SC295-7

https://brownstone.org/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-davos-crowd/

An Open Letter to the Davos Crowd  

Dear self-styled “global elites:”

No doubt, should this missive ever come to your attention, you will simply dismiss me as a “conspiracy theorist.” But no theorizing is necessary when the conspirators keep admitting to it, repeatedly speaking the quiet part out loud.

Your creepy Bond-villain in chief, Klaus Schwab, Chairman of the World Economic Forum, has openly called for “permanent interaction between governments and regulatory agencies on the one hand, and business on the other”—in other words, for a kind of global fascism 2.0. Meanwhile, Schwab’s oily henchman, Yuval Harari, asserts that “human rights exist only in the imagination.” 

One needn’t be a prophet to see where this is heading.

Not only are you not trying to hide your agenda, you’re obviously quite proud of it. As another of your number said in a speech at Davos in 2022, “The good news is that the elites across the world trust each other more and more. So we can come together and design and do beautiful things together. The bad news is that…the majority of people trust their elites less. So we can lead, but if people aren’t following, we’re not going to get to where we want to go.” 

How to respond to this stunning example of tone-deaf arrogance, which I believe accurately represents the attitude of most “elites” these days—especially the elitest of the elites, the Davos crowd? 

Let’s start with this: You’re right—we are not following. And we have no intention of doing so, for several reasons. 

First, anyone who describes themselves as an “elite” betrays a breathtaking egotism. They are openly acknowledging that they think themselves better than the rest of us—smarter, more knowledgeable, morally superior, better equipped to lead. So we should all just shut up and do as we’re told. 

No. We’re not going to do as we’re told. Not by you. We don’t accept that you know more than we do about anything that matters, and certainly not about how to live our lives. If we had any doubts—if we ever wondered whether, after all, maybe your way was best—the last four years have proven unequivocally otherwise. 

Calling your pandemic response “botched” would be the greatest understatement in history. Everything you told us to do—lock down, mask up, “socially distance,” offer ourselves as human guinea pigs—not only didn’t stop the virus but made things exponentially worse. A health crisis morphed quickly into an economic, social, and political one as well, not to mention an even worse health crisis.

It wasn’t Covid that did that. It was you, our “global elites.” 

Indeed, we have come to realize—and many of us knew all along—that the severity of the disease was oversold from the beginning. Sure, it was bad, worse than the seasonal flu, maybe, but not that much worse. It was nowhere near the mass extinction event you made it out to be. It affected almost exclusively the elderly, the infirm, and the morbidly obese. Schools, churches, and businesses could have stayed open all along and it would have made little or no difference in the course of the pandemic, as places like Sweden and Florida have shown. 

Yet you insisted on keeping us locked in our homes. On keeping our kids out of school. On covering our faces and shuttering our churches and bankrupting our businesses. All while holding out hope of a magical “vaccine.” And when your jabs turned out not to work so well—when it was obvious they didn’t stop infection or transmission—instead of admitting you were wrong, you simply doubled down on your failed pre-jab strategies. 

Perhaps, in the beginning, it was just ignorance. You didn’t know what was going on any more than the rest of us did. Maybe you were just doing your best to “save mankind.” 

Somehow, I doubt it. Evidence that this entire debacle might well be attributable to your own perfidy and malfeasance argues against that generous interpretation. So does the fact that you steadfastly refuse to admit your now obvious mistakes and instead persist in your folly. At the very least, it is clear that you have exploited this crisis for all it’s worth, in an attempt to remake the world to your liking—to initiate, as you call it, “The Great Reset.” 

Unfortunately for you, the professor was right: We the people are not on board. We reject your Great Reset. We reject your vision of the world. We reject globalism. We have nothing against other countries, but we prefer our own, warts and all, and we have no intention of surrendering our national sovereignty to any form of world government. 

We reject your multiculturalism. Other cultures may offer much to admire and emulate, but we have our own culture, thank you, and it suits us just fine. 

We reject your vision of a tightly controlled, centrally planned economy. We prefer free markets, messy as they are, as the engine for producing the greatest possible individual liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. 

We reject your nouveau fascism, in which world governments collude with global corporations, notably Big Tech and Big Pharma, to surveil, harass, and ultimately control the rest of us. We don’t care if it’s “for our own good” (although we sincerely doubt it). We’d much rather have self-governance, the freedom to decide for ourselves what is best for us and our families. 

In short, we reject you, the self-styled elites, the smug sanctimonious limousine leftists who fly your private jets into Davos then lecture the rest of us about our “carbon footprint.” We don’t think you’re in any way smarter or better than us. Indeed, you have proved to our satisfaction that you are not. We do not trust you. We do not want your “leadership.”

We suspect, based on hard experience, that the “beautiful things” you intend to “design and do” are not beautiful at all but rather hideous and loathsome—for us, at least. They may be beautiful for you as they increase your power, wealth, and influence. But we care about the magnificent edifice you are constructing for yourselves only to the extent that we wish to tear it down. 

