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What our leaders don’t see Ordinary people are more likely to spot omens

As pigs are culled, a mood of apocalypse sweeps the country. Yevgeny YepanchintsevTASS/ Getty

As pigs are culled, a mood of apocalypse sweeps the country. Yevgeny YepanchintsevTASS/ Getty


October 8, 2021   5 mins

One morning a few months ago, while running on the network of footpaths that riddles my local countryside, I watched a herd of deer gallop across the hollow way in front of me. Three of them were pure white. Encountering such creatures in the wild provokes something ancient. It’s a reminder that a domain of myth still hums beneath England’s busy modern surface.

Only days later, another of these creatures from Arthurian legend wandered into the post-industrial landscape of suburban Liverpool. Having failed to capture it, police shot it.

Their actions were couched in the language of safety, procedure and reason. “There was no option to let the deer wander as it could be a danger to motorists and members of the public,” said a Merseyside Police spokesperson. “As a result a decision was made in the early evening to euthanise the deer.”

All very reasonable and understandable, from the perspective of a body of public servants whose task is acting as the “thin blue line” that maintains our rational public order. The general public, though, was outraged. Responses were clearly powered by a sense that a crime had been committed at some symbolic level. A creature of legend had been destroyed by “health and safety”. Liverpool-based writer Nina Antonia called it “a very bad omen”.

In folklore, the white hart often appears to signal the presence of the uncanny. And the death of this white hart lent a note of deep weirdness to an already-brittle mood at this year’s party conference season, which kicked off the same day. The combined effect was of a political class determinedly bickering over trivia while dangling over a howling pit of monsters.

First, we witnessed the hijacking of Keir Starmer’s sublimely bland 14,000-word effort to reboot the Labour Party by a bitter religious dispute. Forget the future of public services, is it blasphemous to say only women have cervices? This argument, at heart a metaphysical one concerning the true relation between material and spiritual planes, almost entirely drowned out the usual business of shouting about neoliberalism and insulting the Tories.

For the party of government, meanwhile, it has been less metaphysics, more apocalypse. A conference crowd less than half the size of 2019’s applauded the launch of this or that paper, to widespread indifference save among politics junkies. Meanwhile, outside, the country devolved into fist fights and knife threats at petrol stations, and British farmers faced the prospect of a million-pig sacrifice to the god of self-correcting labour markets.

The Remainer class lurched out of their sarcophagi to say they told us so, and that leaving the single market was an irrational thing to do. This is of course true, but rather misses the point that a core question in the Brexit debate was whether or not, from a holistic perspective, the “rational” policy is always the right one. And sometimes “rational” and “right” are as incommensurable as police safety procedures and a beast out of legend. Do we want higher wages or cheaper goods? Are pig culls and lorry driver shortages an acceptable short-term price of correction or evidence of terminal decline?

Further back, the “rational” arguments for offshoring industry had political tradeoffs, as did the “rational” arguments that took us into the EU. Those social classes who didn’t win out used Brexit to make their protest known at the concatenating political effects of our supposedly technocratic, post-political regime.

Today, though, as the technocratic mode of politics limps on, it seems an ever feebler vehicle for stark political choices made against a backdrop of increasingly existential dread. And whether thanks to the pandemic, climate change or the global fracturing of supply chains that once seemed seamless, such decisions are now everywhere: cancer victims or flattening the curve? Young people’s need for affordable homes and a fair tax burden, or social care funding and the preferences of Green Belt Tory voters? And no one wants to think about the prospects for the welfare state if (or when) growth stalls permanently, or if birth rates continue to crater.

And if climate catastrophe looks grim, so does climate mitigation. It was rising fuel prices which triggered France’s “gilets jaunes” riots in 2018; they’re still ongoing. And the global tilt toward “clean power” has prompted what Bloomberg predicts will be the first of many energy crises, plunging many UK families unexpectedly into fuel poverty.

To compound the mood of apocalypse, an offshoot of the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, sought to raise awareness of such thorny questions by glueing themselves to the M25. As a result, an elderly woman suffering a stroke was delayed for six hours on the way to hospital, and is now permanently paralysed. In a sense, the group’s fanatical willingness to risk literal paralysis in elderly women, in order to make a point about political paralysis in climate policy, serves as an eloquent metaphor for the ugly reality of climate-policy tradeoffs.

