protruding from her face) was helpful, and I thanked her. The response: “Of course,” said with a look of feigned surprise, and a little artificial giggle. 6. No sense of humor. In the Before Times, one could usually engage in mildly amusing banter with random strangers. This has become increasingly difficult. 7. Constant fussing with phones. Two people sitting together in a restaurant, each absorbed in his phone. Sitting with someone who shows you a photo of every object that comes up in conversation, or feels compelled to “google” every topic right there on the spot. Related to this: the annoying assumption that everybody and their grandmother has a smart phone, texts, scans, etc. etc. “Just scan your blah-blah code into the reader.” When I inform them that I don’t even have a phone, I get the catatonic look. Thank heavens I grew up without cell phones and computers. 8. After paying in cash, cashier struggles to make change. Here is yet another result of the online/electronic lifestyle, not to mention substandard education. The computer (in whatever form) does all necessary calculations. Even worse: you approach the cashier with your bag of dog food, or whatever. “Can I get a phone number?” or “Are you a discount-club member?” Good grief. Can I just pay for the goddamn dog food? 9. Awful customer service. Or lack thereof. On the phone, the ubiquitous Filipina. Endless automated prompts that lead you around in a circle. 10. Terrible quality. Nothing seems to work quite right. As commenter Mary Contrary over at Samizdata put it, “the general enshittification of everything.” 11. Loud and obnoxious music. I go to the supermarket at seven in the morning to beat the crowds, and they have some demented rap music blasting from the loudspeakers. 12. Left-turn scofflaws. I’m waiting at a red light. It turns green, but I have to wait for a succession of cars in the oncoming left-turn lane, who are all turning left despite their signal being red. Often I see a convoy of up to four cars running the red light, one after the other. Please feel free to share your own pet peeves. In my recent post on Covid (12/3/24), I remarked that a calling card of the Left has always been the redefinition of terminology, so that words are transformed into a fundamentally altered, or even opposite, meaning. Revisiting this phenomenon, I was reminded of a story.
One day during the late 1980s, I was sitting in a café in Philadelphia, discussing current affairs with a wise old gentleman who had vast experience in the world of think tanks and public policy. We were lamenting the adoption by the city of some harebrained program championed by the usual nutjob Leftist coalition. We concluded that it was well-nigh impossible to challenge the move in a public forum because all of the keywords associated with the program were ingrained in the hivemind as positive: war on poverty, anti-discrimination, equal rights, empowerment, etc. My interlocutor, with a deep sigh, then proclaimed: “The Left owns the rhetoric.” Never were truer words spoken. We face the same problem today. The components of Leftist ideology are so infused in our language that we hardly notice it, to the degree that we often are unable to formulate an adequate response in our own minds. We become paralyzed, without knowing why. Consider, for example, the controversy surrounding the bathrooms at the Capitol in Washington, DC. A few members of Congress are bravely resisting the Alphabet freak show, and I applaud their efforts. But they are hamstrung by the lexicon itself because they engage in arguments about gender. Until recently, this word was almost exclusively a linguistic term, denoting an attribute of a noun: masculine, feminine, or neuter. When the subject was people (or animals), the operative word was sex. As in male or female. If you argue over “gender,” you have already conceded half the battle. Once this linguistic battle is lost, the door is open to a torrent of twisted Orwellian doublespeak. A good example is the mind-bending term gender-affirming care to describe the genital mutilation of children. A related sleight-of-hand is the use of the third-person plural, they, in place of the grammatically correct singular form, he or she. In addition to being a linguistic atrocity, this usage serves to blur the identification of people as male or female. The language now forces us all to speak of each other as androgynous beings. Chalk up another victory for the Left. Higher culture requires the ability to identify and analyze differences, great and subtle, between people, things, and concepts. This intellectual process used to be called discrimination. We all know what happened to the word. For decades already, noticing differences between people, once obligatory in educated circles, is taboo. A final example, and this one a bit more subtle: The use of the word planet instead of world. I am hearing this more and more. “Everyone on the planet knows that…” “They have the best sausage on the planet” “No one on the planet believes that…” etc. In all cases, up until very recently, the usage would have been “in the world” instead of “on the planet.” Planet denotes a hunk of rock, an inanimate object. It is a favorite word of the Climate-Industrial Complex. In contrast, world denotes people, nations, cultures, etc. A huge difference. When we use planet, we are already sucked halfway into the Green scam, without a single argument being made. In my recent post Intellectual Decay, Bitcoin Edition (11/23/24), I discussed the problem of subjective value, first as applied to money, and then to art and culture in general. I examined this issue in depth in an article I wrote in 2007 for American Thinker, entitled “Speaking Truth to Art.” I invite you to read the piece, as relevant now as it was then.
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Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. 
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