If the past four years have taught us anything, it is that you “elites” are awful people. Your ideas are awful. Your vision for the future is awful. The society you wish to create, with yourselves in charge, would be unspeakably awful. We reject it, and we reject you. So go away and leave us alone—or else suffer the consequences. 

....

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/02/07/the-empire-depends-on-our-unwillingness-to-look-at-its-crimes/

The Empire Depends On Our Unwillingness To Look At Its Crimes

This entire sick dystopia is held together by psychological compartmentalization. By the fact that it’s more comfortable to avoid looking directly at the horrors of the status quo we live under, even though on some level we all know those horrors are there.

All the shitlibs you see cheering for Biden right now are on some level aware that he’s backing a genocide of unbelievable savagery that is inflicting unfathomable amounts of suffering upon our fellow human beings, but they avoid looking at this reality directly. All the information is right there right out in the open, but they cognitively squirm and twist away from it so that they see only Biden’s acts like slightly reducing America’s student loan debt and not being Donald Trump.

They do this because to really wrap their minds around the depravity of what Biden is doing would shatter their world. It would mean letting in some very scary truths about their nation, their government and their political system that they’d rather avoid noticing. It would mean a crushing deluge of cognitive dissonance until they dramatically revised their worldview into something that could allow for a Democratic president behaving like a complete monster. It would mean having to completely restructure their understanding of the world they live in.

That takes effort. It takes emotional labor. It takes a willingness to experience a high degree of psychological discomfort as you wade into the muck of reality to face the inconvenient facts you’ve been avoiding looking at your entire adult life. It takes a willingness to experience this unpleasantness not just intellectually, but emotionally and viscerally as well. You’ve got to look at it with your eyes and your mind and your heart and your guts. And you have to somehow find the time and psychological spaciousness to do all this in a society that is designed to keep ordinary people busy, tired, dysfunctional, and stressed out.

A vast globe-spanning empire is built on the foundation of how difficult it is to look directly at something that is extremely unpleasant to look at, about which you have been propagandized and indoctrinated your entire life into accepting as normal. In school we’re taught that we live in a democracy and that our government is basically good while other governments are bad and their countries are places you would not want to live in, and then in adulthood this false indoctrination is reinforced and built upon by propaganda from the mass media. Before we have time to learn how to think critically, we are spoon-fed a worldview designed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful, and we will experience cognitive dissonance if at any time we are presented with information that contradicts it.

That’s the primary job of mass media propaganda: not so much to convince us to believe new stories about weapons of mass destruction or whatever, but to build and reinforce a worldview within us which is fiercely loyal to establishment power structures. That’s why the propaganda is served up in two different ideological flavors: one for the shitlibs and one for the rightists. You’re funneled into whichever mainstream, power-serving echo chamber best suits your conditioning and disposition, and then you are fed a power-serving worldview therein which you will zealously defend as the gospel truth.

It’s a highly effective trap, but it’s not inescapable. Anyone who’s ever escaped from an abusive relationship, a dysfunctional family or a cult knows that it is possible to find your way out of a psychological cage that has been built for you by a skillful manipulator, even if there were times in the past when you hadn’t even known the cage bars were there. The light of truth has a way of finding cracks through which to enter, and all it takes to start things off is a faint little glimmer.

We can fight the machine by creating as many of those cracks as possible, which in practice looks like doing everything we can to wake our fellow humans up to the abusive relationship we are in with the western empire. Finding as many ways as possible to show as many eyes as we can the murder, the injustice, the exploitation and the ecocide, not just intellectually but emotionally as well. Many of the indoctrinated are too far gone to be reached right now, or are too personally invested in the status quo they defend, but many others are right on the cusp of leaving the cult of the empire, ready to take the leap if they are just given a good enough reason to.

And to be clear, this is already happening. If this wasn’t already clear to you, Gen Z’s ferocious opposition to Biden’s butchery in Gaza should have driven this point home now. It is not a coincidence that the first generation to turn their backs on mass media indoctrination and start creating their own media and their own ideas is by far the best on Israel-Palestine right now. The humans have already begun shaking each other awake, and its happening most among the humans who are furthest from death.

Right now it feels like the empire is leaning very hard on our tendency to dissociate and look away. Their actions in Gaza look like they’re torturing someone to death in the town square and looking us all dead in the eyes while they do it, trusting that we’ll turn our gaze away and submit. But it isn’t working. People are looking more, not less. The western empire has never had more critical attention on it than it has right at this very moment.

Getting people to look at the empire’s real ugly face behind the mask of perception management is difficult to do, but it’s also the only thing we have to do. Once enough people start looking, the game is already over; it has already lost all its power. So please know that everything you do to help push this forward is making a very real difference. And please know that you are not alone.