And we continue to not talk about who will bear the brunt. As George Monbiot pointed out, the only real way to reduce our carbon footprint is less of everything. Who takes the hit? There will never be enough batteries to make electric cars as widely-available as the internal combustion variety. Who goes back to walking? There will never be enough renewable energy for us all to leave the lights on: who has to sit in the dark? No one has yet worked out how to power an aeroplane on electricity; who, then, still gets to fly? Our meat consumption is unsustainable; who makes the swap to bugs?

Greens usually gesture vaguely at “redistributing wealth” while also curbing it. But those with the greatest power to coordinate international climate policy are the world’s 2,000-odd billionaires – who are also the ones sitting on most of that wealth. This rarefied group may be as motivated as the rest of us to avoid climate catastrophe, but if doing so means someone has to take a financial hit, they’re unlikely to volunteer themselves.

Instead, among the rarefied echelons of bodies such as the WEF, papers and videos are published by more technocrats who discuss the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bed in permanent changes in the name of climate mitigation. Perhaps the masses can be persuaded to buy and travel less; to own nothing and be happy. Perhaps one more Economist article about eating insects will persuade someone other than Sam Bowman to give these crunchy delicacies a try.

Further down the food chain, despite omens and outbreaks of gender theology, our political class is still grimly reluctant to set down the comfort blankets of data, technocracy and “growth”. Nor are they keen to talk frankly about political choices; even about how on earth “net zero” squares with waving through expansion plans at every major UK airport.

The exasperated result has been a growing minority of Britons abandoning reason altogether as a viable register in which to debate anything, instead forming what Clive Martin recently called “Radical Normal”. This increasingly vocal protest cohort coalesces into placard-waving flash-mobs, with grievances ranging from masks to Pfizer, 5G masts, adrenochrome and the New World Order.

From a technocratic perspective it’s easy to dismiss such people as crazies. But while people as a whole may be largely uninterested in politics, that’s not the same thing as being stupid. And having lived through all the rational arguments for de-industrialisation, and the “rational” case for EU membership, the public is now seeing the same woefully inadequate “rational” mindset being turned to climate policy. Meanwhile the painful political trade-offs involved both in doing something and in not doing something become increasingly evident.

In a sense, reverting to the language of omens is a perfectly sane thing to do, when the world has become so complicatedly unpredictable that an everyday person might as well read the auguries as try and master it through data.

Eric McLuhan, son of Marshall “the medium is the message” McLuhan wrote that “Our New World of chaos and complexity is too volatile, too precarious, too important to be left in the hands of the merely practical administrator.” The uncanny white deer often warns of change and danger — or perhaps now, of a future running too menacingly wild for mere technical management. In seeing this message clearly, the people of Britain have been quicker than their rulers to read the omens.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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J Bryant
J Bryant
3 years ago

In the absence of some sort of unifying spiritual belief people are left with only the religion of economics, of personal interest in a purely material sense. And that’s not enough. Hence all the bickering over policies and rule making and who pays how much for which public service. It’s a form of displacement activity.
As the author suggests, even in a society that increasingly denies, even rejects, its roots, the ancient memory of a white hart as symbol persists. And the sight of the forces of rationality slaying the deer speak in a language much deeper than words. Writing over thirty years ago, the mythologist Joseph Campbell said modernity is a ‘terminal moraine’ of myths: incoherent fragments of older myths scattered here and there. But the absence of a unifying myth doesn’t imply the absence of a deep need for a unifying myth.
The forces of rationality will not create our myths for us. That’s the job of artists as defined in the broadest sense. Sadly, the new censors of the left would deny artists their voice. Campbell wrote of an underlying force, a life force that some might call God, that manifests through each of us and will not be denied. Let’s hope that force breaks through our current spiritual and social stagnation and leads us to a brighter future.
And, yes, kudos to Mary Harrington for another fine article.

Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

A great article by Mary Harrington and your comment also.
Sadly most artists today (for decades in fact) have turned away from the numinous towards political statements instead. Art colleges are drenched in post-modernism. Beauty and feeling are viewed with suspicion. Art has been corrupted.
Luckily there are other, largely unsung, artists working quietly away in the hills still producing beautiful, moving work that people buy.

Neven Curlin
Neven Curlin
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Great comment. Paul Kingsnorth expounds on that theme of loss of myth/roots in wonderful ways. Together with Mary Harrington he’s the best author on this platform, in my opinion. The best writers with the most interesting insights. Kudos to Unherd.

tug ordie
tug ordie
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I am a simple man, I see someone quote Campbell, and I upvote

Bart Cypers
Bart Cypers
3 years ago

“Greens usually gesture vaguely at “redistributing wealth” while also curbing it. But those with the greatest power to coordinate international climate policy are the world’s 2,000-odd billionaires – who are also the ones sitting on most of that wealth. This rarefied group may be as motivated as the rest of us to avoid climate catastrophe, but if doing so means someone has to take a financial hit, they’re unlikely to volunteer themselves.“

Very well said indeed, and therein lies the issue many people have with our global managerial classes. It’s not that they don’t trust “the science”, or that they are too inherently irrational to understand sound governance; it’s that they suspect – with good reason – that our political and economic elites won’t have to play by the same rules they impose upon everyone else, in the new society they’re seeking to create.

Last edited 3 years ago by Bart Cypers
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago
Reply to  Bart Cypers

The also suspect that the the world’s 2,000-odd billionaires are driving the climate scamtastrophe for their own interests. if you want to do something for the environment, close down Amazon, Google and social media and ban smartphones

Neven Curlin
Neven Curlin
3 years ago

If human-induced climate change only were a scam… I wouldn’t be worried about a thing.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
2 years ago
Reply to  Neven Curlin

You don’t think it is a scam?

David Simpson
David Simpson
3 years ago

err, smartphones first. Then how could “they” manipulate us. I keep feeling like taking a hammer to mine, but then there’s the childrens . . . Oh dear, how will they talk to daddy

Katy Hibbert
Katy Hibbert
2 years ago
Reply to  Bart Cypers

Spot on. Those champagne socialists who advocated doing away with grammar schools bought their way out of the comprehensive system. They will buy their way out of Green poverty and continue to jet around the world and drive in zil lanes.

Steve Walker
Steve Walker
3 years ago

Mary is fast becoming one of my favourite writers on this or any publication. She is one of those few whose articles I *have* to read, not necessarily because I always agree with her (though I often do) but because she writes so beautifully and presents such provocative ideas that I find it impossible to resist.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago
Reply to  Steve Walker

Same. Aris Roussinos is also unmissable – I take the time to read and think about everything he writes here.
It’s very enriching to reflect on the thoughts they both present. The sad thing is that Harrington & Roussinos are exceptions and not the rule in the present media landscape.

Last edited 3 years ago by Katharine Eyre
Eddie Johnson
Eddie Johnson
2 years ago
Reply to  Steve Walker

Couldn’t agree more. She’s such a delight to read, and I always come away feeling slightly less dense than usual.

Last edited 2 years ago by Eddie Johnson
Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago

Typically excellent piece.
It is an odd feature of modern western governance that ‘technocrats’, at least the governing classes, don’t actually comprehend the implications of technology all that well – smart as they often are, they are overwhelmingly from humanities backgrounds (or some hybrid like Economics) instead of the hard sciences.

Last edited 3 years ago by Prashant Kotak
Alyona Song
Alyona Song
3 years ago

Spot on! How acutely ironic it is that such fine words as “progressive” and “rational” have to be imprisoned in quotation marks. The grim truth is that the Greens and other loud mouth peddlers of total “health and safety” are exactly not intending to fly less, or take advantage of an insect diet, or stop heating/cooling their exquisite lodgings nestled in glorious locales.

R S Foster
R S Foster
3 years ago

…the other rather important point is that people are most unlikely to be willing to fight and if necessary die for a rational technocratic simulacrum of a full-on, “Flag, Faith and Family” Nation State. So our best hope might be the appearance of the Black Flags of the Caliph at the Iron Gates, or a new breed of Barbary Corsairs running ashore from rusting car ferries…or indeed the innumerable Han Legions of the Celestial Emperor Xi sweeping North and West across the Steppe, and pouring like a torrent across the South China Sea…
…we forget at our peril that there are rather a lot of people in the World who believe in something, are willing to fight and die for it…and in addition to that hate us and want to kill us…and not because of something we did in the last few years or the last few decades, but because of everything that has happened in the World since about 1500.
Fortunately, even we as the smallest and most exposed element of the Anglosphere have a moat and have started to rebuild the Royal Navy. But in my view, we will need both and sooner rather than later…
…shame about the Kiwis under the tutelage of the sainted Jacinda though..!

Last edited 3 years ago by R S Foster
Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago
Reply to  R S Foster

The duller and wilder of the Barbarians want to fight us.

The wiser, more patient heads among them realise they’ve already won the war (having as you say no real opponents) and need only cash in their chips in due course.

David McDowell
David McDowell
3 years ago

Excellent journalism.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago

Very good article, thanks Mary!

Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago

Interesting point, but the Ghost Dance was supposed to be a human solution to a problem, not a ‘sign’. You are correct I think that supernatural solutions to material problems probably cannot work on such a scale. But Mary is talking about “omens”, signs or portents, of what the future may hold, which is very different, they involve the natural world, we observe them, we don’t create them.

Last edited 3 years ago by Claire D
Linda Hutchinson
Linda Hutchinson
3 years ago

You could be right about the language of omens being that of thje defeated, however, I fear that perhaps many people in this country now think of themselves that way, if not consciously.

Linda Hutchinson
Linda Hutchinson
2 years ago

Which is precisely why I said “I fear that …” rather than “I know that …”.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 years ago

We find ourselves in an age similar to that of the seventeenth century. Back then the publishing press was becoming widely used. As people grew more literate they consumed greater amounts of information thus becoming more susceptible to conspiracy theories. It was a strange century. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches) was used to justify burning witches, a plague ravaged Europe, and a thirty-year holy war was being waged in Germany. The economy didn’t do great either.
The internet is relatively new. Much like people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we are still learning how to cope with it. We create our tools, but in a strange way our tools also create us.

Last edited 3 years ago by Julian Farrows
ralph bell
ralph bell
3 years ago

Such great thought provoking journalism providing a pathway through the complexities of competing arguments and problems.
A serious threat people face may finally focus people into forgetting the petty squabbles and working together against the problem or maybe a big revolution.
I guess big drop in population nationally and globally would also help, but the demographic imbalances would remain…

Andrew Horsman
Andrew Horsman
3 years ago

I’ve said it before, I shall say it again: Mary Harrington for PM!
Mary could have added to her list of questions that cannot be answered: if the world is dangerously overpopulated – as the XR and WEF Malthusian cultists would have us all believe – who, exactly, should die soon to save it?
At the heart of all of this is an epistemological vulnerability. Westerners in both the Old and New Worlds have stopped believing in their respective foundational myths. The narrative of the inherent virtues of liberal democracy has been challenged by both authoritarian states such as China and by the crisis of greedy corporatism, which has suffocated the optimistic genuine liberalism and individualism of the founding fathers of the US. Their revolution was successfully sustainable (230 or so years and, just about, counting) precisely because it wasn’t founded on some vague abstract idea or in response to an outpouring of compassion or pity. That is, it wasn’t based on vague goals such as “save the starving masses”, or “eradicate racial injustice”,or “achieve zero covid”, or “purge our church of papism”, or “net zero by 2050”, or any other such utopian, ill-defined notions. It wasn’t based on a conception of how each citizen should behave, or what they should believe. Rather it was grounded in a Christian belief based on a genuine respect for the sanctity of the individual, their freedom to live their life as best they choose, and their right to defend themselves and their families against tyranny – hence the second amendment. It was also the case that, for the vast majority of emigrants to America in the late 18th an early 19th centuries – they would only know and be known to the people in their immediate vicinity, wherever it was the ended up. That means no bull excrement.
In that sense, the American revolution had extraordinarily sound epistemological foundations. How many of those on the Mayflower and similar early expeditions do you think were virtue-signalling by jumping aboard in the face of religious persecution? They certainly were not taking snaps from the poop deck to post on their Insta account! How courageous were those men and women, to leave behind their families and friends home countries and voyage into the unknown in the face of persecution at home? Can you imagine their reaction to a broadcast by Chris Whitty suggesting that they stay at home and cover their faces (in some but not all situations) to “stay safe”? Despite the hardhsips they endured, and their lack of superfast broadband connections, I envy them, in many ways – at least they could leave their ideologically divided home countries, and the ignorance and intolerance of their erstwhile fellow citizens.
Those of us who grew up with, and built our adult lives around, a belief that our public authorities are there to protect us now fear the pogrom that many us now, rationally, believe that way be coming. We see the subliminal hatred in the public messaging; we see idea that individuals must do things that they know may harm them, for the supposed greater good; and we hear history rhyming loud and increasingly clear. The fear and uncertainty in the voices and faces of those in ostensible authority is becoming more palpable by the day.
I can’t help feeling that despite the luxury, automated conveniences of globalised early(ish) 21st century society and all of the wonders of modern medicine, that something essential to ourselves as thinking and feeling individuals is slowly but ineluctably sliding from our grip. We are losing a sense of our authentic selves, we are losing the courage to stand up for our true beliefs, we are too scared of feeling bad, guilty or ashamed, we are losing the humility to admit that we can get things wrong. We are losing a spirituality that, if you like to acknowledge it or not, is always going to be there for limited, flawed, and mortal organic beings capable of emotional and intellectual thought and love that our best scientists would tell us are living on a little sphere of rock with a hot middle spinning around a big ball of even hotter fire which is itself on the arm of a vast galaxy of stars all spinning around a weird black hole that no-one can really explain, which is itself a tiny constituent part of a vast universe that we know next to nothing about.

Last edited 3 years ago by Andrew Horsman
Sam
Sam
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Horsman

Wonderful comment. I feel like you could expand it into an article.

Warren T
Warren T
3 years ago

Mind bending article, but after digesting it all I’m just happy that the euthanized deer turned out to be a white one, or we would be going down yet another rabbit hole. 🙂

Sean Penley
Sean Penley
3 years ago

I’m not an ardent animal rights activist. In fact, for the past couple decades I’ve actually loathed deer (they had to work hard to earn that, I used to love them). But I’m still a little shocked they would kill a deer just because it wondered into a suburban area. If the police did that around here, it would sound like a low-level insurgency was taking place all year round. I’ll grant that they are very destructive creatures, basically like giant rats except the males have antlers. And yes, they can be a danger on the roads.
Around here the problem is simply too big to be handled by anything other than hunting to become more popular again. Of course we couldn’t hunt them in the suburbs, but more hunting in the country could ease up some of the population pressures pushing them into the suburbs. And even in the suburbs, a few more ways to deter them could be in order. In my parents’ town they have figured out to spray a mixture of water and hot sauce on any and all plants you don’t want destroyed. The deer will bypass a cornucopia of native plants to devour something you are growing that is not native to this continent and therefore they can’t have an instinct to eat it, which just proves they are being jerks. And some people have taken to keeping around BB guns. The average model is low velocity, so the shot won’t even penetrate the skin, just annoy them enough to make them want to move on, plus they are safe to use in suburban areas.
But that’s for an area with a big problem. If deer are rarely seen in a particular area, which I gather was the case in the town this article referenced, why not just tranquilize them and drop them off back in the country? That’s what they do with bears in my home state. Bears are constantly appearing in suburban areas, jumping in swimming pools, hot tubs, stealing from fruit trees (my parents’ next door neighbors sent a picture of a bear in their back yard tossing a pear from their tree into the air, catching it, then tossing it up again) and even occasionally running into a restaurant (true story). They have much more potential to be deadly than deer, but unless they’ve been actively hostile to humans, they aren’t killed, just moved or chased off.
Like I said, not terribly into animal rights and I actively dislike deer, but this response just doesn’t seem to make sense. And if you throw in that it was a rare kind of deer, it comes across even worse.

Lloyd Byler
Lloyd Byler
3 years ago

I am taking this opportunity, to broadly respond to the various commenters, and to Ms. Harrington, to wit: What exactly has been accomplished to turn the tide of generic defeatism in the collective by an excellent article?
Newspapers require content to stay alive. ‘Excellent content’ is viewed as satisfying the readers’ senses, but what does it accomplish?

That climate change is anything more than cyclical is a pure hogwash.
Humans do not change even a little blip of temperature cycles, it is nature itself going through climatic cycles just like anything else that nature does, all on it’s own, in fact species went extinct long before SO MANY humans arrived, as well as the deep core drills into ice at the poles document such cycles, missing clues: humans.

That there is a stretch on resources is pure hogwash.
It is mismanagement of resources that cause extreme, quote, cycles of plenty and scarcity of resources, end quote.
I will give the Amazon Rain forestry as an example, to wit: because the producer/harvester at the source gets paid pennies on the dollar for harvesting the trees/natural resources, he/she is forced into a subsistence living standard thus causing a struggle to survive, that, is what is causing the ravenous depletion of the Rain Forest.

That there is a novel corona virus is pure hogwash.
Jon Rappoport published yet another excellent piece yesterday documenting citizens requesting proof of an existing isolated covid-19 viral sample from well over 40 countries, and not one single country can prove such.
Mike Adams from Natural News, an actual published scientist, has provided the fact of his failed attempt to purchase what is called a ‘standard of isolated viral sample’ in order to do real comparative scientific tests on the subject matter, and he was told that no such thing exists!

Again, do scientists with dubious plans try to manipulate viruses in labs under the guise of predicting what dangers lurk in bat caves that no humans visit? Sure.
What does nature do when this concoction attacks the natural body defenses on first contact to the 3 lab technicians in Wuhan? “Hogwash, you are gone!” Beings nature sees manmade concoctions as the aggressor, (not the original scientific creator of cycles thereof) it renders such viral chimera impotent to a mere variation of the seasonal flu.

That the seasonal flu (and it’s variation) has flatlined is pure hogwash.
Or that somehow we have all of sudden found a cure for the flu, is pure hogwash.

That more people died in 2020 (from all causes) than in 2019, is pure hogwash, thus the idea that there is such a thing as a pandemic is pure hogwash.
That there are less people dying from typical causes is pure hogwash.
(That deaths are being noted as from Covid-19 rather than the usual causes: True)

That Neil Ferguson’s (utterly proven wrong) predictive analysis of pandemics should be used as rational for lockdowns is pure hogwash.

You see, when you regurgitate hogwash in polished rhetoric, it does not cleanse the matter, it merely dyes it.

The British farmers learned this bit previously from Ferguson’s hog wash diatribe.

Washing more millions of hogs down the drain will be food for the fishes, but it will not change the hog wash thought processes slopping around in people’s brain.

We may run out of fishes, naturally, or through mismanagement, at which point, we may need another master who can feed thousands of people with a few fishes and a few loaves of bread.

Such an event would be called, hope (for the masses).

That people need a renewing of their thought processes. True.

Period.

Last edited 3 years ago by Lloyd Byler
Alan Tonkyn
Alan Tonkyn
3 years ago

Another brilliant article by Mary! ‘And we continue to not talk about who will bear the brunt…… Nor are they (the political class) keen to talk frankly about political choices’. The issues and questions Mary raises here are never addressed by our short-term-thinking politicians. Here’s another one: how do we continue to run our hugely expensive welfare state and NHS when the world decides to stop lending us shedloads of money?

Terry Needham
Terry Needham
3 years ago

You are right. But you cannot doing anything about it. Take what is valuable out of the world (there is plenty) and ignore the rest.

Last edited 3 years ago by Terry Needham
Terry Needham
Terry Needham
3 years ago

You are right. But you cannot doing anything about it. Take what is valuable out of the world (there is plenty) and ignore the rest.

Last edited 3 years ago by Terry Needham
Emre Emre
Emre Emre
2 years ago

Curtis Yarvin does a good job of explaining how technocratic processes get corrupted with power. This unsurprisingly is not a new idea. Most prominently, Critical Theory (going back to the Frankfurt School) is about how supposedly objective processes can’t be thought as separate from the people who execute them – be that science, or similar technical/technocratic processes.
The big irony here then is that we have an establishment trying to wield the veneer of an authoritative process to suppress competing viewpoints (be that COVID vaccination, trans-rights, or free speech amongst other controversies) while pursuing a postmodern interpretation of liberalism where that postmodernism was conceived to challenge that very idea of an authoritative (objective) process.
There then is the crux of the problem – this kind of cognitive dissonance at its heart makes for an unstable basis for a social system. If people can’t see this, they can still feel something is wrong when they look at what’s happening.

Last edited 2 years ago by Emre Emre
Zorro Tomorrow
Zorro Tomorrow
2 years ago

Couldn’t the Police get a dart gun? An escaped zoo animal would have got one. As for irrational exit from the single market – true if only those in charge of the single market were capable of reasonable behaviour instead of pursuing political goals dating back to Kalergi Coudenhove 100 years ago. As for this carbon nonsense, people will be out of work with bigger bills. Will they vote for that? Only if they are gullible and believe St Greta’s lies.There is no more climate emergency than when an acorn fell on a chicken’s head.

Zorro Tomorrow
Zorro Tomorrow
2 years ago

Couldn’t the Police get a dart gun? An escaped zoo animal would have got one. As for irrational exit from the single market – true if only those in charge of the single market were capable of reasonable behaviour instead of pursuing political goals dating back to Kalergi Coudenhove 100 years ago. As for this carbon nonsense, people will be out of work with bigger bills. Will they vote for that? Only if they are gullible and believe St Greta’s lies.There is no more climate emergency than when an acorn fell on a chicken’s head.

Lord Rochester
Lord Rochester
3 years ago

“If there was hope, it must lie in the proles”

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago

And when will the The Burning Man become the Wicca Man? Does the crowd long for that – a sacrifice of someone else to solve the dilemma? Dust off your Frazier and get down with Kurtz. Interesting article.

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Graham Stull
Graham Stull
2 years ago

the only real way to reduce our carbon footprint is less of everything.”
There is another way: fewer of everyone. Human overpopulation is, and has been for decades, the elephant in the room. I’m just biding my time before it becomes the real focus of debate.

Zorro Tomorrow
Zorro Tomorrow
2 years ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

No matter how hard they try, India, Africa and China populations seem to defy the best efforts of the NWO.

AC Harper
AC Harper
3 years ago

No one has yet worked out how to power an aeroplane on electricity; who, then, still gets to fly? 

Electric planes have already flown although there is still work to be done to scale them up. So that’s one string of pearls that cannot be clutched any longer. It rather makes some of the other assertions seem hyperbolic.

David Fee
David Fee
3 years ago
Reply to  AC Harper

‘Work to be done’ is an understatement –

https://insights.globalspec.com/article/17029/video-world-record-for-longest-solar-powered-flight-in-a-production-electric-aircraft.

Mary’s question of who still gets to fly remains valid.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
3 years ago
Reply to  AC Harper

‘Work to be done” indeed. Anything bigger than a 1-person drone taxi soon finds that the required battery weight will exceed practical payload by many times.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
3 years ago
Reply to  AC Harper

No – understated if anything.

The article doesn’t deal with other threats, notably Great Power Rivalry and a very complex (thus flimsy) global economy.

Sean Penley
Sean Penley
3 years ago
Reply to  AC Harper

I have actually seen some interesting articles on the potential benefits for airships. Probably not quite like the old zeppelins, but a modern take on the concept. They would still be slow, so they might never really be the next great for air travel. But they would probably be cheaper and can stay in the air for long periods of time, so I’ve seen them mentioned as possibilities for things like lower-level transmitters (basically providing internet/phone access to remote areas without building lots of infrastructure) to shipping freight. Obviously I have no idea if it will ever actually happen, but at least it sounds interesting for certain uses..
Side note: have you ever seen the pictures of the inside of the “Hindenburg”? Now THAT looked like luxury flying! Of course even if airships were to catch on for passenger travel, I feel safe saying we won’t see anything like that again. We’ll just be sardines in a slower-moving can.